Now that you've all had a day to grieve, I think it's probably okay for me to mention Andrew Sullivan's retirement. Another gentle soul lost to this merciless game we call "blogging". You'd retire too if you had to work a backbreaking ten months a year on a meager six-figure salary.

I just discovered YouSendIt earlier today -- I wish I'd known about it yesterday, when I made my laptop spend hours shoving a 70MB archive up through a slow SMTP connection, emailing it piece-by-piece to a friend.

YouSendIt aims to make email transfers of large files easy. While almost all mail services cap individual attachment sizes at 5 megabytes or less, YSI lets users send chunks of data up to 1 gigabyte at a time. Go to their site, specify a destination address and upload the file using a simple web form. The recipient will get an email containing a link that'll allow them to download the attachment from YouSendIt's servers. Simple.

What's not so clear is how YouSendIt intends to make any money off of this little scheme. For that reason I'll be sure I use the just-mentioned SpamGourmet whenever I utilize YouSendIt's service. If the recipient doesn't have a SG account you can always send the email to your own, then communicate the YSI link to your buddy through a private email. Zipping up your files into a password-protected archive probably isn't a bad idea, either. It's not exactly a secure solution, but it should at least be enough to keep YouSendIt from automatically poking through your files for who-knows-what.

Spam! Everyone's talking about it, I guess because of today's NYTimes article. All parties seem to agree that the CAN-SPAM act is pretty useless and that the problem is getting worse. So what's to be done about it?

the post starts the official Arcade Fire Backlash with its lukewarm review of sunday night's show, complete with backbiting attempts at underhanded snark. i have to wonder, were they even at the same concert?

The 9:30 club stage seemed too small for the eight musicians of the Arcade Fire, whose Sunday night concert operated according to the formula that constant movement and shouting in unison create a powerful show.

...Despite the energy and chaos, the songs weren't very memorable, and Butler's vocals were murky and often unintelligible.

...While its simplistic musical style and histrionic vocals had little substance, the Arcade Fire is certainly to be admired for its extreme and unwavering physicality.

jeez. what is she, 98 years old? i feel like the entire thing was written very purposefully, because normally, whenever i read pop music reviews in the post, they are almost always universally falling all over themselves to write positive things.

anyway, she can latch herself on to the official Backlash Bandwagon if she likes. i'm not so far gone to believe that "funeral" is a life-changing album, or even album of the year, but you have to be a) deaf b) blind and c) apparently incapable of physical movement to find the only thing to appreciate about that concert was that the band can jump around admirably.