Hello everybody, and welcome to what very well may be the LAST DreamHost
newsletter you'll ever receive in 2003! It's definitely going to be the
last one I send this year, so if you DO receive another one, that's your
first clue that something fishy is going on. I've been fighting off
these fake newsletterers all year, and I'll be hot-dam*ed if I let one
get the best of me on the very last day!
To be on the safe side, here are six simple rules for determining if
the DreamHost newsletter you're reading is 100% authentic, or another
cheap Ebay knock-off:
1. REAL DreamHost newsletters have a subject like "DreamHost Newsletter
v#.## Month Year", FAKE DreamHost newsletter have a subject like
"Vj@GRA for much less! 70% OFF REGULAR! g".
2. FAKE DreamHost newsletters are chock-full of useful information
regarding our services, REAL DreamHost newsletters are almost
entirely useless filler and/or drunken rants.
3. REAL DreamHost newsletters are delivered directly to your email inbox,
not scrawled in the bathroom stalls at Wendy's.
4. FAKE DreamHost newsletters come before the month is over.
5. A REAL DreamHost newsletter NEVER lies about being its authenticity,
whereas a fake one ALWAYS lies (oh BTW, this is a FAKE newsletter).
6. And most importantly, the 100% fail-proof way to tell if the DreamHost
newsletter you are reading is fake: It makes you laugh.
Okay so... hopefully you've been able to determine if this newsletter
you're reading is fake or not. Now I can get down to writing the
remaining 20% of the content, maybe even before my laptop's battery
dies and forces me to finish up at Wendy's.
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1. Address Import/Export with Webmail!
In the spirit of this festive season (we don't want to say CHRIS*MAS for
fear of offending anybody!), we're giving all you Happy DreamHost
customers a couple of "presents": two features some people have been
asking for for a while, plus one nobody has!
So, without further ado.. the first "present": The Address Book import
and exporting features of webmail (http://webmail.yoursite.com/) now
WORKS! Yay! It's under the "Address Book" area (surprise surprise!) and
you can import and export in CSV (comma-separated value) format. Which
should make it compatible with most other contact management software you
Happy customers may use!
Of course, SOME of us are too cool to use address books! All SOME of us
do is set up aliases for anybody we ever email at our own domain name!
Then it's easy to remember and type and automatically 100% compatible
no matter what email client you're using. Are SOME people super-geniuses
or what? I wish we all could be as brilliant as SOME of us, I really do.
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2. Charsets for Auto-responders!
"Present" number two: you can now specify a different character set
("charset") for your auto-responders just like you can for your
Announcement List announcements. What are character sets? It's like
when you're Japanese and you send an English speaker an email and all
they get is some gobledy-gook like "y--0eu @re 4 beee!]g l8zy Fa8tty!"
that clearly isn't what you meant to sent, that's because you have some
kind of crazy different character set for your crazy alphabet (no
offense: I mean crazy, "crazy-sexy-cool" crazy, not crazy, "cow from
Washington State" crazy). So set your character set and hopefully their
email readers will be able to handle your auto-responders better!
Oh and ANOTHER THING. Now you can specify different charsets for plain
text announcements too, not just HTML ones! A Merry Winter time to you!
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3. Hunt The Wumpus! (ftp://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/Win994a.ZIP)
And as your final present, this has nothing to do with anything Web
Hosting or DreamHost at all, but I just found this thing like a week ago
and it's all I've been doing even since so I thought I'd tell the world
about it in case anybody used to have a TI-99/4A when they were young
like I did. Anybody? No? Too bad, read on anyway!
Check out this TI-99/4A emulator for Windows.. other OSes um, I guess go
install it on your friend's Windows computer:
ftp://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/Win994a.ZIP
This emulator is especially cool because it comes with a whole bunch of
old cartridge roms, the best of which is "Hunt The Wumpus" which I used
to play all the time when I was six. Here's how it works:
Open Win994a..
Go to "Carts > Insert Cartridge... > Hunt The Wumpus"
Press any key to begin.
Press 2 for English (3 for French and 4 for who knows what)
Pick the difficulty you want (probably easy to start out with)
Pick the option you want (only normal is any good)
Okay, the game begins!
Here's how it works.. your goal is to find and kill the Wumpus, who is
somewhere in the maze you just appeared in, but haven't seen and doesn't
move. You only have one arrow, so make it count! When you're next to the
room with the Wumpus in it, press Q to mean you're ready to shoot your
arrow and then press in the direction you think he's in. Your arrow will
let fly.. if you hit him you win, if you don't, YOU DIE! Who knows why?
Perhaps I lie! You can also die by walking onto the Wumpus or falling
into one of the two pits in each randomly-generated maze.
So, how do you find the Wumpus? You walk around with the arrow keys
looking for blood.. the Wumpus has left a trail of blood two "rooms"
away from his location in every direction. There is also a little bit
of warning for pits.. there's green slime in rooms directly next to a
pit. That's it! Oh, except there are also bats in some rooms, and if
you walk on them too many times, they'll carry you to a random
location (which could be right in a pit or the Wumpus himself!) Also,
there are curvy paths between rooms sometimes. These paths connect
rooms as though they were right next to each other.. e.g. a room two
away from the Wumpus but only connected via windy paths will still
have blood in it. Also, if you shoot your arrow down a windy path it
follows it magically until it comes to a room.
Sound confusing? Well, you must be stupid! It's the easiest (and best)
game ever! Just give it a shot and you'll understand what I'm talking
about way way better. If you like mine sweeper, you'll love "Hunt the
Wumpus"!
So there you go, Merry XXXXXXmas from DreamHost to you! Sorry it doesn't
have anything to do with web hosting..
This month's DreamHost Site of the Month winner is a site for writers to
chat and stuff! It looks kinda unique and different, and that's just
super. I'd write more about it but I didn't bother to check out the site
very deep, not being a writer myself by any stretch of the imagination.
Here it is, the big winner for December, 2003:
http://www.arcane-artistry.net/
If you want YOUR site to maybe be the glorious DHSOTM winner some month,
just go and submit it through our contest at:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=home.dhsotm
And if your site somehow DOESN'T make it into next month's newsletter,
don't sweat it, it's most likely a fake anyway.
