Once more, Mike and Allison have gone above and beyond in sending me a get-well present, in the form of an Amazon gift card.

Which was darned convenient, since I just happened to have an Amazon cartload ready to go already. Since I pretty much have every relevant O'Reilly book now, and Safari Bookshelf besides, I branched out a little and picked up a book on managing online forums. You'll probably see more on that, probably in Stakeholders, as I read through it.

Thanks, Mike and Allison!

The Phoenyx has been receiving a lot of spam backscatter (see the Wikipedia explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_%28e-mail%29 ) lately, meaning our domain name and sometimes working email addresses have been forged on spams. Generally, there's nothing we can do about this - they're not originating from our server, someone's just sticking our return address on

There is one exception: if you're using a challenge/response system, your challenge is spamming me. I will respond affirmatively to it, ensuring that the original spam (which we didn't send) makes it through to you. Because hey: you're effectively pestering previously-uninvolved strangers to do your spam filtering for you. Challenge/response is just plain a bad idea.

Okay, it's not Phoenyx-with-a-Y news, but: the Phoenix is landing on Mars tonight, 6pm EDT (5pm Phoenyx time). You can watch it live on NASA TV.