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I recently stumbled across this article on how to protect yourself against SPAM. Get this … a study conducted by a company called Nucleus Research revealed that the average cost of SPAM per employee per year is $1,934 – as a result of lost productivity*. While most of us may know what SPAM is by now, and how to defend ourselves from it (for the most part), some of us might not be familiar with its little brother, BACN.

BACN is pronounced exactly like how you would say those greasy strips that clog up your arteries. This relatively new term, coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh, basically means emails that you actually want, but not right now. Some examples would be your subscribed-to newsletters and online bills. You can read about how it all got started here. Although BACN may not be as detrimental (or as annoying) as SPAM, it has the potential of robbing us of time spent on filtering our email – sorting the messages we really need from those we might never read.

Many of us battling SPAM have some extra help from anti-spam softwares or we use an ISP that provides SPAM protection. As for BACN, the solution may be as easy as thinking twice before signing up for anything online or offline. For example, do you really need that Facebook update when you are already checking your Facebook account for the fifth time today or the other various daily or weekly updates from your favorite stores (who’s websites you frequent anyway), when you are buried up to your neck with work?

So, with some help from SPAM protection software and a little common sense, we can all keep our inbox, and our bottom line, protected from the likes of SPAM and BACN.

It seems that Microsoft is finally giving in. You can now make the upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 regardless of whether your windows operating system is store bought or downloaded off a torrent site. Microsoft has finally decided to remove the pesky Windows Genuine Advantage tool that comes with IE7, which requires the software to verify that you are using a legal copy of their windows operating system before you can upgrade IE. The software giant decided to make the move in light of IE’s steady decline in market share.

Can we hope to see this happening to the Vista operating system anytime soon?

Being the Creative Director for one of Atlanta’s top 5 largest web design and development company certainly has its challenges, but nothing could prepare Wade Forst for the barrage of mishaps he has faced in the past weeks. The first incident took place at his fiancé’s backyard where 3 of their dogs decided to share a meal of rat carcass and ended up getting poisoned. Next, he was at a local gas station fueling up when he thought that his fiancé was throwing water on him but quickly discovered that the hose actually came off from the pump and was shooting about 4 gallons of gasoline on him.

After a short period of normalcy, the third calamity dawned upon him like an inferno, literally speaking. A nearby tree suddenly broke in half and took down a power line, causing a fiery chain-effect that sent part of his house in flames. He caught a break of good luck because no one was hurt during the incident.

Now we’ll just top everything off with a stolen laptop and just call it quits, right? Not so fast. A few days after the stolen laptop, we heard him talking over the phone with the dentist and he’s scheduled for a root canal sometime this month. Ouch!

With all that has happened I cannot think of a more appropriate movie poster to describe it. I took the poster of Just My Luck starring Lindsay Lohan and Chris Pine and doctored Wade’s face into it. You can view the original version here.

Forget having to have a multi-million dollar budget to make it onto the big screens. For a mere $20,000 and 3 years, you can land yourself in movie premier at the Sundance festival. Did I also mention that you can do this in the comfort of your own room? That is exactly what former Web Designer Michael Belmont did.

The outcome is a 1hr26min hypnotic and berzerk film called “We Are the Strange”, which utilizes a technique that Belmont dubs Str8nime, which is a combination of strange + 8-bit + anime. Wired.com recently wrote an article about him and even listed the steps to making a DIY Str8nime movie on your own. Check out the trailer for We Are the Strange.