REVIEW FOR PUBLICATION: Busted By Brad

I’ve now been busted twice by Brad Allison, a guy I know from Remington’s and the Eagle, and whose online journal I have been following for a while. It’s a little embarrassing, but what the hell.

The first time was shortly after I bought my iPAQ PDA. I was playing around with the AvantGo offline web browser software, and I set it to download his blog every time AvantGo synchronized the PDA browser. Brad is the kind of geek that obsessively scans his server logs, and within a week he noticed that someone (he had no way of knowing it was me, thank gawd) was downloading his pages through an avantgo server. He made a remark like, “What, is this guy downloading my journal so he can read it on the crapper?”

So, naturally, I took him off my AvantGo setup. (I set up an Internet Explorer Mobile Favorite to download the page daily. Ahem.)

Then, just last week, Brad set up a webcam page. Now, call me a kooky voyeur — I have a lot of company — but I like watching people’s webcams. I have one myself. And to simplify watching several at once, I use a handy little freeware program called
Webcam-Watcher. Now, as far as web servers are concerned, Webcam-Watcher pretends that it’s just another Internet Explorer web browser. But in order to set up a webcam on the program, you have to manually enter certain information, like the “referring page” that a web browser transmits to the server each time it requests a file. And I screwed up, slightly. I put in the wrong referring page for Brad’s webcam. And wouldn’t you know it: obsessive log reader that he is, it only took him three days this time to notice that someone (once again, he doesn’t know who — unless he reads this, of course) was downloading his cam image, but sending a “referring page” where the cam image did not appear. Woops! Busted again! And this time, having mistakenly assumed that I went to the trouble of hand-coding a script to download the darn webcam image, he called me a “webcam stalker.” Well, I never!

So now I’ve fixed the referring page setup problem in Webcam Watcher. But I also sent Brad an e-mail (anonymously, of course, since I know him in real life as well) saying I’d be happy to take him out of my Webcam-Watcher setup, if that’s what he wants. So far he hasn’t responded.`