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Bacn – SPAM: The Next Generation

A new term has started to emerge over the last several months to describe the SPAM you get that’s your own doing. The Term is BACN (note the Web 2.0-esque missing “o”). All of those mailing lists, Facebook notifications, Friendster blog-update alerts and Microsoft VS Developer notices were things that you thought you wanted to get in your inbox, but every time one comes in you just decide to turf it.

Bacn Image: jted on Flickr

This image really does illustrate the point nicely (though the Spam cut is probably a bit too small…). I have to admit, that despite the amount of junk email I get, and lots of it is Bacn, I still continue to sign up for notifications of things. I think it’s just the innate fear of missing something. This way I get all the information I might want to read someday, but most likely I’ll just ignore it.

According to the Wikipedia article, and a couple of other sources, the term Bacn was coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in August 2007. Apparently this is what you get when you cross over-zealous twiterers with Canadian bacon and a boring stint at the registration table.

I’ve noticed that I take a similar approach to some of the podcasts and other feeds I have subscribed. Even though I never actually read that feed from TechCrunch, I’m reticent to delete it because someday there might be a good story in there for a blog entry or some other purpose.

At the end of the day Bacn is self-inflicted, so I guess I’d better shut up and start fryin’.

iTunes – Restore Deleted Podcast Episodes

I just had a devil of a time trying to restore a deleted podcast in iTunes (this week’s episode of the GGP actually).  The episode in question had failed to download in its entirety and so I decided to delete it, and add in a manually downloaded copy.  Yea, no such luck.

Once the episode was deleted, iTunes refused to allow me to force the correct file back into the right place.  It’s just this sort of “I know better than you” attitude that drives us Windows & Linux geeks CRAZY about some of the OS X applications.

There is (thankfully) a feature of iTunes that will allow me to re-download the episode from the feed. Here it is in three simple steps:

  1. Collapse the feed in iTunes
  2. Hold down the Option (Alt) key and re-expand it
  3. All the available episodes will re-appear, simply “Get” the one(s) you want

I don’t know if anyone else has had this problem, but here’s the workaround just in case.

Thanks to Dennia on My Mac Blog for her nearly 2-year old post which saved the day.