OK - this is a blatant plug, but we'll be losing money on the deal, so no worries about conflict of interest ;-)

My wife has been running a cookie dough home business - she prepares 2 types of cookie dough each month, and delivers them in frozen, vacuum-sealed packages.

For the month of October, she is teaming up with a friend to donate $4.00 per dozen cookies sold to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation via the Kitchen-Aid Cook For the Cure program. The cookies are sold for $4.50/dozen. You do the math.

Albert Ip just posted a description of a potential use of Flickr.com: Learning Object Authoring... Looks pretty cool, and perhaps one of the simplest way of doing this (until APOLLO and Pachyderm go live... ;-) )

Update: I had incorrectly typed Albert's last name as "Yip" - Sorry, Albert! All I can think of is some kind of latent Vern Yip flashback from too many episodes of Trading Spaces or something... (Janice was a Trading Spaces junkie, so I was exposed to entirely too much of that - there is an upside to downsizing to just basic cable ;-) )

Sometime over the weekend, this site received its 30,000th visitor since mid-2003, as recorded by SiteMeter. As I write this, it's sitting at 30,135 visitors (about 100 per day).

That's actual human visitors, with image-enabled browsers (bots and spiders aren't included in this, because they don't download the image used by SiteMeter). I'm constantly amazed that anyone comes to read what I dump here. This site began as (and continues primarily to serve as) my outboard/online brain. Persistent searchable memory. But if others find it useful, you're welcome to help yourself. That's harder to do with the stuff inside my skull (but perhaps this site is more useful to others... ;-)

Wordpress, out of the box, is pretty decent at avoiding spam. It could be better, and there are a few plugins that will help:

3 Strikes Spam Prevention Plugin - Kinda like an email spam filter, calculating "spam scores" for new comments, and killing ones that pass a threshold.

Kitten's Spam Words 2.0 - kinda like MT-Blacklist, but better integrated into Wordpress.

I've added both, and it will be interesting to see how successful they are...

Looks like our Subversion repository got a bit corrupted today. Here's the instructions to restore, for future quick reference:

Last time I tried a standalone posting app, it was Ecto, which didn't like Wordpress too much.

This time, I'm trying MarsEdit, and have applied a patch to the Wordpress XMLRPC connection by Johann Richard at 'Take the Red Pill'. This patch may behave better with Ecto, as well...

I'm pretty impressed with MarsEdit. Looks like Ranchero is doing an awesome job at avoiding bloat, producing excellent task-oriented applications.

Yet another conference in Calgary (this one on campus!) that I heard about first via the magic of RSS...

New Ways & New Technologies in Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts. The items listed in the Conference Program sound pretty interesting.

I wonder if this bit may prove to be the most valuable part of the conference:

This is pretty cool. The SciQ project - which was one of the early adopters of CAREO (and now APOLLO), is sponsoring a contest to get students to talk about science.

The SciQ: Science Revealed - Talk About Science Contest is open to all Alberta students in grades 7, 8 and 9. If you know of any, spread the word... Free stuff!

Great. I just buy a license for Shrook because I didn't like some of the things missing from NetNewsWire Pro. Now, Ranchero Software released a public beta of NNW 2.0 and the thing rocks!

It's got the flag-and-archive posts feature I liked from Shrook. It's got the smart folders I liked from Shrook (and iTunes, etc...) and a bunch of other stuff. I just re-imported my 247-strong blogroll into it, and will be trying it out for a while. It's MUCH more responsive than Shrook... That may be reason enough to change. NNW 2 doesn't have the "distributed checking" feature that Shrook has, but that actually failed or got in the way as often as it helped (but when it works, it's pretty cool...)

Just checked my GMail account - 176 spam messages neatly sorted and out of the way. Went through them all, and not a single false positive. Wow. Score one for the G-Men (and women)!

During our latest Pachyderm development sessions, that pesky EOModeler-deletes-the-.svn-directory issue reared it's ugly head. I was using the workaround (rename the "good" eomodel file, checkout a new one, move the .svn from the new copy to the "good" copy, nuke the new one, rename the "good" one back to the proper filename), and I accidentally deleted the "good" model file - blowing away a couple hours of carefully saved work. Doh.