I passed the 3100km mark on the ride home this afternoon. 3100km ridden on my bike so far in 2008. Seems like a strange milestone - but I’ve now ridden more as of August 12 2008 than I did in all of 2007.
I thought I pretty much maxed out riding last year. But I started riding earlier this year, and have taken a slightly longer route along the Bowmont Natural Pathway to avoid some street riding. And I have ridden almost every single day since mid-January (except for maybe a couple of sick days and miscellaneous days missed due to travel etc…). If I can keep up the pace, I should be able to hit 4-5000km by the end of the year. That’s a LOT of carbon saved…
I switched to mollom for antispam on my blog one week ago, using the wp-mollom plugin. I wanted to give it a week so it’d get a fair shake, and figured anything had to do better than Akismet and SK2 were doing on my blog.
There was an initial warming up period for the first couple of days - I didn’t realize this, but apparently my blog attracts a particular dialect of spam that is different from what had been seen by mollom before. After teaching it about these silly spammers (most appear to be based in eastern Europe, and use fragments of text from my own blog posts and comments to appear legit) mollom started to do pretty well.
I’ve found several comment-spam campaign management applications mentioned in my blog’s referrer stats. Most appear to be from Turkey - is that the new hotbed of spam?
And, so far, all appear to be .aspx applications.
Is there a positive correlation between jackass cretin spammers, and MCSE-accredited web developers? Coincidence? Or is .aspx just the current fave platform of brainless L337 Skrypt Kiddies?
Just imagine if all of the energy spent trying to blast comment spam onto blogs, and spent trying to prevent said comment spam blasting from being successful, was instead directed toward something positive. Like curing cancer. Or feeding the hungry.
I finally got around to hanging the poster I had made of my 2007/365photos project. It turned out to be a bigger task than I’d originally thought - not the hanging, but the finding a place to hang it, and then getting the poster there.
The poster is 3’x4’. That’s a big poster. It didn’t register just HOW big that was when I placed the order at Qoop.com - I just picked the biggest option. But that’s a BIG poster. I don’t have any place in my home that’s big enough to hang this (without family conflict, anyway), so the only place left was in my office. And the only space large enough to hang this sucker is behind the door. Great. Now there’s a place to hang it - I just had to get it onto campus. The poster had been sitting in the shipping tube for almost 2 months at home, waiting for a time when I’d be driving to campus, or taking the bus, or running an errand near campus so I could drive it there. That never happened, so I stuffed the tube into one of the paniers on my bike and brought it to work this morning. With over 2’ of cardboard cylinder sticking out the top - almost as tall as I was on the bike :-) (didn’t get any photos of that, thankfully…)
I bought Tetris for my iPod Touch today, but it keeps crashing before I can actually play it. I reported a problem through the App Store, and was rewarded with this gem of a dialog box:
I have a recurring pattern when implementing a project. I start simple. Then things get complex. Then I start overthinking, overdesigning, overengineering things. And they start getting really, really cumbersome, awkward, and unmanageable.
I’ve done this with every development platform I’ve used. WebObjects. Rails. PHP. WordPress. Moodle. Drupal.
Yes, even Drupal.
So, again, I need to remind myself.
Work WITH the tool.
NOT against it.
Or, if you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong. If things are designed properly, using the most appropriate approaches, more often than not things become quite simple. Easy, even. If something isn’t easy, it’s being done wrong.
I currently run two separate blogging services on campus, and think both actually have their place and so continue to maintain and manage both a community blogging service running on Drupal, and a more individual blogging space running on WordPress Multiuser.
weblogs.ucalgary.ca is the Drupal-powered community blogging system. It’s got the organic groups module enabled, with access control configured, meaning people can easily login using their campus LDAP credentials, create groups, and publish content knowing that only members of the specified group(s) can see it.
The referrer logs for my blog just turned up a tool used by someone who is apparently a commercial spam publisher to track various spam campaigns. Interesting.
What’s more interesting is that the tool appears to have no login. It’s an open form on the internet. We all know what happens to open forms on the internet - SPAM! It’d be a shame if the campaigns got jammed up with garbage content…
Alec posted a link to this a few days ago, and I finally got around to watching the video. It’s Professor Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress, where he talked about the anthropological effects he observed after producing his awesome video essay The Machine is Us/ing Us.
The presentation is a fantastic, rich, and deep investigation into the connections and their effects on communication and media. Free up 55 minutes and watch the whole thing.
It’s been just over a week since I decided to make Twitter a read-only medium. I haven’t posted a single tweet, and have only scanned Twitter a handful of times in that week.
And I haven’t missed it one bit.
I’ve been having many more IM chats with the people I care about. I’ve been conversing more via email. I’ve been writing more blog posts. I haven’t dropped offline. I haven’t disconnected. All I’ve done is lengthen the feedback loop - no more constant reloading of Twitter.com to see if there are updates. No more composing tweets while offline. Just a healthy balance, and a reconfiguration of the social connections.
I’ve been having a fair number of spam comments get tgrouh the filters on my blog. I’ve tried Akismet. I’ve tried SpamKarma2. I’ve tried Akismet AND SpamKarma2. Still, I get over a dozen spam comments published on my blog every day (and hundreds successfully killed by the filters on a typical day).
It doesn’t sound like much of a problem - a dozen or two spams to deal with every day - but it makes keeping a blog with open comment posting more tedious than it needs to be. I shouldn’t have to fear leaving a computer for extended periods of time, nor dread returning to connectivity after a couple of days to sift through the crap that got through (and hopefully not accidentally nuke any valid comments).
