What’s All This Then!

I like getting comments as much the next blogger. But when they are full of useless links and repetitive statements that have nothing to do with my post, well, I’m getting a bit tired of having to delete a hundred or so each day. Akismet is doing a great job but I’ve need additional filters. So here’s what I’m working on:

One thing I noticed is that several spam comment come from the same IP address. So my first experimentations will involve blocking specific addresses. If you have your own domain, I understand that you can do edit your .htaccess file to block addresses and site names. I will elaborate further on this as soon as I figure it out. You can also do something similar by using PHP code to do the blocking. Again, more material for a post on my success or … experimentation.

Another solution comes by way of Project Honey Pot. Accordingly to their site:

“Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.”

This method is said to work for anyone, whether they have their own domain or they have one of those free blogs such as blogger. I will write about the results of this one too.

There are several plug-ins specifically for WordPress users. I have Referrer Karma on my to-install list as one of the top solutions fighting for comment spammers.

So, lots of work ahead and I’ll keep you updated on my progress…

Remember… DEATH TO COMMENT SPAM

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A blogger that I respect recently wrote to me about my site’s design. She said that the layout didn’t work for her and “a more professional looking theme would be nice.” I have to agree wholeheartedly with her! I have sketched out a few designs for my sites and can’t wait to make them real. The only thing stopping me is this curse of having 24 hours in a day and 30 hours worth of activities to accomplish them all in. I am in awe of you bloggers that seem to effortlessly post the equivalent of “War And Peace” on a daily basis while changing the look of your blog as easily as you would your hair style. Amazing! For now, I’ll take the incremental approach and change one or two aspects of my site as I can. We’ll see what I can do this weekend. But don’t hold your breath because my time has already been spoke for.

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Are you an insomniac? Perhaps a night shift worker? Or maybe a student looking to gain some brownie points early in this new school year? Well, get your ed-u-men-cated self out of bed and to the outside for this summer’s lunar eclipse. NASA will even have a live web cast of this heavenly event.

If you’re the superstitious type, don’t worry. Just make sure to bang your pots and pans as loud as you can to force the sky demon into releasing our sacred moon back to it’s right spot in the night. I’m sure that your neighbors will be more than happy to help you by adding shouts and hand gestures of their own.

(NOTE: Add three hours to the times shown to get East Coast times.)

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After the adventure that I had during my last upgrade to WordPress 2.2.1, I *was* going to bypass version 2.2.2 and just wait for September’s release of 2.3. And then I read about one blogger who had his blog hijacked, robbing him of all of his site’s traffic. If you’re depending upon your blog for income, you can imagine what a financial blow this can be. The good news is that he managed to figure the how and why. Still, his post about this thievery reads like a detective novel and has me reconsidering the security upgrade in WordPress’ 2.2.2. ::: sigh ::: Maintaining a blog shouldn’t be this difficult…

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Maybe it’s the summer heat. Maybe it’s the neighbor’s four rottweilers who were recently confined within fifteen feet of my kitchen door. Maybe some unfortunate creature just died under my house. I don’t know. I do know that something has unleashed an army of flies into my house. Last Tuesday I came home to swarms beating themselves silly against the inside of windows in my kitchen and dining room. Since I keep my home relatively clean, these uninvited guests are a rarity — maybe a handful during a year’s time at the most. But not this time! It was like a scene out of a horror movie. (Hmm, maybe my ex is about to show up …)

Anyway, it was me verses those germ-ridden, up-chunking, annoying little critters. Just my luck, there wasn’t a fly swatter to be found. No problem. I grabbed the first available item — a bottle of Windex. Windex? Windex! “Attack!” I yelled and began squirting away. The first battalion of these puking insects was wiped out in a matter of minutes. A few hours later, a second wave appeared but they were no match for my deadly mist. And then a third wave began their assault, followed by a fourth and so on for the next couple of days. By the weekend, I rested. The battle was done. I had won!

I thought of digging tiny graves in my backyard complete with little crosses. Perhaps even a monument to the “Unknown Fly.” But I know what you are thinking, “How do I know that they are Christian flies?” Good point! Since they didn’t continually knock at the door and leaving pamphlets, they couldn’t have been Baptist, Jehovah Witness, or AME Zion. There weren’t any bicycles left behind, so they couldn’t have been Mormon. Perhaps they’re from a nature-type religion. After all, these little buggers were streaking around naked while buzzing their mini-mantra. Or maybe they were just a bunch of annoying, streaking pests — which explains why Windex worked so well. The label on the bottle says, “Helps Prevent Streaking” and it certainly did! (I know that whenever I get the urge to run around without my clothes on, a few swigs of Windex and the urge immediately passes.) Yes, I realize that there is a bit of a contradiction for those of us who wear pants. We all know that the first thing a streaker has to do is remove the fly.

In any case, I now have clean windows and a collection of streak-free flies. Life is good … unless the ex is coming to town.

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I am! No, this isn’t about that special blue pill (no need for that … yet). Today was my first visit to a doctor in several years. I had to go. My heartburn was beginning to singe my nose hairs at times. My blood pressure has started surging to dizzying heights all too often … and I do mean dizzying.

When I left the good doctor’s office, I had a bag full of goodies. No candy just a few weeks worth of the purple pill, Nexium, a couple of boxes of Toprol, and a prescription for Sucralfate. Gotta love the Doctors and their pills. His plan is for me to mediate myself for a couple of weeks and see if my peptic ulcer and high blood pressure go away. “Where do you work?” he asked. “RPC”, I replied. “That explains it.” he said and added a few more boxes to my already full bag of pills. It was almost like Trick-Or-Treat except he wasn’t wearing a mask when he gave me the bill and one of the side-effects of the medicine won’t be a sugar rush. Aside from that …

I hate taking pills especially different ones at the same time. Interactions? “If there are any, they should be few,” my doctor said encouragingly. Great! I guess my only alternatives is to put up with that acidic fire that is burning a large hole in my chest. Maybe I can get use to the ringing in my ears that drowns out everything else. Or, when I can hear, maybe it will be ok to look like I’m blushing every time someone says something. Nah, I’ll take my pills. Perhaps it will give me something interesting to blog about — weird hallucinations, growth of a third leg (no need for the blue pill then), you know the usual…

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Some people complain that movies should be more like real life. Often I wish real life was more like the movies. Although, back in the day, movies were of tamer stuff. You could watch a guy kiss his horse but not his girl. How bad a movie was, was in proportion to the number of chase scenes and explosions. (A wide screen would make a bad film twice as bad. Actually, that last statement still holds true today.) Today’s movies do a great job in stretching the boundaries of reality and imagination. So I do enjoy watching a good film as I get the chance. But with hundreds of new films coming out each year, who has the 8, 9, even $11 to risk seeing each one?

I don’t know about you, but I’m working on a very restricted budget. Yet I try to include a little bit of entertainment money so that my life isn’t all about working myself to death. In fact, playing myself to death is a much better alternative. And if most fun didn’t demand money up front, you’d find me laugh myself to the graveyard. So for now I’m doing the next best thing. While I can’t justify the expense of cable or satellite TV, I have been using Blockbuster online rentals as a very cheap form of entertainment … well, it was cheap in the beginning.

It started out at 15 bucks a month and I could have three movies out at a time. Even when Blockbuster raised the monthly fee to $18, it was still a good deal — much better than $40 for satellite or $60 for cable. It got even better when Blockbuster let me use my online movies for free rentals at their brick-and-mortar stores. Even though I sometimes can only watch 20 or 30 minutes of the movie a day, I was in entertainment heaven. Was it a bargain? Last month, I spent less than a dollar a DVD.

But I guess all good things must come to an end. Or at least, become more expensive. Blockbuster sent me an e-mail today letting me know that I can have the same service I have now for $25 a month. That’s a shame because I’ve been getting letters from satellite companies offering their services for $30 a month. But Blockbuster isn’t so greedy as to not give me some options. In fact, they’re offering 11 plans. If I want to be extremely cheap, I can rent up to two DVDs a month for five dollars. Of course, if I want to be extremely cheap, I’d shut off my electricity. My entertainment center would be a birdbath and some rocks. If I want to splurge, I could always upgrade to a pellet gun.

Oh well. Someday it will be great to be able to play for living instead of work for one. Until then, I guess I’ll have to continue supporting my habit of escaping into movies. Yes, I know it’s good to be without vices. But is it good to be without temptations?

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This might be one of the questions you get when you leave a comment to one of my posts. I reinstated the “did you pass math” plug-in to try and put an end to the hundreds of spam comments that I’ve been getting these past couple of months. My “Akismet Spam” has been catching them all but there are still several hundred that I have to wade through to make sure a legitimate comment didn’t get caught. So over the weekend, I turned on my next line of defense and waited. Today, instead of a few hundred spam comments, I found 67 waiting for me. Several of them had the same URLs and text but different IP addresses and websites. Are there that many people that have so little to do that they can sit around all day and send out spam? Does anyone have any better suggestions?

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During my long and hot drive home this evening, I had the pleasure of listening to the newscaster rant about how violence on television leads to violence in the streets. But how true is that really? If television had nothing but musical shows with stringed instruments and saxophones, would people be complaining about all the sax and violins in the street? Yes, I realize that is a hypothetical case. Still, I doubt it would ever happen. Why? Right now there are many comedy shows on the ol’ tube. I have yet to hear a news story about people in the ‘hood being plagued by drive-by-jokings …

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You probably heard one of the ways to increase your gas mileage is by filling your vehicle during the coolest part of the day. I thought about this as I stood in 107° heat, feeding my car’s nasty gasoline habit, looking at the State’s calibration sticker on the pump and trying not to go into a heat-induced delirium. Or maybe I did because it occurred to me that the State had certified that that I should be getting a gallon of gas. Yet gas changes its density with temperature. High temperature, less gas per volume. So how can the State say that my gallon of gas is in fact a gallon of gas?

This question became like a bad song stuck in my head. It intrigued me enough that I had to do a little research. Apparently, a gallon of gas has been standardized at 231 cubic inches at 60°F since the 1920s. The thing about gasoline is that it expands as the temperature rises. As the temperature goes up, there’s less gasoline in that cubic inch. The reverse is true as well. The colder it gets, the more gasoline energy is available in that cubic inch. So if you are the owner of a gas station, you got to love those hot summer days when mother nature helps you overcharge for a gallon of gas without you having to do a thing. Of course, if you live in a generally cold climate, the consumer is the one reaping this benefit. This explains why gas pumps in Canada have temperature adjusting devices. We can’t have oil companies and gas retailers losing money during those cold months, now can we.

What about Canada’s warmer neighbor to the south? I learned that while the gas industry routinely makes price adjustments to its wholesalers based on the temperature fluctuations, the consumers see none of this. But don’t worry. It looks like a few other people have wondered about this discrepancy too. I learned that more than 20 lawsuits have been filed in seventeen states by truck drivers and motorists. These lawsuits seek to have gas pumps fitted with temperature compensation equipment so that when you pay for a gallon of gas, you get a gallon of gas regardless of how warm or cold it is. The response from the fuel industry is … it would cost them too much. I guess it would. It’s as if you bought five apples from someone and they can get away with giving you just four apples. Of course it would “cost” them money if they were forced to give you what you paid for in the first place.

As I read more about this gas cost verses temperature, I wondered if there might be a balancing of costs between gas stations and consumers over the course of a year. If you bought the same dollar amount of gas every day for one year, who would come out ahead? You or the gas station? So here is a picture that shows the average yearly temperature in the US during 2001. The red line shows our 60°F demarcation line.

In our little scenario, if you were buying gas north of the red line everyday, it looks like you’d benefit. If you were selling gas south of the red line, then you would be benefiting at your customers’ expense. Of course, this picture and our little scenario are misleading. I’ve lived in places where where it has been 40° in the morning and 70° by the afternoon. And there are studies that there’s much more traveling done in the summer than in the winter. So I guess it can’t really be argued that there is a balancing in cost between gas stations and the customers.

Until the courts sort this out, I don’t know what you and I can do about it. For now, all we can do is gas up during the coolest part of the day. And yesterday started out at 80° for me … maybe I should just move to Alaska.

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If you’ve been a loyal reader, I apologize for not posting since July the 2nd. A week spent away visiting family, a couple of weeks dealing with irs and divorce, and another week spent away training …. July went quickly. As I check my comments, I found that the Akismet spam filter has 319 messages. I’m deleting all them en mass. So if you don’t see your comments, please resend them and I will answer them right away. I may have to go back to using the ‘add it up’ option to comments to stop these wasteful spambots.

In any case, let’s hope that August will be a much better, profitable, less stressful month. I plan to finish up several rough draft posts and put them out for your viewing pleasure. If you missed me, go ahead and drop me a line ….

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