Hump Day comes and goes so quickly.

September 1, 2004

My friend Michiko left a nice comment to the last entry stating how she hadn’t ever thought about using the BBC News as her homepage and was glad I’d given her the idea. I prefer getting my news from the BBC, but frankly, I like my homepage to be Google’s awesome news site. It’s an aggregated site, which means they use Google’s patented pigeon-ranking system to sort through 4500+ different news sources and cull together stories from them all. Great for searching news, good way to get an overview. I also like having a Google search box–both for web pages and images–on my homepage. Granted, one of the things I swoon over in regards to Mozilla’s marvelous Firefox web browser is the built-in Google searching, but for those times when the first thing you have to do is look something up on Google, that extra second is just what you need to get searching.

Or as someone else put it once, setting your homepage to Google (or a Google site, in my case) is helpful because not only do you get a quick search at your fingertips, but the speed the Google site comes up is often a good indicator at the overall speed of the Internet that day.

I had a disparaging remark prepared to write to someone–who shall remain anonymous–who decided to use an extremely immature method of correcting a minor grammatical mistake in a previous posting, but in the interest of decorum they shall remain nameless and sans rant, and instead fester in the knowledge that they stepped way below their level.

I’m sick of comment spam. It seems to go in cycles, unfortunately, and I’ll go weeks without getting so much as a single piece of spam sent to the comments section of my blog, and then there are days like the last few where I’ll get dozens. My normal procedure is to delete the comment and blacklist the IP address of the sender, but that’s just a stopgap procedure. Maybe 2/5 comments are spammed from the same IP address, and while stopping 40% of the comment spam would be nice, it’s a drop in the bucket.

For those unclear on my idea of “comment spam,” it’s where pieces of spam advertising online gambling, sex sites, Viagra, Cialis, or whatever the erectile dysfunctyion pill of the week is, and other crap are placed in comments. That doesn’t mean that someone has visited my site and selected an entry to comment on and put spam in instead, but bots roam the Internet and look for vulnerable sites such as my own to spam. It’s partly my fault in that I left my website with the default configuration, and while I don’t really want to do change that at the moment, I place most of the blame on the people doing it. I’ve been browsing the plugins available for the system my site runs on (the one that allows me to log in to my site, write an entry, post it, it takes care of archiving, etc.), and there are a few good anti-spam ones, so I think I’ll set them up this week.

One is a system similar to what Hotmail and Yahoo have implemented for creating new accounts where you’re required to copy a string of text into a text box to post the comment. It prevents automated bots from posting comments because they’re denied unless they post the random sequence of alphanumeric characters. So yes, it’ll mean you’ll have to type in a few extra letters to post a comment, but what the hey, not many of my readers comment anyway. I don’t want to dsable the commenting altogether, either, so this is pretty much a stopgap solution. The other thing I could do would be to upgrade to the latest version of the software my site runs, but that would cause more headaches than it’s worth.

I’m back to the second page of Google returns when my name is searched for. Here’s hoping I get back to the first page.

My muscles are a bit stiff my my jog on Monday, but it’s a good kind of stiff. I actually like that feeling, as I’ve mentioned before, and I wish I could feel it more often. Guess I’ll have to exercise a lot, then stop, then start again more often. Or…not. I could also start going to the gym, but that’s way more effort than I want to put into exercise. I already have a problem with exercising for the sake of keeping yourself “in shape” since that’s just a societal image you’re trying to maintain for the sake of other people, but of course, there are people who need to exercise for the sake of exercising. Excercise should be fun, and as I wrote about earlier, I used to jog as a type of escape from my daily doldrums, but now it’s just plodding on a treadmill. Not nearly as much fun, but I need to lose about five or ten pounds in order to comfortably fit into my jeans this winter. The winter season is always bad for food, and I know I’ll gain at least five pounds between the end of November and the beginning of January–and that’s being conservative. So I’m stripping OFF weight for the winter rather than packing it on. Mainly, I just can’t afford to buy new pairs of jeans should I outgrow the ones I have now. I’m still at a 34 waist where I’ve been since I lost those 30 pounds two summers ago and that’s fine with me–I’m certainly not tryign to lose another two inches off my waist–but I don’t want to go back up to a 36.

The company is being audited today, so not only is my boss buzzing around, but there are three IRS agents pouring over the books. Doesn’t look like too much fun–both getting audited and pouring over books. Accounting was the drabbest class I ever took in college.

I feel kind of bad, though, because one of my coworkers is technically doing my job right now. While I was still stuck on one of the projects that looks like it’s being wrapped up imminently, he had to start testing another project. Now that I’m done with my project, he’s still stuck testing this other one, and it would take awhile for me to take over. So while he’s busy doing “my job,” I’m trying to keep myself busy. There’s another project I *could* get started on, but unfortunately, my computer here at work isn’t powerful enough to actually run the software I’d need to test. How’s that work, anyhow? I mainly need more RAM in order to run it, but my lovely eMachines computer here at work is limited to 256 MB of RAM because, well, eMachines sucks. Gateway bought ‘em a little while ago, so maybe they can whip them into shape.

I did splurge a bit on myself and buy a new mouse for here at work. Nothing fancy, just a basic Microsoft optical wheel mouse that I picked up at Office Depot for $15. There’s a $5 rebate on it, too, so that would drop it down to $10. The mouse I had before was an older one with a ball and rollers, and it never tracked right. Not to mention that the place where your palm rests is starting to turn green (from the grey that’s there now) from the amount of usage it’s gotten over the years. Plus, when I leave it’s never a bad idea to have a spare mouse around, no?

So that’s about all I have for now. I’ve been talking with an old friend of mine the last couple of days who I’ve seen so infrequently in the last six years or so I could count them on one hand, so that’s been nice to catch up with them. This weekend is, of course, a three day weekend, so I’m trying to figure out how to best spend my extra day off. It’s raining outside now, so here’s hoping that the rain doesn’t extend to this weekend. I might even get off early on Friday.

I had a whole rant prepared that I wanted to talk about in regards to a couple of pro-Bush signs I saw this morning, but I think I’ll skip that. I’m tired of politics. An issue-based campaign seems to be so lost on both the candidates and the huge number of people who not only eat up the mudslinging but believe what they’re told by their candidate of choice without thinking for themselves. That’s a critique of both parties, by the way.

In the end, I think that both candidates are schmucks. In the second Presidential election of my life that I vote in, I’m going to vote for the guy who isn’t as much of a schmuck as the other and who I think will probably do less damage to this country over the course of the four years following the election. This is a great system we’ve got here. We’re not voting FOR a candidate, we’re voting AGAINST another candidate.

Happy Hump Day.

Posted in Geekery, General