The Blog of Harald

the world, I want to get off!

Wow, I’m impressed. A search for ‘panvore’ in “google”:http://www.google.com/?q=panvore returned no hits! We’ve been joking about Brian (the human garberator) for years. Most of us are omnivores (we eat anything); Brian is a panvore, because he eats *everything*.

_Update_: two days later, and I’ve been indexed; the search now returns this page…

It’s Christmas day, the spammers are out in force, and I don’t feel like babysitting. Comments are kaput, for now.

The Straight Dope: Why does the shower curtain blow up and in instead of down and out?

I always thought it was convection; hot air rising out the top of the shower stall sucks the curtain in. But it turns out that cold showers do the same thing, thanks to the Coanda effect.

You learn something new every day :-)

Apparently we’ve developed cochroach contraceptives:

The Straight Dope: Is it possible to control bugs by making them sterile?

The Straight Dope: What’s the difference between apple juice and apple cider?

Summary: the differences ranges from “none” to “extremely little”…

It began when I started driving to work; I lost 20-40 minutes per day of walking (not to mention an hour per day of reading :-).

It accelerated when my mother died; for a while there, I just didn’t care.

The result: I’ve mangaged to regain 35 of the 50 pounds I lost in 2002/2003. It’s time to get rid of them. I think I’ll get through the holidays first (although I’m going to try for _some_ restraint), and then get serious come January.

I was heading into the mall from the parking lot. A guy gets tired of waiting behind another car, and forcefully throws his car into the other lane and speeds towards us. Curmudgeon that I am, I yell at him to slow down. This guy stops his car (in the wrong lane!), _gets out of the car_, and yells back at me:

bq. Who are you to tell me what to do?

I gave him the obvious answer: I’m the guy with the two kids that you could have hit with your car!

He yells something else unprintable, but gets back into his car and speeds off.

Anyway, the real question is this: Where the hell does that attitude come from? He did something completely boneheaded, but other people aren’t allowed to call him on it unless they’re somehow an Authority? Sheesh!

I’ve experience the problems described here: The Daily Whim: MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site

Several times we’ve woken up to a dead cfrq.net server, and (ignoring one disk crash) it’s always been runaway Movable Type comment scripts causing the system to thrash, until some important process gets killed because of the resulting out-of-memory condition. It invariably happens on a Saturday, which means we all get to wait until Monday morning for the server to get manually rebooted.

I’ve installed countermeasures in the past:
* I’ve renamed the comments script
* I close comments automatically after two weeks
* “Comment SPAM interlocking”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/10/14/comments-spam-interlock/

And still, I see a constant, steady stream of comment spam that gets posted, even to postings that are closed to comments!

So far my WordPress blog is getting fewer hits, but it’s only a matter of time until the spammers find that one…

*sigh.

I saw it, I had to share:

Boing Boing: S’mores Nativity kit

Interesting read:

Why Nerds are Unpopular

bq. So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

I went to a school full of smart people, so I didn’t suffer this nearly as badly as some people I know, and people actually sought me out for help with their homework. Still, I can relate with the argument…

gumstix – waysmall options

Yet another source of very small computers. I wonder what interesting things I could do with a bunch of these…

I’ve had no luck with “supermarket self-serve checkouts”:http://www.nelson.monkey.org/~nelson/weblog/life/supermarketCheckout.html either.

These days I’ll use them for quickly picking up snacks on the way to the Rolemaster session, but that’s about it…

I got 94% (average error 38 miles) on “this US Geography Test”:http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/states_experiment_drag-drop_Intermed_State15s_500.html – much better than I expected!

(via “Perverse Access Memory”:http://www.whiterose.org/pam/archives/007206.html)

We had the first blizzard of the season today. When I left the house the roads were clear. About 5 minutes later, it started snowing, but the snow was just blowing around making the road surface look pretty. 15 minutes after that, the snow was sticking and turning to ice, and everyone was sliding around trying not to hit things with their expensive SUVs :).

At that point, I turned around, thinking that the drive home would be even worse. It took me more than twice as long to get back home. Then I drove the kids to school, and the wife to the subway, before making it back home again.

* Time on the road: 2 hours.
* Times stuck: 1 (on a relatively small hill, too).
* Skids: 5 or 6, not counting powering around corners with the front-wheel drive :-)
* Times _almost_ rear-ended: 2 (in both cases, I had left myself enough room to move forward and avoid the guy behind me who couldn’t stop ).

The afternoon drive was much better; the salt trucks had been out, and the freezing rain didn’t materialize (at least, not here). People always complain about how the first snowfall of the season is the worst, because everyone has forgotten how to drive in snow. I think it’s worse than _that_. For most other snowfalls of the season, the roads are covered with salt left over from previous days, and the snow melts as it hits. Today, with no salt (and -4°C) the snow fell, then was crushed into ice by passing cars…

For about two weeks now I’ve been getting massive amounts of comment spam, both here and on some old Movable Type weblogs on the site. None of the comments appear to be making it through; WordPress has comment moderation (which just makes it annoying to delete them), and the MT sites have comments turned off. (For some reason the comments are still getting posted; but they’re not displayed on the blog pages, so no major damage).

Most of the comments are “Hey, what a great website!” comments, with no URLs (and no racy referrals, either); I don’t understand the point. Are they just trying to be annoying? Is this a test? Did the comment spammers suddenly find new tactics about two weeks ago, or did they suddenly notice my website again?

I guess it’s time to research WordPress blacklisting tools…