Posts from — May 2006

Nice:

“All pretty little girls deserve to be spanked once a day”

story

I got this via fark. . .

Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State.

A frequent problem that gets reported to our customer service here at work is one with schools and their spam blockers. I guess a lot of schools do some sort of outsourcing with their IT- and I’m using outsourcing loosely- I mean either a central office runs the mail for the satellite schools or a hosted service (business). I’m basing a lot of this off the conversations I’ve had with various customers. I’d have to guess that schools do this because of their bureaucratic nature, lack of budgets, or lack of staff, or maybe lack of skill at that job-level.

Anyway, given that, the following story I saw on fark.com doesn’t surprise me at all:

There it was in the e-mail spam filter, along with offers to invigorate both your bank account and your sex life: an offer to save the Cobb County schools $250,000. But this message was for real.



School officials are blaming an overeager junk-mail filter for capturing and killing a Kennesaw businessman’s bid to provide telephone services to the system. It seems the part of the filter that watches for pornographic material was offended by the use of terms such as “long distance.”

story. (If it asks for registration, use bugmenot.com)

What does surprise me is how dense school finance director Robert Morales is.

Le sigh. I’ll stop ranting about spam soon, I’ve just been dealing with it at work a lot lately.. . .

AusTex PCS Has Bad Service. As someone wrote:

Four months later they found my post and replied. If the little bit of effort it took to write a response was spent trying to better the situation THEN — we wouldn’t be here.

newer – original post

They’re just interested in CYA (or CTA) by playing he-said-she-said.

A commenter noted:

Still. What is this accomplishing?
You’re playing he-said-she-said, and you’re further damaging your reputation.
Who would want to patronize an establishment who argues with its former customers? On the internet of all places?


I personally consider $30 pretty cheap to keep a customer. Is this harangue worth more than that?

I agree with that last comment from that post

Well, I thought walking from here to here would be more than 10,000 steps. Nope. I’m glad I didn’t put any money on that. FYI- it’s only 7501 steps (according to my goofy pedometer/step counter). At least I was over 10K for the day.

This post is dedicated my “Three Ladeez”. You know who you are. (No, Marc, you’re not one of them).

Massive index of 80s videos on youtube!

Everything from The Cult, Rush (maestros entre maestros!), Icicle Works, PiL, etc. . . . wow. Let the time wasting begin!

Interested in electronic voting? It seems Patrick spent a day as an election judge. Interesting writeup. I half-expected an in-depth look at how the machines go wrong but knowing Mr W, that’ll come later. Or maybe on Frontline. . .

Well, now that I (think) have trackback spam under control (/me crosses his fingers), I dropped in two more plugins into Blosxom. They both almost do the same thing – but basically I added tagging to the blog and I added a plugin to allow path-based tag urls to work. You can read more about the plugins here.

Amazing how much you can get done just by catching up with the Open Source community. . . .

Oh, one other thing- I added a tag cloud below to see how it’d work. It’s under the ClustrMap. It may get ugly and out of control, but I thought I’d play with it for a while. . .

Some quick DVD “reviews”. I’m introducing a new ranking- the dreaded NR. In a way it’s worse than a 0. It’s like that hell place for unbaptized babies that you gentiles have set up.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – NR

Wow, I didn’t even finish the DVD. Le yawn.

Jarhead – *

A for effort and one star for Peter Saaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrsgaaaarrrrrd.

National Treasure – *

The secular DaVinci Code. Stupid movie with a stupid plot but still- you *know* what you’re getting into when you watch this. Goofy music too. I sort of want to give this a 0 star rating, but in a way, I wanted to watch a cheesy “adventure” and got what I was after. Barely one star – just barely (mostly for Diane Kruger)

Layer Cake – **

I watched it again and decided to raise it’s rating a bit.

Alien vs Predator – 0

I like Lance Henriksen a lot, but even that couldn’t save this flick. Pee-eww.

Blade:Trinity – 0

Uggh- and I was hoping that this would be good too. :(

The Village – ***

Yeah yeah- we all knew what was going on. Yeah yeah- we knew what the twist would be. But you know what? I still liked it. I thought the performances were good and I liked the story. Sure it’s not perfect, but I really think that Shyamalan’s movies are throwbacks. That’s the only way I can describe it- maybe throwbacks isn’t the right word though. But even his less-meaty movies like this one are like well rounded and fleshed-out (but just barely) Twilight Zone episodes. Adrien Brody should’ve rented What’s Eating Gilbert Grape for his prepwork though. It would’ve helped him.

Sideways – **

I finally watched this. Two words: Over Rated. Or is that one word?

Two stars for the acting though.

Stander – **

I have a weird love/hate relationship with Deborah Kara Unger. Sometimes I get creeped out by her, and I don’t know why. Sometimes, I’m shamed to admit- I hunger the Unger. Sometimes she’s a character in a movie I watch and I really shouldn’t write anything about her but I should write about the actual movie. Sometimes I do that, sometimes I don’t. This is one of those times. Interesting flick.
stander wp article

I’ll leave you with this:

Well, I did a bit of searching and tinkering after Todd had recommended using the Akismet API to combat comment spam in my original post.

I got a bit sidetracked though- I thought about CAPTCHAs and switching plugins, I reviewed WordPress quickly (you need a WP key to use the Akismet API) and even thought about switching platforms because I thought WP was quite nice.

But I decided to give Kevin Scaldeferri’s Writeback/Akismet plugin for Blosxom a whirl. I’ll leave the comments open for a week or so to see how it goes. If not, I’ll think about using something else.