Rants and Revelations

…and about as pleasant.

Yesterday I noted that the current incarnation of MovableType + MT-Blacklist makes the link in comments into a redirection, probably to reduce the utility of these fields for spammers trying to increase their Google PageRank. So of course what do I find when I wake up this morning? Two comments on very old blog entries with about 5 copies of a spammer’s URL in the body of the text of the comment. Thanks to MT-Blacklist, it only took about five mouse clicks to remove these entries and put the URL they were spamming into my blacklist and check to see if they’d posted any other comments from that IP. Suck on that, spammer.

This morning one of my cow orkers was escorted off the premises. There are now two guys sitting at his desk going through his computers looking for something. (I hope they know Linux, because that’s all that’s on one of the two computers.)
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I never noticed this before, but if you put a URL in when you’re commenting on my blog, it doesn’t actually put the URL in there, but rather puts in a URL for a local redirection CGI that will send you to the correct place. I wonder if that’s to stop comment spammers from getting the Google PageRank points that they’re trying for? I don’t remember this before, so I wonder if it’s something that came along when I upgraded to MT 2.661, or when I installed MT-Blacklist.

I see that Misha’s blog, which uses an older version of MT, doesn’t seem to have this feature.

Back in February I wrote about my cow orker Rohan, and his taunting me about his SETI@home stats.
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This morning I had to go do my Kodak mandated “Health, Safety and Environment” (HSE) orientation. Yawn.
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I have two Tivos, the one in the family room with one 80Gb drive (it used to have an 80 plus a 30, but the 30 died), and the one in the bedroom with two 30s. I decided it was time to upgrade the one in the bedroom.
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During the time between GeoVision laying me off and the end of the DMR gig, I must have went on over a hundred job interviews, and I was getting pretty good at it.
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I was just entering a new “Bad Job Experiences” entry, and had been working on it for about an hour when I suddenly got a pop-up “The application Mozilla has unexpectedly quit”. Buggrit. I haven’t had Mozilla quit on me since the 0.9 days. But that’s the third time an application has unexpectedly quit on my today, so I guess it’s time for a reboot.

I think next time I’m going to edit these entries using vi and cut and paste them. At least when vi quits, I can do a “vi -r” and get back most of it.

More in U.S. Say Bush Did All Possible to Stop Sept. 11 Attacks

After Richard Clarke’s forthrightness, and the administration’s spin, evasions, personal attacks on Clarke, and outright lies, MORE people think Bush did the right thing? I think the whole damn country has gone stupid.

Oh yeah, he did all he could. After all, he ignored the warnings of his counter-terrorism advisor, put together a panel that never met, appointed a cold war expert on the Soviet Union as his National Security Advisor instead of somebody who understood the current threats, and concentrated on settling old scores in Iraq to the exclusion of all other foreign policy.

And 43 percent of the nation is buying this line.

A while back I raved about some Bulgarian Women’s choir stuff I listen to. This is not going to be such a rave.
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Remember how I promised that I wouldn’t rant any more about my iPod? I lied.
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Help take back Google.

Jew

In Rants and Revelations: Remind me again why I do this? I ranted about the abuse I get because I ask people to not send HTML email to my mailing lists. The usual rejoinder, after they finish being rude or calling me unprofessional or a luddite is to say “Where does it say I can’t send HTML?” So as of right now, it says it on the list info pages. Check out the LUGOR newbie SIG page for an example.

Note that I word it as a request, not a demand, and I even link to a page that shows you how to configure a bazillion mail clients to not send HTML mail. Damn, I’m too nice.

I run a bunch of mailing lists on my home server. I do this out of the goodness of my heart, not for monetary gain.
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The headline says Kerry suggests Bush may have set Iraq deadline for political reasons.

Where did the “may” come from? I mean, it’s pretty damn obvious from Bush’s obscene haste to get the goverment turned over exactly on time, even when it looks like the situation is getting worse and worse, that it’s all politically motivated.

I’m sure that Bush, or rather the Bush advisors who can count to 11 without taking off their socks, sat down last year and did a complex calculus of how much time they could possible make political hay out of the new Iraqi government, based on how long it would be before the inevitable civil war breaks out or at least until it becomes patently obvious the new goverment isn’t working, and worked backwards from election day to figure out when to set the deadline.

A real leader, somebody who actually cared about making things better for Iraq and the rest of the world, would have said “We’ll restore the infastructure first, THEN we’ll get a provisional goverment set up, THEN get the oil flowing again”. Instead, they did the oil first, the government second, and they still haven’t gotten the infastructure going, and Iraq is looking more and more like Somalia but with US private security companies playing the role of some of the warlords.