Blog Spam

Posted on January 22, 2013 by bluedepth

I hate spam. I really hate it. I don’t want anything to do with Casinos, cheating lovers, or SEO bullshit. In fact, I’ve developed a very acute loathing for the phrase “SEO”. I’ve started to mentally connect “SEO Specalists” with “Used Car Salesmen”. If you are one, keep it to yourself. Don’t come and talk to me about SEO. It’s just gaming the system and it’s both corrupt and dishonest.

To that end, I went back to look at Askimet and realized that the API token that I thought was for-pay only turns out that it’s free for personal blogs. What a surprise! So I installed the Akismet plugin (I had earlier deleted it because I thought it was pay-only) and applied my API token and so far, although it’s only been a few moments, my blog is blessedly spam free.

The comments are the source of the spam. There was a post in the WordPress Community Pool regarding Twitter that got me thinking about how my readership engages with my blog. People don’t really engage in Twitter much anymore and they don’t engage in WordPress comments either. All the engagement seems to be focused on Facebook. I’m not against any of this, but I find it very fascinating. This leads me to the topic of this post, which is that blog spam in the comments on my WordPress.org system is even more damnable. Nobody uses the comment system but I’m loathe to disable it. So, Akismet, at least so far, is riding to the rescue.

With that, I have a great Monty Python skit to share with you all on YouTube. Enjoy!

Unexpected Side Effects

Posted on January 19, 2013 by bluedepth

One thing I wasn’t really expecting but that I’m getting in a rather steady stream are spam comments. There seems to be several species of spam floating about. Amongst these are the link droppers, the foreign language gobbledygook, the ‘cheaters’ messages and the random attaboy messages that are possibly authentic but utterly meaningless.

But then there is another class of commentary. There is a whole argument chain about the Wheel of Time that has been marching along. It seems like real comments from real people, as the commentary has a real argumentative structure but I haven’t written any critical posts about WOT.

I’ve been deleting the spammy comments, all of them, and eventually I think I’ll have to create an email filter to organize them into batches or turn off email notification altogether. At least the WordPress app allows me to deal with comments like the mail app allows me to deal with multiple emails. Highlight batches and delete.

It’s not that I don’t want comments. I do! But I want real comments from real people. One thing I will state, if a comment is obnoxious I will kill it without remorse. If you have an unquenchable opinion, start your own blog.

PAD 1/11/2013 – Book of Life

Posted on January 18, 2013 by bluedepth

“If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.”

The answer for me is quite simple. I would leave that particular book on the shelf and I would leave it be for years and years while I lived, moved, loved, got sick, got well, and enjoyed a nice long life. Then when I am very old and very tired I will sit back with an obnoxiously expensive drink, put on some Mozart, sit back, pull it off the shelf and make it a page-a-day until I got to the end. Then I would put the book back and enjoy a life well-lived and the serenity that comes with robbing death of his surprise ending.

PAD 1/10/2013 – Flavors of Context

Posted on January 18, 2013 by bluedepth

“Vanilla, chocolate, or something else entirely?”

Context is full of hidden landmines. This prompt could be for anything ranging from ice cream to sex. The entertainment value alone for a discussion on my sex life won’t be happening on this blog, so you can safe yourself the clutched pearls and faux shock. The only other option is a culinary question about ice cream preferences. I wouldn’t dare let even that subject be plain as that. I prefer to make my own ice cream, and when I do that I prefer to make it with dark chocolate, lots of vanilla for body, and crushed up Altoid mints for the flavor spike of mint that I really love when making my own ice creams. I am quite surprised that more ice cream manufacturers haven’t attempted to crush and incorporate Altoid mint flavors into their ice creams, but as it may be, I sometimes peek around corners and do things unexpected.

When it comes to commercial ice creams, I have to admit to a preference for Strawberry. About a year ago my partner, Scott introduced me to his favorite ice cream flavor that one of our local fast-food joints makes. Culvers sometimes makes what’s called Butter Brickle and I have to admit that it’s sometimes edging out my preferences for Strawberry.

As funny as innuendo goes, and as far as it’s applicable, what started out as a clear discussion of a topic not related to sex will almost always find it’s way right back into that sense wether you like it or not.

The best video I saw in reference to hilarious innuendo is the Star Trek Sexed Generation YouTube video. Here it is:

WOT: Matrim Cauthon’s Theme Song

Posted on January 17, 2013 by bluedepth

I wrote about this years ago when I first started reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books. One of the main characters of the story is Matrim Cauthon and he plays a central role throughout the entire story. I’m currently reading “Memory of Light” and just finished a rather well-written section early in this book featuring Mat.

That section got me to thinking about an old LiveJournal post I wrote all those years ago. Thanks to Spotify I can embed the music right in this post:

After reading the lyrics and thinking about Mat I really think this track from Coldplay has Mat nailed down pretty well. I thought everyone else might enjoy it as well.

PAD 1/9/2013 – Fear

Posted on January 14, 2013 by bluedepth

“You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.”

Golly, this is an easy one. It’s actually a feature in some of my more deeper and more meaningful dreams. I’ve blogged before about a regular setting that usually happens in my dreaming life – the big house. Sometimes it changes shape and place, but I know it’s the same structure. Almost always in these dreams I end up at the end boarding an elevator. What starts out as a normal elevator ride becomes way more nightmarish when the walls fall away and it’s just me standing on a rising metal platform with a broken knife-switch control. Either the elevator rises or I pull the knife-switch and it falls.

No real big surprise that my biggest phobia is that of heights. So, the room itself is sort of the fear, at least until when it rises and then the walls fall away.

PAD 1/8/2013 – Teachers

Posted on January 14, 2013 by bluedepth

“Tell us about a teacher who had a real impact on your life, either for the better or the worse. How is your life different today because of him or her?”

Mrs. Fitch. She taught high school chemistry at one of the high schools l attended. In fact I took New York Regents Chemistry class from her and I remember her fondly to this very day. She treated the kids with a no-nonsense style that I appreciated. She wasn’t alone, as she was the middle between biology and physics teachers who were also very memorable. The most entertaining thing I remember was when she used denatured alcohol to surprise a sleepy student. We all watched as she snuck up to him, prepared the surprise and then set it off. He never fell asleep again, at least during her class. As for what I learned? The material from the chemistry class is pretty much gone. If you don’t use a tool eventually it rusts, and for me, what I learned in high school, for the most part, has rusted away. I do remember some lessons, especially on significant figures when doing calculations and all the many botched experiments. Funny what stands out in your memory, but I distinctly remember hearing a story about how one student who I knew was tearing down an experiment and didn’t consider that a metal stand holding a bunsen burner rig may have had some residual heat stored in it’s stand-ring. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I heard that she grabbed the ring thoughtlessly and the metal wasn’t cool to the touch.

As it is, the town that high school served was wiped off the face of the map by a once-in-a-lifetime flood of the Susquehanna River. I don’t know if it still stands or if Mrs. Fitch is still alive. It’s been many years. If so, or if not, I’ll always have those memories and smile when I remember them.

PAD 1/7/2013 – Helplessness

Posted on January 14, 2013 by bluedepth

“Helplessness: that dull, sick feeling of not being the one at the reins. When did you last feel like that –- and what did you do about it?”

I rarely have this feeling. Almost always I can either acquire control or I can find some way to escape the situation. There is one time, not really a matter of helplessness, but one of catastrophic failure that recently happened to me that I can write about. Several months ago I had a server, a Dell uber-tower that was 9 years old and suffered a total systems failure while I was actively trying to backup files on that server because I just didn’t trust the tape system to work properly. Turns out I was just a little bit psychic I guess, because half-way through my attempt to backup the machine, there was a catastrophic fault on the servers motherboard which pretty much hosed the entire machine.

I needed to get the data off the tapes and get a new server set up as quickly as I could. The realization of the failure hit me right in my gut. It’s where cancers always feel stress, like a knot in your stomach. Not nausea, but it felt just like I had been punched right in my gut and was short on air. I arranged to get a new server up and running and got the system back on its feet but needed some of those files on the tapes in order to rescue everything. I called all around and nobody had that old technology still, so I had no choice but to resort to data rescue services. They got the tapes, and after a protracted back and forth regarding them I received the files that were written to the tapes on several DVD’s. Turns out that Backup Exec lied about making successful backups all along and that all my tapes had filenames and directory structures, but no actual data to any of the files. They were all zero kb. In many regards I had spent a lot of money for DVD’s with just the headstones of the files I needed, and no bodies.

Thankfully I had mirrored the system to another server a few months back and I was able to rescue a majority of the data that I really needed and only lost about two months of my coworkers work. It was bad, but it wasn’t heart-attack bad.

Since then, I resolved that I would never again trust any data to tapes, and thankfully when that server died it took the last tape drive with it, so there are no more tape drives in use in my office. Tapes are very 20th century things and there are better ways to store and backup data now.

I will never forget that feeling of being punched in the gut. Thankfully now the relevant systems are under contracts and warranties and letters of agreement and whatever else we could find to properly cover-my-ass and ensure that this would never again happen to me. It might happen to someone else here, but it won’t be my fault, ever again.

PAD 1/6/2013 – Separation

Posted on January 10, 2013 by bluedepth

“What’s the most time you’ve ever spent apart from your favorite person? Tell us about it.”

When it comes to favorite people I count my immediate family and my partner in that group and it’s a very small group. Generally speaking when I’m away from one of them I’m almost always with others, unless I’m on a work trip. For the work trips they never last longer than five days or so. Missing people and pets used to be a bothersome emotion but since Apple introduced FaceTime for their mobile devices even long distances and not seeing loved ones for a length of time isn’t as bad as it used to be. One thing I will say is that very few people ever opt for FaceTime in general. I don’t know exactly why, perhaps it’s too much for people in general or it’s use case is far too specific and it isn’t used because there are quicker ways to communicate. If I had people who wanted to use FaceTime I suppose it would be used more on all my mobile devices.

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Category Archives: Blog

PAD 1/11/2013 – Book of Life

PAD 1/10/2013 – Flavors of Context

WOT: Matrim Cauthon’s Theme Song

PAD 1/9/2013 – Fear

PAD 1/8/2013 – Teachers

PAD 1/7/2013 – Helplessness

PAD 1/6/2013 – Separation