What was your favorite book as a child? Did it influence the person you are now?
I can't really remember which book was my favorite when I was growing up, but when I first saw this PAD and started trying to remember, the book that came to mind was this one: Mr. Chatterbox
So, I'll just leave this PAD here, and let people who know me bask in the perfection of my choice from my past. As for whether or not it influenced me as an adult, again, just going to leave it here. LOL
Tell us about a time you did a 180 — changed your views on something, reversed a decision, or acted in a way you ordinarily don’t.
That sort of altering of viewpoint, after a long time considering if something like that had actually happened to me and coming up blank initially makes me think that I’ve never done that sort of thing. My beliefs are quite entrenched, I’m quite certain of my positions and my opinions. Anyone who knows me knows that of what I speak passionately about I am determined in and if I am not, I rarely speak of it. It’s better to listen if you aren’t sure than to speak out of a position of personal doubt. There just isn’t any passion in doubt. If you aren’t sure about what you think then how can you put any energy behind it? Passionate thinking goes hand in hand with what I consider to be critical thinking. Can it truly be said to be critical if you can’t be passionate about it? I suppose I am too much my Mothers son, I think I learned my views on passionate discourse from her as a role-model for not bandying around the bush. If you feel something, then be out with it, don’t let it just fester in the dark.
Often times at work I get the phrase “Oh Andy, tell us how you really feel!” thrown at me. I knock those lobbed bastards right out of the park with a home-run whack with my bat. Damn right I’m going to tell you how I really feel! Anything else would be dissembling, tantamount to a lie and do a disservice to whomever I’m speaking with as well as to my very own self. As such, I am functionally retarded when it comes to flirting, subtext, and innuendo. I accept a life of blunt honesty over the dubious sea of gray foam that is subtext, subtlety, and innuendo. Don’t try to play hinting games with me, walk up and say what you think and how you feel. Be honest, be direct, be blunt. Time is precious, don’t be a foolish putz.
So there.
You receive a call from someone an unexpected person. Who is it, and what is the conversation about? Go!
This happens to me more frequently than I care for. My work number is identical, if you transpose two numbers in the exchange part of the number with the city jail. I get at least two calls a week from random citizens of Kalamazoo asking about hours, or the status of someone in detention. I always take the high road and tell them that they have misdialed and reached Western.
I want to, I won't, but I want to pull a horrible prank on these wrong callers. “Yes, when is John Doe getting out of jail?” and my response should be “Oh, John Doe you say? We're going to hang him in Bronson Park at Noon today. Thanks!” and hang up.
Much like Johnny unplugging the landing strip lights in Airplane! or pulling the fire alarm paddle at work, it's something you secretly want to do but never will because you just aren't that bad 🙂
Lesson here? Be careful how you dial the damned telephone! 🙂
Wow, what a long strange trip that was! I’ve got a lot of my amateur photography and I’ve been kicking around the notion of placing it all on my host and sharing it through my blog somehow. I started this sad trip with Pixelpost, then looked around for other LAMP scripts that could work after Pixelpost belly-flopped and died on impact. The issue I had with Pixelpost was trying to mass-import 218 pictures of my two cats. The software just couldn’t cope. So after a while trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole I just gave up altogether.
Then it struck me that I could use my WordPress blog maybe. I had a dim memory about something about Galleries. I can store as much as I like on my host and there’s no bandwidth issues so why not? So I did some reading in the Codex and well, there you go! Create a new Page, add Media, create a new Gallery and it’s EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Then I happened to notice JetPack and looked in there and it has Carousel feature which improves the standard Gallery control for WordPress. WOW! It was everything I wanted and it ate all 218 files without blinking and making new pages is a snap! Adding and removing pictures from the Galleries is just as easy.
So all that way and all that time blown out trying to get a weak system to behave itself and the answer was just under the covers in WordPress all along! I am exceptionally pleased. 🙂 Thanks all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Automattic! Thankee-sai!
You can find these galleries on the main menu of my Blog, under the title of Photo Galleries. I hope you enjoy them!
Yesterday was a lost day. Absolutely no traction. I got stuck in the quagmire of web development. The project was quite straightforward, I wanted to create a form that could hold information, text, checkboxes, dates, lists you could check. Then I wanted to cast these forms as blog posts that could be commented on, tracked, just like I do on SupportPress. I naively thought this would be easy. Hah. WordPress ate hours wallowing in custom post type hell, then template hell. I gave up on that. Then I turned to Drupal, what a mess that is! It’s worse than Perl! Thousands of crisscrossed resources, some only work with older versions, some only with newer versions. What a headache. I thought I could force a bug-tracking system to bend to my will and so tried Mantis. That pretty much killed the last dregs of my day. What a mess.
So since there was no easy path, my investment was zero dollars and I really don’t care to slog around with struggling with web development I just abandoned the entire thing. There was a system called Gravity Forms for WordPress but it was $$$ and I couldn’t be sure that it would have worked and didn’t want to sink money into a solution that would probably not be adopted anyways.
But at least now I know. That area of web development is a mess. Bleh.
I came across two great plugins – WP-Blacklister and IP Filter for WordPress. The first lists all the IP addresses for all the spam comments that a blog gets. The spam is identified by Akismet, I grab the IP addresses and then put them into TextWrangler. I sort the lines, find the really obnoxious networks, the ones with the same three octets over and over again, so something like 5.5.5.1 and 5.5.5.2, and 5.5.5.3, these, depending on how they resolve in an IP lookup get a block, either 5.5.5.* or 5.5.*.* or 5.*.*.*. From the left to the right there you block off more and more of the network. The more *’s in the block, the more stations are simply thrown off.
And then there is IP Filter plugin, I assemble a list of naughty IP’s and then fill in the details for this plugin. If an incoming IP address matches any of my blocks, they get no content and a short blurb stating that their network was either a source of spam, malware, or otherwise is unwanted traffic. I applied this list to all my blogs and I had spam comment rates which were about 30 per hour go to zero.
I will be creating a new page on my blog that lists these bad networks and IP addresses. Feel free to get this plugin and enter these blocks for yourself if you wish. I’ll be updating it as I find more spam or Limit Logon Attempt Plugin lockouts.
There is a wee part of me that is toying around with blocking the 141.218 subnet. We’ll see. 🙂
I recently added to my WordPress blog security now that blogs like these are being targeted by botnets. I’ve found a great plugin called “Limit Login Attempts” which allows me to set lockout values to people who try to guess what the ‘admin’ account password is.
First, lets just say that the level of entropy in my admin accounts is so high that there isn’t enough time left in the Universe to try every combination – but that being said, my values for this plugin would make this a non-issue. I give people 4 attempts to try the ‘admin’ account, after that they are locked out for 1440 minutes, a day. If they lockout twice, the lockout penalty goes to 720 hours, or a month. There is 4320 hour span until retries are reset, that’s 6 months.
Of course, the filter also captures the IP address, so I’m going to look into getting a IP blacklist plugin and adding these captured IP addresses to that blacklist. They’ll never be allowed to my blog. This line of reasoning led me to think about an immune system for the Internet. If an IP does something wrong, it is blacklisted and that fact is then sent to every other site and they blacklist it as well. One false move and you are suddenly banished from the network. I think this would radically change how people behave online. There would definitely be a lot of noise raised when people are suddenly unable to communicate with any host whatsoever because their systems were filthy, compromised, or malevolent. That would add a certain value of responsibility. It would only be a little bit more to establish a site like Digg where people vote on the malevolence of comment traffic, putting trolls right along with botnets and black-hats, out in the cold, banished where they all belong.
I can smell an RFC forming. 🙂
I run a gaggle of WordPress blogs, both for personal reasons and for work reasons. My SupportPress site runs on WordPress.org and the host I’ve been using all along, iPage sent me an email informing me that they have detected a botnet-sourced cyberattack directed at the login pages of WordPress.org installations. They also informed all their customers that they have installed network limits on these attacks, but that even though the attacks have been greatly reduced, that it shouldn’t lead to a flagging of security vigilance.
No time like the present to get things installed on all my WordPress blogs. The first thing I can think of since all my passwords are 16 to 20 characters long, randomized, stored for me in 1Password, and stored in such a way that even I don’t know them – is to install a plugin called Limit Login Attempts to all the WordPress blogs I manage. This will prevent people from screwing up their login attempts and it will email me when they try. So far this blog is covered and I don’t really expect any problems here.
Thanks to social networking, especially Twitter and my good friend @wyrdsmyth, and my hosting provider iPage I have been protected all along. More security is usually a good thing and in this case, warranted with this extra plugin. Next stop are all the other blogs I manage.
What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?
I love impossibilities. The mythical arrangement of Atlantis has always appealed to me. The way I’ve seen possible renditions of that city is a circular arrangement where the different rings were devoted to different zones, like farmland, dairyland, commerce, and residential areas. I also imagine that it was served by super-science and technology served the population in all of it’s needs. No pollution, no noise, no glaring lights blotting out the beautiful night sky. I also imagine people enlightened to the point where crime just doesn’t happen, there aren’t any reasons to cry and the only killer of man is old age. Alas, this is Utopia, otherwise known as “Nowhere” and it’s just a fantasyland. A lovely little ideal that keeps you comfortable when faced with how things really are: Rotting stinking cities packed with wretched awful people.
I really don’t think that humanity can achieve an Atlantean level of sophistication or enlightenment, but that doesn’t mean you just throw away the ideal. There has to be something, even if it’s imaginary that you can grab ahold of and buoy yourself on when faced with just how bleak and awful life really is all around you. So in that, Atlantis will be as real as any of us need it to be, to put all that suffering and wretchedness into context and by doing so, make it appear not as awful as it otherwise would be. In many ways, Atlantis is Hope. Hope is a silly thing, but it’s also a needful thing. Logically then, Atlantis is a needful thing.
We cry for lots of reasons: sadness, pain, fear . . . and happiness. When was the last time you shed tears of joy?
It was actually a movie that did it to me. The first time, hell, every time I watch “Rise of The Guardians” there is one part of the movie, near the end that gets me all choked up each and every time. It had been so long since a movie was able to get such a pronounced emotional response from me that I did panic just a little when I felt my cheeks peppered with tears. If you haven’t seen the movie, you really should, and if you have, you know exactly what I mean.