I am sick and tired of people coming up to me at Wal*Mart and asking me “Do you work here?” or worse yet, just assuming that I do and asking me where to find things. I think it’s the fact that I keep my keys on a lanyard that throws them off.
Blog
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Bad Behavior
I installed the Bad Behavior plugin for WP. Bad Behavior is designed to stop spambots, the beasties that extract email addresses from websites, post comment spam, and cause unending amounts of referral spam. It does so by analyzes incoming web requests and attempts to determine if the request is coming from a legitmate, robots.txt obeying spider, a human, or a spambot of some sort. It then responds to malicious requests with Error 403 (access denied or forbidden) while allowing legitimate requests to go through.
Some time ago I had designed a trap to perform a similar function, but mine only made sure that robots followed the rules in robots.txt file by enticing them to break the rules, then blocking the IP address of any robots that did so. Bad behavior seems much more effective. In 20 hours it has blocked 1700 requests from spambots and the like. The only downside I can see to using Bad Behavior is that my stats look much crappier now.
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Help! I’m trapped on an Argentinian message board!
Check this post at an Argentinian forum out. Scroll down to the post by Maynard. There I am, pretending to sleep on my keyboard at the ol’ HelpDesk. I only found out about it because the bastard hot linked to the picture. Another forum post that I grace with my presence can be found here. The post is by a gentleman or lady who goes by the name Turtle and is captioned “The monday syndrom”.
I’m trying to think of a good way to put those hot linkers in their place. I suppose I could change the image to a message insulting Maynard’s mother, or make the image 17MB so the page just loads (basically) forever for everyone who looks at it. I don’t really want to be too much of a nuisance because I think it’s pretty funny. Does anyone have any spiffy ideas for revenge?
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The website’s new clothes
WordPress is up and running. All my old entries were imported and I did my darndest to clean them up (fixing any damaged links). I also disabled all the moblog entries because the gallery is going to be completely redone, which is going to change the url to any of the images there. Comments were not imported, and I’m pretty sure that don’t I care, although I was pretty proud of that one trackback that I got.
I’m using the “Connections” theme by Patricia Muller. Out of the available themes I looked at I like it the best, but there are some tweaks I’d like to make to it… Namely, I’d like my content to flow.
I’m considering a new domain, something to bring me some inspiration as to what to do with my website. Journaling is good and all, but most of what I write about is maintaining blog software, and that can only be fun for so long. I want to just pick something and post about that and only that. I’ve tried maintaining 2 weblogs before, and both of them ended up neglected.
I have a good name, and the domain isn’t taken yet.I’m a terrible speller, and therefore am still trying to think of a good name (although presently evilpontiff.com and flamboyanthetero.com are available). I’m just not sure what I do there that I wasn’t doing here. I don’t want yet another neglected domain. -
My 401(k) rocks!
I took a walk across the campus of Keene State College last night with the goals of getting a little exercise and some fresh air. In my wanderings, I saw some students with some crazy goatees. For a momment, I considered walking up to them and saying something like “I used to have a crazy goatee that went down to here, but I cant grow one like that now, because I have a 401(k) and if grew a goatee like that, the government would take it away.” I thought that that might sound crazy, and I worried that they might realize that I wasn’t a student and knife me, so I didn’t say anything.
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I dream of iCal
PHPiCalendar seems to work well for Reverend Jim, which is where I heard about the software originally, while working on something completely unrelated. He’s using Mozilla Calendar, so maybe I’ll look into using that or Sunbird until I can get an Apple. If I get ambitious enough, I’ll let you all know how it works out.
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Pardon the dust
Got bored with the old templates. I’m in the process of implementing the “city” template, an entry in the template contest over at pmachine. The front page is up, but everything else is going to look like garbage until I get some more time.
3/17/05 – Front page *should* be finalized now. The links to comments and trackback and such seem to be working. This does not mean that the comment and trackpage pages are working.
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Spring is almost here
I’m pretty sure that I would have been able to see the sun setting on the horizon today when I left work if it weren’t for the few clouds sitting where the sun sets. I have yet to see the sun after work.
Also, hi to Jenny, Al, Adam, Deb, and the person from UNH who reads callblog. If you aren’t on this list, then either you never comment, and/or you don’t check back enough that I recognize your ip address on my top 30 visitors.
