Category: Uncategorized

Cancel your appointments and mark you calendars for this Friday night. At 7pm the Sci-Fi Channel will bring Joss Whedon‘s Firefly back to the small screen. Its first time on TV, in 2002, Firefly was totally porked by the Fox Network, who’s executives decided it would be good to play the episodes out of order and at different times each week. The show was canceled before all the episodes had even aired.

Fast forward to December 9th, 2003. Firefly is released on DVD and it rockets to #1 on Amazon.com’s best seller list. Fast forward again to 2005. On September 30th, Serenity, a movie based on Firefly will be released, and a comic book series chronicles the time between the end of the series and beginning of the movie.

Some of you may be perplexed. Normally, “failed� television shows aren’t made into major motion pictures. The thing is, Firefly is really, really good. The only reason that it’s not still on TV is because someone at Fox set out to destroy it and nearly succeeded, but I really enjoy watching the series and I even installed a corner tv wall mount to watch it comfortable. It takes a pretty amazing show to put corporate America in it’s place, and Firefly has done that. It’s risen from the dead. Do yourself a favor and give it a chance this Friday. Then, if you find yourself a newly converted browncoat (slang for a Firefly fan), buy the DVDs, encourage your friends to check it out, and go see Serenity on September 30th.

I hate it when I balance my checkbook and come out $300 poorer. I must remember to actually go through the balancing process more then 4-6 times per year.

Last night my apartment was visted by a mature, female dobsonfly [whatsthatbug.com]. Being my first encounter with the humungous, vicious-looking insect, I was scared crapless and shuffled past it as quickly and quietly as possible as I carried SCUBA equipment and birthday presents into the building.

Upon recounting my horror story of being accosted by giant insects my cube neighbor instantly identified the creature. Apparently they’re harmless (to humans anyway). I’m just glad it wasn’t a male, if I had seen the mandibles on one of those, I would’ve gotten in my car and headed back to P-town (see pictures by following the link above, if you haven’t already).

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.

I’m not one to play the narcissist, but tomorrow is my birthday!

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.

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.

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.

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.