Category Archives: What? Are They Nuts?

New Look

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My web host made a change last week to bring their supplied-with-the-package blogging up to more-or-less modern standards. Along with a new database, a new look, and new themes, we lost the much loved plug-in, Can You Do Math. That means we have gained something else.

Spammers are TurkeysSpam.

I investigated the replacements for the little adding two numbers app. I closed comments on articles more than 30 days old. That’s not too much of a burden since many pieces here are topical. And I turned on moderation. That’s a burden because your startling, fascinating response gets delayed until the moderator notices it.

There were nine (9) new messages waiting this morning. That’s been about average since we made the change. Plenty of sites get hit by more. A lot more.

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Certified?

beats by dre wants us to buy some noise canceling headphones. “These have a microphone within on every earpiece that perform with an electronic circuitry that creates an opposite audio breaker to scale back breaker.”

Yeppers, I’m definitely clicking on that one.

How about the Viagra 150 mg for which I can get an advance payday loan?

<PLONK>

Do they really, really think I’m going to click there?

I read all about the Top 10 WordPress Anti Spam Plugins. That article was published in 2007 and about half the apps offered were out of date.

Akismet is by far the most popular anti-spam plugin; Some 12 million peeps have downloaded it. This Automattic program is completely free for personal use. I don’t want to use it for two reasons. One is that it has to confer with the mother ship; the other is that, as one reviewer noted, “it can get a little overzealous.” In a two week test, he found that Akismet blocked 653 spam comments of which five were not spam. I don’t want to lose any genuine comments, particularly if they come from first time readers.

The bottom line seems to be that most of the plug-ins will weed out the spambots but even the math programs can’t intercept all the human spammers.

Bear with me. We’ll be experimenting with juggling fruit and writing equations in the coming weeks.

 

Thursday Thorn: Kin We Use the Dogs, too?

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Here’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) speaking at a Senate judiciary committee hearing on Thursday, March 7. These are the people who determine what color socks you wear:

“The time has come, America, to step up and ban these weapons. The other very important part of this bill is to ban large capacity ammunition feeding devices — those that hold more than ten rounds. We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines. Limiting magazine capacity is critical, because it is when a criminal, a drug dealer, a deranged individual has to pause to change magazines and reload that, the police or brave bystanders have the opportunity to take that individual down.”

It’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round,
30-round, even 150-round magazines.

Oh, goody.


 

Monetized

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First rule of writing: write what you know.

I write a blog which means I do occasionally read OPB (Other People’s Blogs). And when I read, I often comment.

order screenSo.

I seem to have a couple-three logins at different blogging softwares but they all come back to the gmail account associated with the No Puffin Perspective™. They display my own name and everything, since I don’t snipe anonymously.

A friend sent me a link to a LiveJournal blog today. It started an interesting discussion about ownership and privilege; I logged in to make a comment. LiveJournal gave me a couple of options: LiveJournal itself, Facebook, Twitter, Openid, Google, MailRu, Vkontakte, or Anonymously. I won’t autolink my blogging to Facebook or Twitter because you never know what might end up tweeted on your wall. MailRu, founded by Yuri Milner, is the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world. I don’t speak Russian. Ditto for Vkontakte. I’ve never bothered to get an Openid because, well, I have gmail.

So I clicked the GooglePaw and gave LiveJournal my email address, fully expecting to see my name and the North Puffin avatar show up. I saw “ext_1649750” and a crash test dummy.

Went looking for a way to change the avatar. Did so.

Google Plus now probably has a low res bird on my page instead of my smiling mug.

Went looking for a way to change the user name. And that’s where the story gets interesting. LiveJournal is perfectly happy to change my public name from what they assigned to what every other account uses. For $15.

I have a better idea.

I deleted my LiveJournal account and I recommend everyone else do the same.

We Go Fast, Part II

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Up in North Puffin, the Conservation Law Foundation is concerned. See, the State of Vermont issued St. Albans City a Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (MS4) permit last month.

“We’re convinced that significant water quality improvements in Vermont will take too long to achieve,” a spokesman who was not Dennis Farina said.

They are so worried about the timing for water quality improvements in Vermont that they have challenged the permit.

If I’ve got this straight, they want things to go faster so they figure the best way to do that is to tie the engineers, the municipal officials — the very people who would otherwise do all the work — plus a bunch of attorneys up in court? For the next year or ten?


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