April 2008 Archives

I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of Blogger but tonight I have to give them a pat on the back.  I just read on Mediamax's new blog that their old blog has been labeled a splog and they no longer have access to it.

Why do I get the feeling that somewhere out there, a Blogger employee with a free or low end account on Mediamax recently got an email from Mediamax telling them about their upcoming changes and how they either had to upgrade to a pay account or lose all of the data?  I have to admit that even I would have a hard time not pushing that button if I was sitting there looking at gigs of files, not being able to retrieve them, knowing that they'll be deleted in a few days, and knowing that Mediamax could really care less.  That's what they did it me.

Way to go, Blogger.  Now if you could just go ahead and mark their new blog...

Edit: Want to see something really stupid?  I just realized that they signed up for the same service that previously marked them as a spammer.  I guess they didn't take the hint.

Some thing that has bothered me for quite some time is how Movable Type does it's comment links. Instead of just a normal link to a website, it does this weird internal redirect. I'm sure the software does this to help prevent spam but with all of the protection built in, there's really no need for something like that.

It's easy to fix.  Here's the code for the Comment Detail template.  You'll find it under Design -> Templates -> Quickfilters -> Template Modules.

<div class="comment"<MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled archive_type="Individual"> id="comment-<$MTCommentID$>"</MTIfArchiveTypeEnabled>>
    <div class="inner">
        <div class="comment-header">
            <$MTCommentAuthorLink default_name="Anonymous" show_email="0"$> <MTIfNonEmpty tag="CommentAuthorIdentity"><$MTCommentAuthorIdentity$></MTIfNonEmpty> said:
        </div>
        <div class="comment-content">
            <$MTCommentBody$>
        </div>
        <div class="comment-footer">
            <a href="#comment-<$MTCommentID$>" title="Permalink to this comment"><$MTCommentDate format="%x %X"$></a>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>



See the line up there with $MTCommentAuthorLink? That's where the "Commenter bla-bla says:" get generated along with the link. All you have to do to get rid of the weird redirect link is add in no_redirect="1" to the line.

So the new line will look like this:

<$MTCommentAuthorLink default_name="Anonymous" show_email="0" no_redirect="1"$> <MTIfNonEmpty tag="CommentAuthorIdentity"><$MTCommentAuthorIdentity$></MTIfNonEmpty> said:

Why am I posting this? Because it's missing from the docs. Rather annoying actually. Almost like reading Wordpress' codex once again. There used to be a plugin for this but it's no longer needed.

Hopefully this will help someone else out. (And maybe get the docs edited to show this feature.)

Now I'm off to regenerate about 200 comments. :)

edit: Also considering that I don't use nofollow on this blog, I think it's important for folks to get credit for their comments.

reedit: You have to do the same to the Recent Comments widget.

Just a quick note to mention that I've added links to the Daily Sukoku puzzles over on the USAToday puzzle site to my Daily To Do list.  I've been playing them for quite a while now and can usually solve them.  They don't always score them correctly (Todays was a five star pluzzle which usually means it's the hardest to solve but I found it quite easy.) and it is a source of enjoyment.  (My thrills are cheap and easy.)

Maybe someday I'll learn how to spell Sukoku correct.  And maybe Firefox will add the word to it's dictionary. :)

If you get stuck like I do on occasion, check out this Sudoku Solver for help. (It's currently down for some reason.  Hopefully it'll come back shortly.)

edit: Oh and my sister is giving away my old Star Trek books. :(

Vanessa talks about how much water you're supposed to drink everyday. I keep a 64oz jug in my backpack and make tea or lemonade every so often. Usually every other day.

So how much water do you drink during the day?  It appears that the 64 ozs. of water we've always been told to drink everyday is actually too much.

The gallery is fixed in case anyone is interested.  I really need to sit down and sort and caption those pictures.  Maybe someday.

As a number of you know, I live off a fairly small disability check ever month.  It's just under eight hundred dollars.  Most of it goes to paying rent as well as my insurance premiums.  I also pay my ten bucks a month for my local calling only phone and buy some food with the left over.  Maybe even occasionally ride the bus.

Every so often someone drops me an email offering me a tip for my online work.  Since I have to report everything and get it nicked off my check, I tell folks that it's usally not worth the effort.  Unless, of course it's some serious money that will make up for what gets subtracted from my check.  I usually suggest sending a gift card for a national chain that's local to me that either I can use or donate myself to one of the area organizations that help the homeless.  Either that or I'll suggest that they signup for the three days free USENET access and have them send me the account details so I can play catch up.  Heck, some folks even pay for *.pdfs of the games that I used to play and send me those links.

The problem with that though is I usually do my internet work at one of the local university libraries.  Since the complex I live in was built shortly after WW2 and we're probably still using the same copper phone lines, DSL is not an option.  Ditto for cable.  Wouldn't have the money anyway.  I use a number of services like Adrive that allow me to store the files only and copy them over to a 2 gig flash drive that I picked up a few months ago. (Mind you, I was also coping over stuff I was working on so I wasn't able to bring stuff home all of the time.)

One of those services that I use is Mediamax.  If I remember right, they gave you 25 gigs of storage for free but only allowed you to download a single gig every month with their free account.  You were also only able to download a file size of 10 megs.  That was how they made money.  Anything larger, you had to upgrade to a larger account.

I also use rapidshare.  They give you 50 gigs of space for free.  The problem with them is that they'll delete anything that doesn't get download after a three month time period.  Since a lot of the data was actually watermarked with my name and email, I couldn't allow others to download the files.  So some went to rapidshare and some got uploaded to mediamax.  I did play it safe though and anything really large got uploaded to rapidshare.

Just to throw this in, I recently discovered adrive and for the last few weeks, I've been combining the accounts and uploading everything to them.  I recommend them highly.

Imagine my complete surprise when I received an email from Mediamax this afternoon (And in GMail's spam folder as well.  Guess they don't think much of them either.) telling me that they're rebranding their service as thelinkup.com (No, I'm not giving them a link) and how exciting the switch over will be.  Of course they'll be raising their rates for the paying clients.

Now here's what bothers me:

Current non-paying users: If you are not currently a paying subscriber to MediaMax, you need to upgrade your account before April 25 to be included in the move. Otherwise, your account will be deleted and all your files will be lost.

That's my account.  One of the non-paying users.  I received that email this morning, the 18th. (That is once I found it in my spam box.  Very glad that I actually skim it before deleting.) I have seven days to grab my files.  Gigs of them.  Mind you again, they only give a gig free of downloads per month.

Of course, they actually announced this on the 8th on their blog.  No where on their site have they mentioned the change over.  When you're logged in, and I log in every day to grab a few files, there's no mention.  In fact, I just checked and there's still no mention anywhere of the changeover and the required upgrade on their site.  I wonder why they're being so quiet about the changes?  Could they realize how upset they're going to make folks when they discover their files have been deleted without notice?  Heck, they turned off comments on their blog.

Now, you'll have to excuse me.  I have to figure out which files I am able to save and which files will get deleted.

Thanks a lot, Mediamax.  Please rest assured that you've alienated me and, I'm sure, many others.  I will not be using you new service and will encourage others not to as well.

[Please excuse any typos.  Using the stand up dumb terminal.  I can barely see the screen as well through the plastic cover that is kept over it.]

edit: Looks like someone over at Blogger.com took out some revenge on them.

If you still have a working TRS-80, did you know you could put it on the internet?  Here's another link on the subject.

So what happens when you take Garfield, the cat, out of Garfield, the comic?  You get an "even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life."

Garfield Minus Garfield

edit: Discovered here.

Edit: Oops forgot the link.

You're going to have issues going back through the archives but I wanted to give a quick plug for Half Baked, a webcomic that was suggested to me.  The back and forward arrows sometimes don't work but you can manually edit the URL to see the next comic.  Give it a try.

And if you like that one, they have more webcomics on their main site.