May 2008 Archives

For some strange reason, I'm popular in Croatia. 

Hmmm....

Here's another video mashup from the funny folks over at Chocolate Cake City.  I've included material about the Aqua Team Hunder Force scare in Boston before.  As Engadget mentioned, it's a wonder why no one else ever noticed those signs.  

What got me started on this was I just refound the Tom Hanks as James Bond video I had found previously.

The image comes from a New York Magazine article.

My sister has started yet another blog, Daily Dose of Bilbo.  She's uploading a daily picture of one of her cats, Bilbo.  Feel free to ooh and aah.  This goes along with her other daily picture blog.

edit: I wonder how long it will be until her other two cats, Bossa Nova and Rosco, will demand their own step up to stardom.

reedit: I miss my own cats.  Thanks Angie.  Where ever you are.

I didn't get a chance to blog about it ahead of time but Shane's gave out a free lunch on May 17th. It consisted of a free 1/2 rack of ribs and a free Coke Zero. (Our local location threw in a free apple cobbler as well.)

I got there about 45 minutes before opening thinking I was going to be too late to get any free food but I was happy (and surprised) to discover that I was 5th in line.

I put up some photos of the event in the gallery.

For a while now, I've been having problems with getting trackbacks sent out of this blog. (Mostly to Wordpress blogs using Akismet I've noticed but that's besides the point.) 

I did note a number of times I received a "403 Throttled" error within my activity logs.  A quick google search pulls up this article on Richard Green's site on How to fix "403 Throttled" errors for trackback pings in movable type.

Richard tells us to add in the settings OneHourMaxPings and OneDayMaxPings to your site's /mt/mt-config.cgi file. (I note that as SixApart's docs don't actually say where to put those settings.) I've gone ahead and placed both lines in my config settings and saved the files.

...And watched the number of spam trackbacks go skyhigh.

Oh well.  At least my trackbacks are going out now.

Say hello to Poker 101.  I don't normally link to sites filled with affiliate links and the like (At least I try not to.) but I'm making a big deal about this for one very good reason.

It's still there.

You see, a couple of months back, I noticed (see the comments section) that sometimes I had to resend spam reports into wordpress.com when they didn't get acted upon them.  Now, I know it's only Mark over there dealing with those reports (Lloyd used to do them as well but I noted that he got removed from that position.  At least he's no longer following up on reports any more.) but after two reports sent in previously, (and a third one in today) the site is still there.

- Affiliate links? Check
- Adverts? Check
- Content stealing? Maybe.  Copied at least.

This isn't the first time I've seen this either.  This guy had his sites up for more than a week after first questioning what the issue was.

Sure, maybe wordpress.com has a public face of being anti-splog.  We all know that previous experience shows otherwise.

Upstart Blogger is giving away the domain name, spamchow.com if you can come up with a good way to use it. I've gone ahead and made my entry.  For the last few months due to all the problems we have had with Akismet, (long story that I would rather not get into.) we've been using a reworked version of the old wp-spamassassin plugin, not just for wordpress but for other platforms as well.  I've been debating on making it available to the general public and/or turning it into a service.

Hattip: Joshua Goodwin.

Just a quick mention, we now have a comment policy.  Just some butt covering.  We've had folks make comments in the past that I either found in poor taste or they made them posing as someone else.