Well, after 2 years in the same apartment here in KC (I still can’t believe I’ve been here that long already) today I packed up and moved to a new place. Moving is always a major hassle but fortunately we had Jolayne’s uncle and cousin and my friend Ash helping out. That made the whole process run pretty quickly and smoothly, and I was loaded up from my old place and into the new in about 4 hours. We’d gotten a couple of inches of snow the night before, which was a minor inconvenience, but nowhere near as bad as the 10 inches that were on the ground when I moved out of Columbus. Hopefully this is the last time I move in the dead of winter for a while.

The new place is a spacious 2 bedroom apartment in Mission, KS. It’s about the same distance to work as my old place, and more importantly its about 2 minutes from Jolayne’s apartment (my old place was about 25 minutes away). This is very very nice. Conveniently its almost exactly in between where Jolayne works and where I work (she works south of KC, I work north). This is good, because this also happens to be the apartment that we’re going to live in after the wedding. So far I really like the place, though there is a minor issue with the garbage disposal. It’s broken, and I mean like the smoking and reeking when you turn in on kind of broken. Hopefully they’ll get that fixed pretty quick. Other than that things are good. I’m just getting things unpacked and set up. As you can tell, I’ve clearly got my computer and RoadRunner set up. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise anyone that knows me. In fact, the cable guy was out to set up RoadRunner before we even started unloading the truck. It’s all about keeping your priorities straight.

Comments

Comment by Tobin on 2005-01-31 07:35:15 +0000

Maybe you should try moving back to Columbus some time.

Comment by Sarah on 2005-02-01 17:05:03 +0000

Which is more important bandwidth or food? Who needs furniture anyways? A computer on the floor still works. Glad to know the move went well.

It’s time to talk about comment spam again, but this time its good news. Google has used their position at the top of the search engine heap to promote a new standard for helping to reduce the effectiveness of comment spamming on blogs and forums. They go into detail about this method on their blog, but basically it involves adding a new attribute, ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to any link tags that should be ignored by Google when calculating its ranking of a page. So if all links posted in blogs comment pages contain that attribute, they’re usless for pumping up the Google ranking of other pages which is the main point of comment spam. In a rare display of search engine unity, MSN and Yahoo will support this attribute also.

Developers of blogging software have already started adding this attribute to be added to any kind of spammable user generated content by default. For example, Movable Type has a plugin available that I’m installing, and would recommend that anyone else running MT install. This initiative is only going to be useful if it recieves mass support. I’m not convinced it will be useful in actually reducing comment spam, at least not in the short term and maybe not ever. If there’s one thing spammers have shown, it’s that they value volume a thousand fold over effectiveness. It takes so little effort to spam that even if it becomes completely useless, I’m not convinced they’d stop doing it. I’d be willing to bet that right now, somewhere some spammers have microwave antenna set up broadcasting spam into the depths of space hoping that maybe in a couple thousand years an advanced alien race will stop by hoping to pick up some herb4l V1AGR4 and refinance their mortgage. I think the real benefit for this effort is more for the search engines themselves than for bloggers. If this takes off, it’ll help drop tons of useless spamming web sites from gaming the system to get higher rankings in search results, making those results more accurate and reducing noise. Even if that’s all it does, then its still good enough for me.

This might just be getting my hopes up for no good reason, but apparently there’s a site out there about the attempt to get a sequel to Master of Magic made. I was in nostalgic bliss a while back when I found the game available as abandonware, but the thought of a sequel finally being made is really really exciting. Providing it’s done right. (Master of Orion 3, I’m looking right at you. No. Don’t even look at me.) There’s nothing official yet, but apparently Stardock is serious about getting it made and is working on getting the license to the series. I haven’t played any of their games before, but apparently they’ve done a few turn based strategy games so they might be reasonably qualified. As long as there’s a chance it might get made and it might be good, that’s enough for me. I mean, I guess a poorly made sequel would be better than no sequel at all. Unless you’re Master of Orion 3.

Just got back from Lawrence where Jolayne and I saw the second of two nights of shows by The Get Up Kids, who were celebrating their 10th anniversary as a band, and also recording a live album. We got there about halfway through Veda’s set. They were a local band, and didn’t really do anything for me one way or the other, although there was a dude yelling into his guitar pickups at one point, which was amusing. Murder by Death was up next and I really enjoyed their set, so much so that I picked up one of their cds. They play kind of a metal tinged alt-country with good old fashioned songs about whiskey, the devil, and the electric chair. The only detraction was that they had a cellist that was pretty buried in the mix, and I think it would have been interesting to be able to hear more of that during the heavier parts.

The Get Up Kids took the stage next, and played a really good, really long set with a good mix of songs from all of their albums. I guess that makes sense, to give them more tracks to choose from for the live album they were recording. Given that they were recording, I would have expected the vocals to be a little louder but I guess that doesn’t matter if you’re recording from the boards. They had a few equipment problems during some of the songs too, but that’s probably why they did 2 shows. Suprisingly this was the first time I’d seen them, even after living in their hometown for 2 years. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to see them again sooner than that.

Thank you comment spammers, for helping me hate humanity just a little bit more in 2005. Today I started off the new year with 573 spam comments from the same source having been newly added to my blog. What’s the point? My insignificant blog gets about 15 hits on a good day, and I’m sure my Google ranking is so low as to be nearly non-existant. I’d been ok with my average of 5 or so comment spams a week, but this is more spam in a day than I’ve gotten before total. I have comments set up to send me an email for each comment (mostly to be aware of any spam that slips through) and there were so many messages that it managed to choke up Outlook. (I guess that’s more of a strike against Outlook than the spammers, but it still pissed me off). So yeah, that was a pretty crappy way to welcome in 2005. Just a heads up to everyone, the word “poker” and several variations there of are hereby considered verboten in comments.

Comments

Comment by Dan on 2005-01-01 17:50:12 +0000

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to install MT-Blacklist.

http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/

Comment by Will on 2005-01-02 00:31:25 +0000

Yeah, I’ve been using MT-Blacklist for a while, but new ones just keep slipping in. I’ve even renamed my MT comments script, but they still found it somehow. So I figured I’d just block any comments that mention, uh, p0k3r and be done with it, since that seems to be what most of my spam relates to.

Comment by Dave on 2005-01-03 23:05:10 +0000

Comment spam got so bad on my MT site that I wound up disabling comments after too many days spent picking through junk comments.

One day I’ll get around to fixing the situation more permanently.

For what it’s worth, all the commenting stuff I need gets done on my LiveJournal, which is nicely resistant to that sort of thing. So of late, I’ve not been terribly inclined to work on the MT setup. 😉

Early Monday morning Jolayne and I made our way out of the snowy barrens of Ohio and had a good (if rather long) trip back to KC. I can’t imagine making a drive that long without Jolayne along for company; I think I’d go crazy. KC hadn’t gotten any snow at all, and was well above freezing when we got back, which was a very nice change. Then when I finally got to check my email at home for the first time, I found this waiting for me.

Good times.

Comments

Comment by Phil on 2004-12-28 23:27:57 +0000

Wow.

I’d really like to figure out how to get my Junk E-mail folder to work. I keep getting all of these “C|ALlS” emails…

On Tuesday, Jolayne and I went to Columbus to pick out the tuxedos for the wedding. Fortunately, tuxedo options are pretty limited so it wasn’t too tricky. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t even show us anything in a powder blue with a ruffled shirt, tails, and a hot pink top hat but its probably for the best. I got fitted then also, as did most of the groomsmen too just to get it out of the way early. Afterward, I went to hang out with my old roommates Matt and Ben, and I was supposed to stay with them for a night before heading back to my parent’s in Dayton. And that’s how it would have happened, if not for the massive, ridiculous snowstorm that unloaded on central Ohio over the course of the next day.

I probably could have made it out of Columbus had I left early enough, but I got sucked in by finally having a broadband connection to play World of Warcraft again. By the time I was ready to leave it had been snowing all day and the roads just weren’t very good. I figured I’d stay another night and leave in the morning when the roads had been cleared a little. Which would have been a good idea, except for the fact that Columbus got a layer of freezing rain that night, and Dayton ended up with well over a foot of snow by the time the whole thing was done. The next morning, Ben and I spent a good hour and a half digging my car out and clearing a path so I could get out of their parking lot. As I was heading out, I gave my parents a call to let them know I was on my way only to find out that it was currently impossible to get to my house since the street hadn’t been plowed. Back to Matt and Ben’s, where I managed to get stuck in the parking lot again. By the time my parents let me know that their road had been plowed, it was dark and the interstate was still supposed to have been pretty bad, so I spent yet another night in Columbus. When I finally made the trip back to Dayton today, I-70 was still pretty rough in spots, and when I actually got into the Dayton area the interstate was still snow covered and traffic was crawling. I’m just glad I was able to get home for Christmas Eve and Christmas, but Jolayne is with her family up in Waldo, OH where they got just as much snow as Dayton ,if not more, in a pretty rural area. I’m supposed to head up there tomorrow evening, but I’m just hoping I’ll be able to make it because it would really suck not to be able to see Jolayne on Christmas.

After making the trip to Ohio and driving through a good bit of snow and road salt, its come to my attention that I need some new wiper blades for my car. The only thing is, I’m not sure what size wiper blades I need (I know, I know. I’m a total car maintenance idiot). I checked the manual and didn’t see it, so I decided to look online. From the main Suzuki web site, I found a link to Suzuki Pit Stop, their official site for maintenance related info and manuals. Of course, I didn’t find anything useful there either, but what I did see was a healthy dose of lame. Not only do they charge you for access to the online version of the owner’s manual (for only 30 days of access no less), they charge you to look at technical bulletins about the car! I’m assuming that the technical bulletins detail causes and fixes of common problems with a particular make and model, judging from titles like “Squeaking Noise from Steering Gear” and “Incorrect Fuel Gauge Reading”. To me it seems like that would be as if Microsoft decided to charge for access to security updates, and also charged just to read any details about a particular security hole. So yeah, that seems pretty ridiculous to me. I wonder if that’s a common practice in the auto industry?

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2004-12-20 22:12:33 +0000

That is sucktacular. On the hopeful side, if you go to AutoZone or a similar car-parts store, they’ll know what kind of blades you need. They’ve got a little database of their own. But really, that’s some crappy customer support.

Comment by Phil on 2004-12-22 13:03:22 +0000

Yeah. I got my new wiper blades this year at Wal-Mart. They’ve got a little book tethered to the wiper blades rack that tells what size and type you need for whatever make and model. It’s pretty nifty.

And, yeah, I’m a car maintenance idiot too. Oil changes every 3,000 miles. That’s pretty much about it.

Tomorrow morning Jolayne and I are going to hit the road and head back to Ohio for the holidays. We’ll be there for just a little over a week, which will be nice since its the first real vacation time I’ve taken this year. I’ve got about 3 weeks saved up now, but I can’t really afford to use any more since I’ll need to have a bunch of time off for the wedding next year. Fortunately, my vacation time rolls over from year to year. By the time the wedding rolls around next April, I should be back up to 3 weeks by then which should work out nicely. Anyway, both Jolayne and I are really looking forward to seeing everyone back in Ohio (and also to getting the 11 hours of driving behind us). As per the usual procedure when we go anywhere, I’ll be lugging around my laptop, PDA, digital camera, and MP3 player which gives me just about everything I need to maintain my technophile standard of living short of a broadband connection. The downside? Keeping track of 5 separate chargers and power adapters. Fuel cells for portable electronics need to get here right now.

There’s an interesting http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/technology/circuits/16comi.html?oref=login”>article in the New York Times today about Penny Arcade, which is far and away my favorite web comic. The article gives some some neat backstory about the creation of this comic who’s brilliance I’ve pretty much taken for granted for the past couple of years. However, seeing it featured in the Times is just about as bizarre as it is cool.

Comments

Comment by Neal on 2004-12-15 21:29:58 +0000

Archive Link (no registration) courtesy of this NYT link generator.

Comment by Neal on 2004-12-15 21:31:05 +0000

Arrrr!

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/technology/circuits/16comi.html?ex=1260853200&en=eb47e98c399976b9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink