Lee.org

I installed Spam Karma and tested it a bit. Let’s hope it keeps the wolves at bay.

2-7-05 update. It works really well. So far 80 spams automatically blocked and 16 comments automatically let through. Batting 1000 so far.

2-12-05 update. You can find really good Spam Karma documentation

Notably:

Realtime Blacklist URL

All Spam Karma-enabled blogs publish their realtime blacklist by default at:
[http://yourdomain.com/path/to/wordpress/]wp-content/spam-karma/export-blacklist.php
You can use this URL to refresh your blacklist if you trust that whomever you are hitting for updates also keeps up to date and doesn’t let their list be polluted by bad entries.
Mine should be available.

I snagged this nice idea from gfmorris about how to make comments in WordPress stand out from one another. I changed the code a little because his quotes didn’t work for me.

Starting at about line 37, add the items in red to wp-comments.php:

<?php $j=0; foreach ($comments as $comment) { ?>
<li id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>" <?php if($j%2) {echo "<div class="comment-even">";} else {echo "<div class="comment-odd">";} $j++; ?>

Finally, put these in your wp-layout.css

.comment-even {background: #CECECE;}
.comment-odd {background: #F0F0F0;}

An example of what you might get out of this is in the neighboring image.

After way too much deliberation, I’ve decided to go with WordPress.

WordPress, don’t fail me now.

I’ll see what I can do about importing my old journal into this system as soon as I can figure out how to do it. It might take a while.

For the time being, my previous journal pages will continue to be available on my old journal pages.

Molls sent this to me before xmas. I stole it from this site and pulled it local for posterity. Click on the picture to play this shocking Shockwave.

PPG showed this to me. From :The New York Times

Gallery Show Seeks the Art in Spam, Seen Through the Eyes of the Future

January 26, 2004
By SAUL HANSELL

The discordant verse, in simple black letters on white paper, is in keeping with the basement alternative art gallery in which it hangs:
———————————————-
victorious tank tepid conservatism veldt

cerulean carl
frontal decry brennan
———————————————-
It may seem the work of a striving, if cryptic, poet. But it is an excerpt from the nonsense words found in a junk e-mail message, as captured in a Manhattan exhibit that tries to make art out of spam.

The exhibit, titled “Reimagining the Ordovician Gothic: Fossils From the Golden Age of Spam,” is at Spaceworks at the Tank, a gallery and performance space on West 42nd Street devoted to experimental works.

Jesse Jarnow, one of the curators, said the name was inspired by a display he saw at the American Museum of Natural History on the Ordovician period, an era that ended about 445 million years ago, when the earth was dominated by primitive sea creatures.

“They had all these brightly colored snails,” he said. “But they don’t really know what it was really like.”

Riffing on the idea of junk e-mail as a lowly commercial life form, Mr. Jarnow along with the other curators, Daniel Greenfeld and Mike Rosenthal, tried to depict how an archaeologist 450 million years in the future might present current culture, based only on relics of spam. Motifs include the random text typically added to the end of spam to avoid being discarded by spam-finding filter programs, which the exhibit presents as the work of the “great writers of the ‘Ordovician Gothic.’ ”

The accompanying text notes that “this school of writers emphasized playful literary juxtaposition, frequently casting aside the period’s typical syntax in order to achieve a more visceral form.”

Using the sort of displays common in natural history
museums, the exhibit examines other aspects of the world as captured in the amber of spam. Light-up dioramas, for example, show pictures of the actual deposed African leaders who are frequently the purported authors of e-mail proposing deals that typically involve wire transfers of many thousands of dollars. “It is not known whether or not their appeals were received by willing accomplices or not,” the exhibit commentary says. “If they were, most likely, those who responded were simply drawn into the deep unrest from which the requests sprang.”

The spam exhibition will be on display through Feb. 15 at Spaceworks at the Tank, 432 West 42nd Street. It is open Thursdays and Fridays, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 6 p.m., and during performances.

[excerpted and edited from a letter from me to TJIC]

Hey Trav, didn’t you say that a friend of yours was a part of a TV show called Myth Busters?

I stuck it into Tivo and the first episodes will be airing this week. 3 episodes of “Myth Busters” on the Discover Channel on 3/7/03 at 8, 9 and 10 pm.

This’ll be one of the last new things going on my Tivo for a while. I recently put my Tivo account on hold.

My folks got me Netflix for Christmas. I’m very happy with it… $20 a month gets me about 12 DVD rentals per month, delivered via US Postal Service to my door. And, I have a suped-up Tivo, it’s got an extra 60 gig drive in it, for a total of 80 Gig or so. That gives me about 85 hours of recording capacity. Actually, it’s between 55 and 200 hours depending on the picture quality you choose to record at … I usually opt for “High Quality” mode, which gets me 85 hrs. The snazziest factory built Tivos get about 35 hrs of record time on High Quality mode. But recently I’ve been selecting the lowest quality mode… I’m hoarding TV programs for that vast upcoming time without a Tivo programming guide. I still don’t understand why Tivo doesn’t have a dual 100 gig drive option for TV nuts… I’m sure that lots of folks would go for it and love it. The hardware isn’t that expensive and it’s completely worth it.

So I’ve got like 100 hours of all my favorite television programs + 3 new DVDs per week + I’m taking 2 classes + I’m teaching 2 days per week. I won’t be reinstating my Tivo service for a while…

That isn’t to say that I’m not a huge fan of Tivo. It’s only because of all the reasons above that I can put the service on hold for a while.

[Begin Tivo gush]

If you watch television and don’t have one, you need one. You don’t even realize it, but you do, really. I’m not just saying that. Your television watching will become smarter and more productive with less effort than your current channel surfing habit affords you. You’ll watch more of the type of programs you want to watch, when you want to watch them. You’ll find lots of great shows that you didn’t know existed, and you won’t ever be tied to network program guides as when to watch them.

If you’re thinking of paying extra to get more cable TV channels, don’t. Get a Tivo instead and the amount of stuff that you want to to watch on your existing channels will instantly quadruple. I can give you a hundred examples but here’s a start: My dad likes programs about WWII. So I put in a Tivo Wishlist item looking for the keyword “WWII”. In 5 minutes, I found many programs that he would NEVER have found on his own. Like “The Veteran’s Project”. It airs bi-weekly, Sunday mornings at 8am on the History Channel. It’s a fantastic program but we would NEVER have come across this without Tivo.

So, a month before his visit, I pack Tivo full of WWII programs for him. Of course he watches TV most nights when he’s in Florida. Nevertheless, fully 3/4 of the programs that I record for him are shows that he hasn’t seen! Quadruple!

[End Tivo gush]

I could gush about Tivo for a long while; it’s pros and even it’s few cons. I’ll leave the rest of my gush for another time.