Late last week Jay Allen, the designer of MT-Blacklist posted recommending a plug-in called MT-Moderate and some other anti-spam tools. MT-Moderate originally force-moderated comments, which is basically one of the things that MTB does, but it has been redesigned to force-moderate trackback pings too. That was a privacy hole in MTB (and MT) which doesn’t have a trackback moderation feature. Some blog spammers send pings – usually in large waves. If they managed to evade the MTB blacklist scan, the pings got into the public site. Spam comments that got around the blacklist, on the other hand, usually ended up in moderation.
Bored
I thought this review was useful for mentioning that the word “boring” and the usage of “interesting” as “not boring” seem to have entered the language only about 250 years ago.
Arts & Letters Daily
I added a site to my aggregator after finding this Guardian Article through Butterflies and Wheels News.
The site is Arts & Letters Daily. I am enjoying it for all of the reasons mentioned in the Guardian article – and especially for wide interests, good writing and fidelity to logic and reality.
Semi-Tough
“Semi-Tough” was on TV last night. I saw it in a theater back in 1977. Unfortunately it wasn’t in the TV guide, I didn’t know it was coming on, and I didn’t set a tape. Then my sweet Claire insisted on watching “Dead Like Me”. Damn. (Double damn – I really don’t like the lead actress although it’s fun to watch Mandy Patinkin in a solid role). I hope it’s on again soon.
Happy Birthday Claire
Claire turned 20 today. I continue to be amazed by her intellect and her talent, impressed by her increasing maturity and self-reliance. She has witnessed and tolerated my ups and downs for the last year. I love her dearly.
Deadwood, Season One
The second season of Deadwood has started on Movie Central with Episode 13, “A Lie Agreed Upon (Part 1)”. Deadwood, like other HBO shows, has started numbering episodes by absolute consecutive numbers. Movie Central uses the absolute episode number in its online program guides.
Weight Check
A little positive news. My weight has been going up over the winter. I have been going through a reality check around diet and exercise over the last several weeks. I have made some changes, and I am starting to notice the results.
Lost in the Library
My friend Randy Reichardt, a librarian by profession, blogged about the Gorman controversy in separate entries today and yesterday. Michael Gorman is the president-elect of the American Libary Association. In December 2004 he wrote an essay in the LA Times which criticized Google’s project to digitize entire libraries. His article was discussed in some blogs. Some of the discussion was thoughtful and well-informed, some was polite and some wasn’t. People sent him clips of some of the more colourful things some bloggers were saying. Then he wrote a piece in the Library Journal online dismissing blogs and bloggers. (Information and relevant links in Randy’s entries linked above).
Fulfilled
There was a movie on TV tonight: “Their Eyes were Watching God”. Halle Berry is in it and Oprah Winfrey produced it. The description of the movie in the newspaper was a young Florida woman’s quest for self-fulfillment in the 1920’s. The digital TV guide described it as the odyssey of a free spirit through stormy romances. After I noticed this show in the program guide, I search for information about the book and the writer online, and checked a couple reviews of the movie online. I watched the first half of the show before tuning out.
March Begins
The weather turned ugly today. It had been warm on Saturday, with some good melting. The forecast for today had held the potential for skiing – cooler temperatures and fresh snow. The warm temperatures persisted until midday when sleet and freezing rain started. I decided to stay home. It might have been ok in the woods but the wind and snow were making the roads treacherous. On a positive note, I got upper body workouts yesterday and today with my long-handled ice chisel. I chopped back some of the ice and snow behind my garage, opened some drainage for my neighbours’ parking pad (they moved from Victoria and still haven’t figured out what hit them, opened the sewer grate at the end of the back lane, and opened the grate in the curb in front of my neighbours’ Jim and Sharon’s house. I should shoot some digital pictures of the great rows of snow on the boulevard before they melt further.