Cranky-D

When the spammers find an old post, I turn off comments on that post. It’s a random kind of thing, but I’ve found that leaving the ability to comment on brings even more of them. Since I get a notice for every comment I receive, no one gets to leave junk here.

I guess they do it because somehow you can count hyperlinks, even in comments, and somehow you can get money out of it. Otherwise, they’re just tools. Of course, it could be both.

Anyway, if you find a post you cannot comment on, you’ll know why.

I spend a good deal of time reading weblogs and the comments therein. One thing I have noticed, and cannot understand, is that many of the people on the left are still spewing hate in the comments. They appear to continue to be unhappy, even though their guy won. Their outrage has not diminished:

Left Pretty Much Outraged By Everything

I seethe, therefore I am.

If a complaint falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it exist?

Stuff to ponder.

The article linked above is about Burger King doing a taste test using people who don’t have access to fast food. Some on the left find it outrageous. Whatevs.

I am more concerned (or mystified, really) with those who cannot seem to let go of their hate. They continue to scream about George Bush, who has something like six weeks left in his term. They are still outraged with Sarah Palin, who is back to being governor of Alaska but still making appearances that draw crowds.

Hate and bile is all they seem to know. Why can’t they be happy that their guy won the election, and move on? Heck, I was a tad annoyed over the election results, but amazingly enough I got over it pretty quickly. Sure, I’ve been doing some defensive buying in expectation of unfavorable laws that might be passed soon, but it’s probably more likely that I am overreacting. I don’t spend my time hating Obama, and indeed I never hated the guy in the first place. I think he was the wrong choice, and I still think that. However, I will wait until he demonstrates bad choices before accusing him of making them.

I don’t have a huge emotional investment in any politician, since I know that they are just humans like me. None of them is going to save me or anyone else. That is pretty much G-d’s domain. They don’t deserve the kind of emotional energy that goes into hate either. Besides, hate takes a lot out of you.

I guess taking things in stride is part of being a classical liberal, and part of being an adult.

It’s kind of odd that I have posted all these pictures lately. I don’t normally do that.

Eh, it’s not like I am using up all my bandwidth with my provider. I have plenty to spare.

Okay, I’m kind of at a loss here. I plan to start having regular content, but I really don’t do straight news analysis stuff and have no desire to do so at this time. I was going to start writing 100 word stories based on the topics suggested by the site, but it is apparently dead now. So, if you like, throw out some topic suggestions for that.

I figure on one 100 word story per day, an apropos of nothing post, and perhaps one other thing of some kind yet to be determined.

Probably should go to bed now, before Mr. Sun shows up. He’s due soon.

Update: 100-word story topics could be just a word that must be used, a situation that needs to be explored, stuff like that.

One of my favorite movies is “Conagher,” with Sam Eliot as Conn Conagher and his real-life wife Katherine Ross as Evie Teale. Evie was widowed early on in the movie, and was so lonely she would write poems and tie them to tumbleweeds in the hope that she could somehow be communicating with someone out there.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the writer of the poem or the tumbleweed that carries it.

Another of my father’s sayings, “Don’t let your alligator mouth overload your hummingbird ass.” Words to live by.

Jeff G. at protein wisdom has decided to take a break. As one of the guest bloggers from a few years ago (and I still have access), I will try to add my own weird take on things over there to keep the content going. If the spirit moves you, you might drop by to see if I have contributed anything. Or not, whichever. I admit that there is a lot more traffic there than here, which means that my ego gratification score is much higher there even when I get lackluster feedback.

The first time around I decided to expand on his memes. If you’re masochistic and curious, search the archives for my handle and you should get a good portion of my content there. This time, I plan to come up with my own memes, and rather than ape J.G., I will try to create something new.

Update: I just did a search over at PW and wow, I have written a lot over there. Some of it is actually mediocre.

Update II: If you’re interested in my weird short stories, read here, here, here,, here, and here, in order. They take the armadillo meme and run with it. I have no idea what J.G. thought about what I did to his character, he never said a word.

I received a domain renewal notice way back in August, and I thought I had renewed properly. However, last week my domain expired. I was kind of surprised as there was a placeholder domain there instead. For a moment I thought someone else had taken my domain, which I thought odd as I cannot see why anyone else would want it. Looking closer, it appeared to be an automatically generated page that tried to guess content from the URL. So, briefly, this domain contained links for bicycle parts.

I tried to renew Friday night, but it took until today for them to finally get off their butts and process it. For those few days I was annoyed that I couldn’t get to my site, though I rarely update.

Boring, yes, to all but me. I wonder if anyone else noticed it was gone for that short while.

I was just looking through the old stuff posted here and, my word, most of my posts are in the “under the influence” category. It makes me look like I drink excessively on a daily basis. I don’t. First of all, I can’t do that any more, and second, I have work to do. I think the reason it looks like that is that I post a lot more often when I’m drinking. When I’m working, I’m too busy writing code, writing reports, or otherwise thinking about work to consider posting. I’ll try to change that. Perhaps my work and writing will improve if I mix them up a bit.

The current state is that I will be on this job for at least another 4 months, and if more funds become available, maybe longer. I have managed to make myself valuable enough. The laptop is working fine so far. However, I am currently in Southern California so I am having network difficulties. The DSL in my Dad’s house does not play nice, and I have never set up a stable hardware situation involving a network because the modem does not run ppp0e directly. I have managed to push through a plan to remedy that while I am here. A new modem will be purchased (by me), and it happens to have wireless capabilities as well as running ppp0e in hardware. Once that is working, I will no longer be stuck on their computer. Even better for them, I won’t be in their way when they want to use it.

My sister is leaving for Alaska, so it will be me and my dad for nine days. The big part of the reason I’m here at this time is because we don’t leave him alone any more. The last time we left him alone, someone backed into him while he was walking in the bank parking lot. He ended up in the emergency room, and my brother had to drive here from over 200 miles away. After that, I think the longest we’ve left him on his own is a few days, and even that was tense (for us, not for him). He can completely take care of himself under normal circumstances, but luck seems to go against him and us at the least-best time.

Protein Wisdom has undergone a complete site change, so none of the links I have here to posts there will work any more. Now I think I probably should have cross-posted everything, but at the time I was trying to create original content just for PW, and felt cross-posting went against our “gentlemen’s agreement.”

That about covers it for now, kids.

This morning I found a few emails in the in-box. The first was noting a test comment to another old post. When that succeeded, a few more comments to be approved showed up. I immediately closed comments on that post and deleted what was alread there.

I have it in my queue to update to a new version of wordpress, and I hope that solves the problem. However, every time they change it the old templates won’t work, and I get tired of messing with them. Plus, the only way to be sure is to test it out on a local version of apache and only deploy when it that works.

At least, that’s the way a geek would do it, and I must maintain my geek pedigree.

I was getting spammed out the wazoo for the last few weeks. Somehow, someone latched on to one old post and every comment spammer started hitting it. At first, I set my linky threshold lower so that any comment with more than one link got sent to moderation. That kept them from showing up, but didn’t stop the pain. Finally, today I realized that closing comments to that entry might help. I did, and now blissful silence.

Except for someone who sent me an email asking if I want to pay them to get my site to show up at the top in search engines.

Me. A computer science geek. It is to laugh.

All you have to do is embed some text that cannot be seen, or just add a few posts that hit the g**gle “high points” and BAM! you’ll have traffic.

That’s all I need. A reason to raise my bandwidth limit.

I guess if I had ads it might make a difference. But since no one reads this site but me, why would I bother?

I think I’ll go read a site that has some actual content. Toodles!

I did renew my URL and everything, but I haven’t been inspired at all. However, the spambots are great at finding old posts to “comment” on, so I have changed my comment policy. The only comments that are automatically accepted must have one or fewer hyperlinks in them. Otherwise they go straight to moderation.

I have some ideas for content. I think it may be time to fire up the neurons again and return to creating whatever it is I create here.

Update: Got an email from someone sniffing for a place to spam me, so I closed comments. I’m sure that upsets no one.

I just posted another armadillo story over at PW.

I put up a few posts recently over at PW. The first one was a piece explaining where the armadillo has been for the last month or so, while the second one was a brief discussion of the relationship between immigration policy, wages, and the cost of goods and services. Neither is a scholarly work, though the latter has resulted in some commenting, which is always a good thing in my opinion.

I expect that the guest posters will be kicked out of the house shortly. I will miss the fact that I got more widely read there than I ever will here. However, the site’s owner spent a lot of time building up that readership, and I just don’t have the desire to do that right now.

I felt like baiting a troll over at PW. I put up a play by play for all who give a damn to see. That would be nobody.

I was buzzed when I wrote it, but not all that buzzed when I engaged.

What motivates a troll? I have some thoughts.

I posted an armadillo story over at protein wisdom. I have been posting my “talking back to drag-queen music” posts there without noting them here, since no one reads this site anyway.

Here.

Let’s face it, the chances of me posting here much are diminishing, except for the fact that I have to fulfill the dead pool posting requirement. The lure of actually getting feedback on my writing is intoxicating. I plan on enjoying it while I can.

One of my few daily reads, Acidman, passed away last evening.

He wrote about anything and everything. You knew exactly where you stood with him. He had no tolerance for fools, but I have the feeling that he would help just about anyone in need.

He lived a hard, full life, I should think, though he died much too young. He was thoroughly reamed by his last wife in their divorce. He lost his job because of blogging, since he had the gall to actually write what he thought, whether or not anyone else would be offended by it. He told the truth, including the hard truths about himself.

Rather than me quoting something, just go over to the site and read for yourself. Click around the archives. There is plenty of material to keep you entertained and make you infuriated.

For the past year or so, he has had numerous health problems. He was basically drinking himself to death, and instead of letting that happen, he checked himself into rehab. For the most part it took, though I think he slipped a few times. I don’t think slipping is failing. It can be hard to let go of our most intense vices. You take life one day at a time. He did that.

Unfortunately, he developed intense shoulder problems which were so bad he could barely move his arms. This had to be terrible for a man who was so active. He went to the doctor and had cortisone shots, and it seemed to help some. He said he was able to move his arms again, and he was able to work in his garden.

I’m not as sure if he was able to play guitar any more. Music was a huge part of his life, and for a few years when he was a young guy he earned his living playing for people. He visited my blog in April and left a few nice comments. He told me he would send a CD of his music when he was finally able to record some stuff.

I was looking forward to hearing it.

Rob Smith (1952-2006)

I was trying to make a post, and it seems that now I have a word limit. I know I didn’t add that feature. I imagine someone else did.

Now I get to re-install the stupid program because I don’t know where the modification is. That is really a thrilling development. I just have oodles of time for that shit. Oh, wait, I don’t.