Something Up With Which I Will Not Put

Dina wanted new and improved - voila. New, at least. As for improved, feel free to let me know if there are legibilility issues, or if you're just freaked out by the huge flowers.

Of course, compliments are also welcome, should you have any.

Believe it or not, I've been working steadily on the site - granted, no recent entries, but I've been salvaging archives, tweaking the template, and adding and editing links on the student resource pages.

Work, work, work...

I'm sitting in my office (did I mention, yay!!) gazing across the snow-covered football field, dazzled by the winter sunlight. Cold it may be, but beautiful, too.

The semester is going very well so far - all three of my class groups are responsive and to date, they all seem to be reading the assigned texts. Of course, there's always that one student whose mission seems to be to make me question myself, the one who sprawls rather than sits, rolls his eyes and mutters, and manages to convey his complete lack of interest and his disdain in a single slouch...

I look forward to grading that paper ;)

According to Kaspersky Labs, the MyDoom virus most likely originated in Russia.

Does this explain the three hits this blog has had from Russia?

Both the SCO Group and Microsoft have posted rewards of $250,000 US for "information leading to the capture and conviction of the individual or group responsible for the release of MyDoom.B."

In the last week, I have received more than the usual number of infected e-mails, but my various virus thingies appear to have quarantined all the nastiness.

Go to Microsoft if you think your computer has been hit.

More tweaking...

I discovered that certain fonts were displayed in weirdly different sizes, and my beautiful mellow yellow was screamingly fluorescent, depending on which PC was used to view the blog.

I think I've fixed the problems, at least for those using IE. I'd appreciate notes from other browser users - do you see the flowers, does the colour look nice and unfluorescent, and do the fonts seem essentially uniform? I may try experimenting with browser-friendly code, if necessary.

Oh, and praise whatever higher being seems appropriate for MT user support forums!

Okay, here we go again - I did some more futzing with Photoshop, and here is the new new background. I'm using the laptop, so once again I rely on your input to let me know if the colour is hideous. I'm going for a mellow, yellowy-orange, not bright, screaming acid yellow, so I implore you to give some idea of what you're looking at.

The current colour is "light goldenrod." It was "Navajo white" for a day or two, but I was uneasy about the hex code: FFDEAD.

I toned down the flowers, as per Francois' suggestion, so the text should be easier to read.

I'm in correcing mode - only five essays left. But I think it may be time to throw in the towel for today. What makes me think this, you ask?

I just gave myself a fat lip with my own pen.

See, I had the pen in my mouth, I was trying to contain my hair in a clip... next thing I knew, fat lip. And the chances are very good that somewhere between my mouth and my nose, there is a lovely streak of red ink.

Yup, definitely time to go home.

Yesterday, I bought two laptops on e-bay.

I have a friend here in Lennoxville who, now that she's retired, is getting into the cyberworld. So she asked me to find her a laptop, not too expensive, whose primary functions will be e-mail and surfing.

Yesterday, I found her machine. Nice little HP, reasonably priced, no bells and whistles, and just enough power to avoid d-o-w-n-l-o-a-d-i-n-g frustrations.

Then, since I was in the market for my own new machine, I kept looking...

So far this morning I have received four spam* for Viagra. I'm not sure who's spreading the rumour that I'm having problems keeping it up, but I'd like to go on record as saying that it's as up as it ever was, given that I don't have an it.

Which means, by the way, that my it doesn't need to be any longer or wider.

Two of these spam, interestingly, employ what I assume is a filter-busting method: a long string of unrelated words in the subject line. To whit:

"elizabethan valois thermistor weiss aplomb crisis aileen clash eden quickie tallyho mcleod ogre onion ace proteolysis hollandaise"

Aplomb?

As in 'he swallowed his Viagra with aplomb'?

And I don't even want to think about 'hollandaise' in that context...

*Is this the correct plural form? There are enough technical writers and their ilk reading this - is it spam? spams? spumati?

I noticed yesterday that my smoke-free counter was getting ahead of me - the original code would have made today the three-week mark, which it is not. I quit on Friday the 13th, so 21 days has to be another Friday, no?

Perhaps it has something to do with the leap year...

Anyway, this morning I went to Dynamic Drive and found a better code that seems able to count. While it would be nice to say it's been three weeks, it hasn't.

Tip for virulent spammers - get the grammar right and your intended victims may be more likely to fall for your cunning trap:

Dear user of Yahoo.ca gateway e-mail server,

For further details see the attach.

A new doll action figure.

Via Steve

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.


How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm adding this to my resume.

via blork

And you thought the other action figures were cool.

Thanks, Terence!

Anyone familiar with Movabletype 3?

I've been having significant problems with comment spam, and I get the impression that it's easier to control with MT 3. On the other hand, I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle, if there is one, of upgrading.

Is anyone using MT3? Has anyone used it and given up? Or does anyone have other suggestions for dealing with the spamming?

MT Blacklist rocks, yes - but one of the blacklisted urls is mail.com - which means that anyone whose address is [name][at]gmail.com, hotmail.com, etc., has had their comments inadvertantly eradicated. Sorry Bill, Caroline, and the rest of you!

I have removed the url from my list, and would suggest others do the same. Also, if you happen to be perusing past comments and wonder what some of us are babbling about, chances are there's a comment that's been dumped. We're not known for our non-sequiturs round here, I can tell you.

Burma.

I inadvertently checked my cel phone voice mail yesterday and found a message from my friendly technician, who called to say that the ass/elbow crew finally figured it all out, and the part has been ordered!

Now all we have to do is wait for the part to arrive, then for FS to contact me to tell me...

I bet I have a working screen by, oh, 2005!! Woohoo!

I know, I know.

It's not finished yet.

I have a class now; I'll be back to fix it later.

:P

Tada.

Ok, so I'm cleaning up the comment spam that's accumulated of late, and one of the newest rat bastard spammers is flooding my site with links to pictures of naked male celebrities - including Martin Luther King.

Welcome to 2005, ladies.

Six g-mail invites, on a first-come, first-serve basis. C'mon, you know you want it.

Forty or so years from now, will we be surfing through a slew of websites with names like "Granny's Blog?" Will commenters have to gently tell posters "um, you've already told us this. Six times."?

When my grandmother was no longer able to live alone and we moved her into the 'Villa,' my dad mentioned the idea of a computer - we have friends and family across the country, and it might be nice for her to have e-mail capabilities. The answer was an emphatic "no." She has a phone, and a large TV, and her newspapers, so she's in touch.

My parents, on the other hand, are both computerized (I don't mean that they're robots. I have no proof of that.). So when the time comes that one or both of them need the kind of living arrangement that my grandmother has, I assume we're going to have to make sure there's a DSL connection in the room.

When it's my turn, my antique laptop computer will no doubt be a source of amusement for the strapping young orderlies, whom I'll probably bore to tears with my tales of yesteryear, when we thought OC-768 was the height of technology.

"It used to take upwards of five minutes to download a file that big, in my day. Now, about that sponge bath..."

You would think that an entry of such historic significance would be more exciting.

It's spring! Time for a new look.

This year, I decided I would use my own images - please let me know how the colours and layout work. I do all of my blogging on my laptop, which means that my display colours are completely unreliable. What I see is not representative - so feedback is welcome!

In case you're reading this in the archives, and the look has since changed, this is the look I'm talking about.

I'm getting tired of the green. Stay tuned.

Sorry for the inconsistency. I think this look will last for a while. The pink and green was ok, and very spring-like, but it wasn't really me. This I can live with.

So on Thursday, I bought a new printer at Future Shop:

Me: I'm looking for an Epson multi-function that I saw on your web site.
FS Guy: You want to know the price?
Me: No, I know the price, I want the machine. It's marked down from $99 to $59.
FS Guy: [points to $250 machine] Is this it?
Me: Um, no. $59.
FS Guy: I guess we don't have that one.
Me: Yes, you do. I checked online, and you have it at this location. That's why I'm here.
FS Guy: [turning around and practically tripping on actual model] Is this it?
Me: Yes! Thanks.
FS Guy: [as I pick up my own box, and as box underneath falls on my foot] ... [walks away]

The weirdest part? He didn't try to sell me an extended warranty. Not even a little bit. Which was a little disappointing, because I had my whole tirade ready.

Still getting used to the new Moveable Type set-up... my primary goal here is to eliminate the thousands of comment spammers who leave their mark all over my stuff. Eventually, I'll be able to turn my attention to actual design.

In the meantime, if you do comment and find that it takes ages for your comment to appear, you'll be happy to know that (a) I'll publish you ASAP, (b) we're working on it, and (c) if all goes according to plan, you'll be able to comment and publish simultaneously, as soon as we get one of those image-recognition thingies installed.

It's a good thing I am not paranoid.

This morning, I opened my browser and scrolled down my page for the weather forecast. Interestingly, the forecast was in French.

Which it was not yesterday.

If I were paranoid, I might have taken this linguistic switch as evidence of some kind of insidious Big Brother (or, perhaps more appropriately, Grand frere) plot to take over my web site, one element at a time.

Thankfully, I am not paranoid.

I clicked on the weather button, and sure enough, the French weather network site opened. From there, I went to the English site, and found the English code for the button, and added it to my template.

If I were paranoid, I might have been a little perturbed that there was (a) no indication that changes had been made to the code, and (b) an automatic redirection to the French site with the old code (which I added about a month ago, when the WN changed their old, old code, again, without notice or explanation, resulting in everyone's favourite tiny red X in my sidebar, rather than the weather).

But I'm not paranoid.

In the process of moving our home office, we've come across a 1988 price list for a computer company where Dr. T worked once upon a time, which reveals a couple of things:

1 ~ this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I complain that the man never throws anything out. I mean really, 1988??

2 ~ computer technology (in case you hadn't noticed) has skyrocketed in terms of capability and plummeted in terms of price. We are all pretty much aware of this, but the 1988 price list offers some concrete examples:

HP laser printer: $6,750
Hayes 1200 baud external modem: $649
IBM PS/2 (featuring 2 Mb RAM, 115 Mb hard drive - and that's Mb, not Gb; and there's no monitor): $14,000 (add $350 for a 12" black & white monitor, and at least $850 for colour)
Compaq portable 386 (featuring 1 Mb RAM and 40 Mb hard drive): $10,595

Right now, I am creating this entry on my sexy new laptop, which features 2 Gb RAM, 160 Gb hard drive, 17" anti-glare screen, integrated webcam, wireless, etc., etc., for which I paid about a thousand dollars - one-tenth what I would have had to shell out for that portable Compaq. And my SNL is 'espresso' brown - it's like a huge slab of cyberchocolate.

Just the way I like 'em: sexy, powerful, chocolatey, and, as it turns out, cheap.

Help!

I'm trying to be a good girl and post more regularly to The Communal Kitchen, and I want to incorporate the RSS feed from that blog into this blog's sidebar.

Translation: I want new entry titles from my recipe site to appear as links in a permanent section in the sidebar of the page you're currently reading.

I've found a few variations on this theme, but no code that actually does what I want it to, and I can't figure out how to tweak the codes I have found to make them do my bidding.

I have set up a feedburner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCommunalKitchen#

Maybe it's my keywords, but most of the stuff I've turned up in researching this is either how to set up a feed for your site (which I've done) or how to read other feeds in various readers.

I'm convinced that what I am trying to do is easy, and that I'm probably just overlooking a really simple solution - help!

If you have a nice, simple solution (or even a messy complicated one, really), please let me know!

So there was, in fact, an unbelievably simple way to do what I was trying to do - Feedburner has an option called BuzzBoost in the Publicize tab that does pretty much exactly what I set out to do, namely, have an updated list of recent entries from The Communal Kitchen.

The results are right over there
<<----