I got a “refinance now!!!!!” mailer this week for my apartment. I’m consoled by the fact that paper “spam” costs a great deal to send out.
Oh, I almost forgot. Last week I got penis enlargement paper mail. I didn’t even open it, since I could see the 28-point font through the envelope, and that’s basically how I treat email of the same subject. But that was a first for me.
This morning we went to take part in Reforest The Bluegrass. I made the following observations. Perhaps at some point I’ll have time to think about them and make them into a grand unified theory. Right now, they are just observations.
1) Most of the bumperstickers were politically active (issue- or agenda-based) or were athiest/wiccan/anti-Christian. No Christian stickers were in evidence.
2) 100+ vehicles piled into the park to spew exhaust fumes, in order to plant trees to help remove those fumes from the atmosphere.
3) People don’t know how to work in teams.
4) The trees that were planted in last year’s RtB are all dead now.
5) Across the street, they are cutting down trees just as fast as anyone could possibly plant them. 5 years ago, the land for miles around the park was undeveloped, or farmland. Many very old trees have been removed to make way for houses that now completely encircle the park.
6) I was amazed at the age of the volunteers. Whereas I’d expect most of them to be 30+ folks wanting to give back a little of the earth that they have participated in destroying, I was amazed by how many highschool and college kids there were. And, it being a very warm day, one might say that the view was very nice.
ok, that’s all.
While I suppose that putting this here will teach certain lowlifes how to get around it, I suppose it’s worth sharing the technique, so that other people can benefit from it. Seems that the spammers are idiots, and post the same comment repeatedly. So if you get a pattern early on, you can prevent a lot of other ones later.
The following goes in $MT/lib/MT/App/Comments.pm and assumes that you have some clue about Perl. I won’t be providing tech support for this. Please contact your local Perl guru.
It should be somewhat obvious where these go. I’ve provided a few lines of context.
if (!$q->param('text')) {
return $app->handle_error($app->translate("Comment text is required."));
}
if ($q->param('text') =~ /I wish it true|see a later|cool amazing page/i) {
return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
"An unexpected error has occured"));
}
if ($q->param('author') =~ /hydrocodone|phentermine|gay f..king|valium/i) {
return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
"An unexpected error has occured"));
}
if ($q->param('url') =~ /cheapdrug/i) {
return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
"An unexpected error has occured"));
}
my $comment = MT::Comment->new;
And proceed with that same sort of thing. This will bit-bucket the most eggregious morons, and then you’ll still have to deal with the others manually. Or migrate to WordPress, as I’m planning to do just as soon as I get a few spare moments.
On Sunday I’m heading for St. Louis again, for another week of Apache training, and, I hope, geocaching. Last time I was in St. Louis I found a grand total of 1 geocache, due to schedule and exhaustion. So hopefully I’ll do a little better this time.
On a related note, I put out a cache on the 15th of March, and it’s already been stolen. I lost two travel bugs in it, too. I’m really irritated about this. Darned kids.
Next week is TV Turn Off week, leading me to think about how much I have watched television lately. The stats on the web site suggest that in the average american home, the television is on for 7 hours, 40 minutes every day. It would take me at least two weeks to have the television on that long. I might turn on the television twice a week, and perhaps watch a movie (on television, or video, or DVD) once every two weeks.
So, something that I’ve wondered is whether I’m actually missing something. There was an article in the newspaper last weekend about a television show with Donald Trump in it, which has popularized the phrase “you’re fired.” I suspect that almost every one of you reading this know what show that is referring to. The article didn’t mention the name of the show, because, of course, everyone already knows. I found this amusing, since I don’t know. I also don’t know why the phrase “you’re fired” would become popular. I expect someone would explain it to me, but I’m not sure why I would care.
And that’s really the question. Should I care? Does it matter that I never saw a single eposide of any of the Survivor shows? Does this make me less in touch with the culture? If I don’t watch the news, and so don’t panic when I’m told to, then can I really be an informed voter? And when I don’t get the references to CSI and The Sopranos, am I just as annoying as those folks that don’t get it when I make reference to Don Quixote and Robert Frost?
But, at least for now, it’s a bit of a moot point. I can barely keep up with all the stuff that I have to do right now. I can’t imagine that I’d get anything done if I wasted any more time watching TV.
My Eastern Orthodox friends have a strange thing that they say when a loved one dies. May his memory be eternal. This made little or no sense the first few times I heard it, but seems to make a little more sense with passing time. While I would not presume to attempt to explain something that makes sense to the Orthodox, it seems to refer to one’s life having lasting import.
A few days ago, a friend and colleague reported in his blog that a loved relative had recently died, and he recalled time spent with her. In that way, her memory becomes eternal, because it has lasting impact on the life of someone who, in turn, has had a lasting impact on the life of others.
It seems that, when someone dies, the only comfort to be had is that their memory is lasting. The saddest thing is when someone passes, and nobody marks that passing. This is true tragedy. There is a tiny graveyard on the west side of Nicholasville Road, just before Regency Center, that most residents of Lexington aren’t even aware of. In it are broken, mostly illegible grave markers. Nobody seems to know who these people are, or what their stories were.
I think that one of my major motivating factors in many of the things that I do is that my memory be eternal. I’m still trying to decide if this is self-seeking or not. I want to do things that have lasting import. I think, sometimes, this is entirely about vanity, while other times it is about wanting to do things that matter, simply because they are important, and it feels good to be part of something that has lasting impact.
When my grandfather died, I was in a very wretched time of my life. In fact, I had been given divorce papers just days before Grandpere died. I was not able, at that time, to mourn his passing. It was nearly a year later when I was thinking about him, and wept at the enormous loss. And now it has been nearly two years.
My grandfather’s memory will indeed be eternal. The people he touched, and who benefited from knowing him, are countless. He wrote more letters in a year than most of us will write in our life time. Heck, he wrote more letters in a month than most of us will write in our life time.
And, in ways that I notice all the time, Grandpere is part of who I am. I notice tiny manerisms that I have, from time to time, that remind me of him. And other not-so-tiny things that I see in myself, and my father, and my brother.
Grandpere, I miss you, and your memory is eternal.
This came in the mail today.
At a time when I’m about ready to go flip burgers rather than endure another week here at $job, I’ve been given two technical writing assignments in quick succession. It’s as though my employer suddenly realized the skill that caused them to hire me in the first place, and want to have me do something I’m actually good at!
It’s like a breath of fresh air. I’m actually enjoying myself.
Yeah, I’m one of those strange people that actually enjoys writing technical documentation, and writing “white paper” sort of documents aimed at non-technical people, and, I guess, just writing in general. I think I could happily spend the entire day doing nothing but that.
My only frustration at the moment, in fact, is that I’m compelled to use inferior tools for the job.
I really can’t imagine writing structured documents in Word. How do people do it? I mean, obviously, Word does a lot of things that I don’t know about. But the simple task of writing a structured document, with internal references (see section 12.4) and auto-indexing (TOC as well as a glossary/index at the end) is way beyond my ability. I would have thought that this sort of thing would be really easy. And I expect it probably is, and I just don’t know how. But what point-click-drag-and-drool method could be easier than just typing index{GUI indexing tools} at the point in the text that I want the index to point to?
The amusing thing about this kind of rant is that it elicits exactly two kinds of responses. Either people immediately see my point and agree, or they have no idea what I could possibly be referring to. The latter group tend to be the “well, of course everyone uses Word, silly” group who can’t imagine that there are other ways to do it. (And, although that sounds derogatory, I’m sure that many of these people can produce as-good or better docments using that tool.) The former group, alas, commiserate, but don’t really have a functional solution to offer. Which is very unfortunate.
I have been obsessing of late about a clock. I used to be very fond of this clock, and I missed it. That’s right, I missed a clock. Sad, hmm?
It’s not just any clock. It’s a clock that inspired Acme::Time::Asparagus. And I missed it.
Well, this evening, it was given back to me, and I am very happy about this. But it got me wondering about *things*, and how I get so attached to *things*. I accumulate *things* long after I have room to store all the things I already have. But I get very sentimental about things, and I can’t get rid of stuff.
But now I have the clock back, and that’s a Good Thing. 🙂 One more thing to find a place to store …
I have increasingly less patience with political correctness. (By way of Mr Hib Gib.)
A wise man once said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I suppose that this sentiment no longer has any place in intelligent cultures. The mark of a civilized culture is now, apparently, where nobody ever says anything that anyone else can possibly take as offensive. I’m afraid I have come to take this attitude as an indication that the person(s) in question are simply incapable of having an intelligent debate, so they have to fall back on whining about how unfair it is that their oponent disagrees with them.
It would seem to me that only a child, an idiot, or a sheltered academian, could possibly look out at the world and take offense at people that disagree with them. Get over it folks. *Most* of the people in the world disagree with you on at least one major point, and you simply can’t spend your life getting offended at this.
People who get offended by words they don’t understand (“nigardly”, “uvula”, and “tar baby” are good examples to start with), are fair game for mocking. Except, of course, when courts and committees support their ignorance. Then the field for mocking is greatly widened.
People that get offended by people who disagree with them on religious views (critical readings of books like “The Bible” and “The Koran” are good examples) are simply burying their heads in the sand. Whoever you are, most of the world disagrees with you about religious views. Get over it.
People who get offended by nationalism are living in a dream world. For millenia, people have loved their nations, and have been willing to die for that love. And, for a very long time, when people have moved to a new nation, to become citizens of that nation, they have, in some sense, been willing to become part of the culture of that nation. I’m not sure when people started thinking that they can become part of a new nation, but not in they slightest measure integrate into the culture of that land. I suspect that this is a very new phenomenon. Now, granted, not all things old are good, but this strikes me as a very odd notion indeed.
People who get offended by being treated differently from citizens, when they are in a nation where they are not a citizen, clearly need to travel more.
People who get offended by satire need to read more. If writers across the ages had been as hung up on political correctness as we are today, some of the great works of literature would never have been penned.
And some people just need to get offended more – by things that really are offensive – so that they can distinguish between real offense and what is just something that they happen to not agree with, or, perhaps, simply don’t understand.