August 29, 2006 – 12:07 am
I was just reviewing my spam stats and noticed that somehow my Akismet API key got dropped out of my SpamKarma 2 plugin configuration some time ago, which means it hasn’t been checking spam against Akismet for a while.
I was about to go find my key and put it back in, but looking at the spam karma scores, I don’t think I want to. When it was in there, I’d very often notice (when reviewing the logs) that Akismet marked a particular (sometimes obvious) spam as “not spam”, and it was only kept out by the other SK2 pieces that counterbalanced that false Akismet score.
Now that I’ve been unwittingly running without it for quite a while and not seeing any adverse effects, I think I might just keep it that way.
August 28, 2006 – 11:29 pm
I think I’ve decided to downgrade poker from a “hobby” to just a casual fun thing to do every once in a while but not get serious about.
For a while now I haven’t been playing hardly at all (maybe a couple times in the last several months), and the times when I have (last Saturday night being the most recent), it just seems like my head really isn’t into the game the way it should be. This is probably due to all the other stuff I have to devote a lot of concentration / mental energy on right now (primarily work stuff).
For a while, when I first got into it, I was playing a lot - online and in person - and reading all kinds of books etc., to the point where I think I was getting pretty decent at it, but lately that has not been the case, and it shows in the last couple games I’ve played, which have probably been some of my worst.
I still like it, and will still play when friends organize a game or whatever, but I think I’ve just decided that (at least for now) it’s not something I’m going to put a lot of time and energy into getting better at, because there isn’t a lot to spare, and what I do have I can think of many other things I’d rather spend it on.
August 28, 2006 – 11:23 pm
Well, this Saturday we got our first taste of how hectic things are going to be for the next couple months.
All three kids are in soccer now, and the boys had their first games on Saturday. Emma waits one week because the field she will be playing on wasn’t available last week, but from here on out it’s 3 games every Saturday. Plus they’ve got practices during the week too, two days for the older two and one for Riley, which, combined with everything else (piano lessons, fencing, school starting back up, etc.) seems not to leave us with much remaining free time. Fortunately, Emma and Riley both decided they weren’t interested in continuing with the trampoline classes, which at least cuts out one thing from that crazy schedule.
August 24, 2006 – 10:23 pm
August 24, 2006 – 10:51 am
August 24, 2006 – 10:40 am
I decided the other day (in the process of fixing this bug in my top commenters plugin) to remove my name from the top commenters list on my blog, since it doesn’t make to much sense to have it in there. After all, of course I will probably always have the most comments in here, but who cares?
So, congratulations to everyone else, who gets an automatic bump up on the top ten list!
Now I just have to go back and have it pull the most recent URLs for the commenters instead of the ones from older comments. I think I may actually just switch it to only post the URLs of registered users instead, though.
August 24, 2006 – 10:28 am
Just thought I’d make a post out of part of my comment from this other thread, since it was going a bit off the original subject.
It’s in regards to a link that DaveZ posted about a Microsoft patent for a home video conferencing service.
The hardware in the current XBoxes is definitely enough to support it though, so I would’t have a hard time believing that they could roll this out fairly quickly. I’m actually kind of surprised that they haven’t done more in this regard so far. It might just be that it’s because they’re spread so thin in trying to cover so many markets.
Perhaps with the recent change in leadership they can better organize their company structure (or even split up) to allow for more rapid advances in this kind of space (home user appliance type stuff like gaming, “media center�-ish stuff, and this). Seems like its a big opportunity that they’re kind of lagging on right now, and I’m speculating that it’s because they’re so focused on all the other stuff they’ve got going on.
Either that or they’re going to “pull an Apple� and do a surprise announcement of a new product/service that’s already ready to go, which would probably be good for them PR wise.
August 20, 2006 – 11:01 pm
Yes, that’s right (well, kind of). I was at a wedding tonight where the ceremony had started; everyone had walked down the isle except for the bride. The “other people walk down” music faded out and everyone stood to wait for the bride to come down, and…
… waited some more - in silence. After a while, everyone was feeling a bit awkward, especially the bride standing there waiting to walk down, and the guy running the music was scrambling away at his computer. Eventually another song came on (although you could tell it wasn’t the one they originally planned on) and things proceeded from there.
Later I found out what had happened. They wanted a particular song for the bridal entry, so someone went on iTunes and bought it. They probably tested it out during rehearsal and everything was fine. The problem came when they got to that day and all the songs were packaged up (probably via a USB stick or something) and handed off to be played on the computer that the DJ rig was hooked up to. Of course, when it got to that song, up comes the password prompt for the original downloader’s account, which the guy apparently did not have. Doh!
PS - Before Dan gets too excited - yes, I know that this isn’t Apple specific just because it was iTunes, and yes, I know there are many workarounds for this, and they should have burned a CD instead of actually playing songs directly off a computer in the first place for an event like this, but the main point is about how over-zealous DRM can really have crappy results. This guy paid his money to iTunes, and he’s probably only ever going to play that file one or two times in his whole life, but they still have to make darn sure that he doesn’t play it on more than one computer.
August 18, 2006 – 11:30 pm
… I will get around to posting my review of the greatest phone I’ve owned so far, but not today.
August 18, 2006 – 11:20 pm
… its march towards world domination!
Granted, Google Ice Cream is an internal product only, but I’m sure any healthy conspiracy theorist could easily see it as leaked evidence of a larger plot to eventually take over everything.