Well, after 2 years in the same apartment here in KC (I still can’t believe I’ve been here that long already) today I packed up and moved to a new place. Moving is always a major hassle but fortunately we had Jolayne’s uncle and cousin and my friend Ash helping out. That made the whole process run pretty quickly and smoothly, and I was loaded up from my old place and into the new in about 4 hours. We’d gotten a couple of inches of snow the night before, which was a minor inconvenience, but nowhere near as bad as the 10 inches that were on the ground when I moved out of Columbus. Hopefully this is the last time I move in the dead of winter for a while.
Monthly Archive for January, 2005
It’s time to talk about comment spam again, but this time its good news. Google has used their position at the top of the search engine heap to promote a new standard for helping to reduce the effectiveness of comment spamming on blogs and forums. They go into detail about this method on their blog, but basically it involves adding a new attribute, ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ to any link tags that should be ignored by Google when calculating its ranking of a page. So if all links posted in blogs comment pages contain that attribute, they’re usless for pumping up the Google ranking of other pages which is the main point of comment spam. In a rare display of search engine unity, MSN and Yahoo will support this attribute also.
Developers of blogging software have already started adding this attribute to be added to any kind of spammable user generated content by default. For example, Movable Type has a plugin available that I’m installing, and would recommend that anyone else running MT install. This initiative is only going to be useful if it recieves mass support. I’m not convinced it will be useful in actually reducing comment spam, at least not in the short term and maybe not ever. If there’s one thing spammers have shown, it’s that they value volume a thousand fold over effectiveness. It takes so little effort to spam that even if it becomes completely useless, I’m not convinced they’d stop doing it. I’d be willing to bet that right now, somewhere some spammers have microwave antenna set up broadcasting spam into the depths of space hoping that maybe in a couple thousand years an advanced alien race will stop by hoping to pick up some herb4l V1AGR4 and refinance their mortgage. I think the real benefit for this effort is more for the search engines themselves than for bloggers. If this takes off, it’ll help drop tons of useless spamming web sites from gaming the system to get higher rankings in search results, making those results more accurate and reducing noise. Even if that’s all it does, then its still good enough for me.
This might just be getting my hopes up for no good reason, but apparently there’s a site out there about the attempt to get a sequel to Master of Magic made. I was in nostalgic bliss a while back when I found the game available as abandonware, but the thought of a sequel finally being made is really really exciting. Providing it’s done right. (Master of Orion 3, I’m looking right at you. No. Don’t even look at me.) There’s nothing official yet, but apparently Stardock is serious about getting it made and is working on getting the license to the series. I haven’t played any of their games before, but apparently they’ve done a few turn based strategy games so they might be reasonably qualified. As long as there’s a chance it might get made and it might be good, that’s enough for me. I mean, I guess a poorly made sequel would be better than no sequel at all. Unless you’re Master of Orion 3.
Just got back from Lawrence where Jolayne and I saw the second of two nights of shows by The Get Up Kids, who were celebrating their 10th anniversary as a band, and also recording a live album. We got there about halfway through Veda’s set. They were a local band, and didn’t really do anything for me one way or the other, although there was a dude yelling into his guitar pickups at one point, which was amusing. Murder by Death was up next and I really enjoyed their set, so much so that I picked up one of their cds. They play kind of a metal tinged alt-country with good old fashioned songs about whiskey, the devil, and the electric chair. The only detraction was that they had a cellist that was pretty buried in the mix, and I think it would have been interesting to be able to hear more of that during the heavier parts.
The Get Up Kids took the stage next, and played a really good, really long set with a good mix of songs from all of their albums. I guess that makes sense, to give them more tracks to choose from for the live album they were recording. Given that they were recording, I would have expected the vocals to be a little louder but I guess that doesn’t matter if you’re recording from the boards. They had a few equipment problems during some of the songs too, but that’s probably why they did 2 shows. Suprisingly this was the first time I’d seen them, even after living in their hometown for 2 years. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to see them again sooner than that.
Thank you comment spammers, for helping me hate humanity just a little bit more in 2005. Today I started off the new year with 573 spam comments from the same source having been newly added to my blog. What’s the point? My insignificant blog gets about 15 hits on a good day, and I’m sure my Google ranking is so low as to be nearly non-existant. I’d been ok with my average of 5 or so comment spams a week, but this is more spam in a day than I’ve gotten before total. I have comments set up to send me an email for each comment (mostly to be aware of any spam that slips through) and there were so many messages that it managed to choke up Outlook. (I guess that’s more of a strike against Outlook than the spammers, but it still pissed me off). So yeah, that was a pretty crappy way to welcome in 2005. Just a heads up to everyone, the word “poker” and several variations there of are hereby considered verboten in comments.
Elsewhere