May 2004 – Page 3 – Absoblogginlutely!

No response from MetroNOmy PC

By Andy on Monday, May 17, 2004

Its been two weeks now since I received a request to stop any more comments being made on my comment about Absoblogginlutely: MetroNOmy PC sends an email stating that they won’t be shipping out pc’s for the time being.
I emailed Julian this afternoon with the following –

Hi Julian – its been some time now since you contacted me about comments that Gavin made. Have you had any more details on how many pc’s you have shipped out and references? Many thanks

I have removed *some* of gavin’s comments which were sailing close to the wind, but others I have left as they were from his own personal experience of working at Intersaver, where Julian agrees that he worked and the fact remains that Intersaver did go bust.

After GCC’s email about libel I did check up on libel law. What does seem daft is that as GCC said, its the only uk law where you are guilty until proven innocent! I have therefore removed any possible unfactual comments from Gavin’s posts and I am still awaiting a reply from Metronomy for more information.

Spam

Captcha installed

By Andy on Monday, May 17, 2004

I installed the captcha plugin and spent about an hour to get it to work. The instructions only mention editing comments.pm but if you have installed blacklist then you need to edit mt/extlib/jayallen/MTBlPost.pm instead and make sure you edit the write section (he has two subroutines depending on which version of MT you are running). Hopefully this will reduce the amount of spam submitted on this site as I really don’t want to spent an hour a day removing the comments and deleting the email on my machine(s)

Real Life

Kristen’s surgery

By Andy on Sunday, May 16, 2004

Kristen goes into the hospital tomorrow for surgery on her deviated septum. Hopefully they’ll only keep her in overnight and she makes a speedy recovery. Its been really bothering her sinus’s and sleeping and general health so it will be good to get this sorted. Get well soon love!

Geocaching

100 finds.

By Andy on Sunday, May 16, 2004

Well after visiting Black Brook Black Hole, which was my nearest unfound cache at 7.3 miles away, I hit the one hundred mark. I had a great time although it was really really hot and I think I got sunburnt – even though I was wearing factor25 suncream and was out for a couple of hours. With Kristen coming home from a weekend away, what a fantastic way to finish a lazy weekend.

Funny Pages

Read my lips – again and again.

By Andy on Sunday, May 16, 2004

There are more atmo – Read my lips flash movies available – the Jingle Bells is pretty funny.Thanks Daisy

Spam

spam comments

By Andy on Saturday, May 15, 2004

Has anyone else been hit with loads of spam comments on their site? Despite throttling of comment submissions AND the blacklist in the past couple of days i’ve had 25+ comments hit per day with about 100 in the latest attack. Most of the pages are either bestiality or incest related so have now been banned but its a right pain.
Update Another 300+ spam comments got in. I’m sure that a lot of them should have been picked up by mtblacklist though as they either contained words on the list or should have been triggered by spam. Something is seriously wrong.

Geocaching

99 caches…..

By Andy on Saturday, May 15, 2004

How annoying is that? 1 cache short of a hundred as I was unable to find the second cache this morning which meant that I was one short as I hadn’t made a backup plan of having an extra cache planned just in case.
Still 99 is a good number to rest on and shows that I am not addicted and can stop when I want to (for the day anyway!)
Had a fantastic day out visiting yet more places I’ve never heard of and seeing some great wildlife. There were loads of baby ducks at the first cache I went to and I saw several squirrels and a jay at the penultimate one. Now my feet ache so I’m going to have a bath.

MovableType

My take on MT 3.0

By Andy on Friday, May 14, 2004

As the several million other MT users have already blogged, MT3 was announced a day or so ago. I tried to read the site but it was being swamped so I only got to see it this evening. Everyone seems to be complaining about the cost of running a blog with more than one author or more than 3 blogs (I have 6 blogs with 3 authors). Interestingly, Mena’s justification for the pricing system contains the text

Based on surveys and user feedback, we are fairly comfortable these licenses will meet the needs of over 85% percent of our current users

I’m not sure which survey or which 85% of users they talked too as it certainly doesn’t look like they talked to the major users.
Having said all that I can’t see what the big deal is. Is there anything that says you HAVE to upgrade to version 3 and pay money? Surely you can just stay on 2.65 on the free licence? The only thing that I see I might loose is the ability to appear on the recently updated list on their website – not that much of a big deal to me as most of my hits come from google anyway.

Firewalls

Firewall problems

By Andy on Thursday, May 13, 2004

Oh great – I was just extolling the virtue (or lack) of our firewall(s) in the office/remote pc’s and then there’s a Symantec Client Firewall Remote Access and Denial of Service Issues posted in Lockergnome’s Tech News Watch. ~~Going to have fun looking at that one tomorrow!~~.
Update After waiting 15 minutes on hold, apparently the problem does not affect the corporate Enterprise VPN client – only the firewalls sold with antivirus type products – phew! As it turns out there is a culmalative patch available for the firewall anyway so I downloaded this instead.

Photos

Missed photo opportunity?

By Andy on Wednesday, May 12, 2004

The new camera arrived today, a Fuji S5000 zoom. I’m really looking forward to using this as the previous digital camera that we were using had no zoom and it was incredibly frustrating not being able to get some good shots. The camera arrived at lunchtime and I was incredibly self restrained and didn’t wander off to take loads of photo’s. Instead I just loaded the batteries, took a couple of photos and then put it back into its box. The main reason for this is that if I’d started, I wouldn’t have done ANY work this afternoon and the bosses were in today 😉
On the way home I was driving past a field and I saw my first ever fox in daylight, in the field. I immediately grimaced at the missed photo opportunity as there were no places to park safely and by the time I would have got the camera out of its box and in my hands the fox would probably have been long gone. This would have been a superb moment to try out the 10x optical zoom.
Incidentally, to see the difference in zoom levels, the zoomed out picture can be compared with the zoomed in picture. Yes I know its not an inspiring photo, but its the scene out of my window.

Month: May 2004