My view of the world

I received this this morning.

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq xxxxxxxxxxx or write me xxxxxxxxx(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Yeppers. This is a wonderful opportunity. Why, for absolutely no fee what so ever, I can put a link to a spammer on my site.

Was this guy dropped on his head recently?

I found this at the Holy Shmoly blog.
Idiot spammers at Holy Shmoly

Idiot spammers is redundant.
BTW: The blog’s author lives in Blarney. Is that not the perfect city for a blogger.

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In addition to Akismet I use the HowtoGeek spam filter. This is a very simple, but effective filter that runs before Akismet and blocks a small number of known spam words.
I went in and edited the list to exclude two or three additional, very specific, terms.

The catch to using this sort of filter is that it becomes very likely that with overuse you will block acceptable comments.
I find that it’s much better to risk a few annoyances slipping through that to block something that is legitimate.

MIT has come up with some sort of “clutter detector” software.
This is supposed to make life easier for everyone from pilots to web designers.
A friend and I were discussing it, and came to the conclusion that the first practical use would be as an algorithm to allow computers to read those obfuscated, number, letter type what you see in the box, security devices.
Therefore the spammers will win the next round.

I was given a Fujitsu 17″ laptop with an early 3.2ghz dual core p4, and a bad hard drive.
Aside from the fact that this desktop replacement weighs more than the desk it sits on (10.5lbs with ac adapter), it’s a nice machine with a great screen.
So I replaced the drive and added memory.
It now has 2gb ddr2 ram and a 100gig drive.

I decided to use Ubuntu as my OS. Being the flavor of the month, I thought it would be a snap to install.
I was almost right.
The wireless gave me nothing but headaches, but everything else seemed to be fine.

For some reason or another, I decided to reinstall, using Kubuntu. The drivers for the wireless card were obviously different than the drivers included in Ubuntu, because it recognized the card and installed without a hitch. No patching, getting drivers from a third party, or recompiling the kernel required.

Everything appears to be running well, although I have yet to test the cd burner. I use usb flash drives almost exclusively for storing or moving data, so I’ll have to remember to check the burn feature one of these days.
(2gig flash drives were/are available locally, for $19.95 at Walmart and Bestbuy.)

In spite of it’s power and available memory, it boots a little slower than a pristine copy of Winblows. But, it boots at least half again as fast as my primary laptop, which is running xp pro, but has all the things I use, and some I haven’t used in months, loaded and running.

From the AP.

A woman in Texas and her neighbors found three of these dead bodies back in July.
Now she says that it might be the legendary Chupacabra.
I agree with the vet who says it looks like a dog.
It lacks the wings I’ve seen on drawings, but it’s great for the town. Before this, whoever heard of CUERO, Texas? Now they are even selling t-shirts.