Spam Strikes Again

January 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson

It amazes me that just a week after re-adding comments, I'm already getting comment spam. One I deleted yesterday, and one today. I had long thought that such posts were enabled by so many sites running standard tools like Movable Type, etc, and that by doing my own thing they would have to manually account for my site.

Well, either the comment spam tools are more thorough than I had imagined or the spammers are pretty bored. In any case I just added IP address logging to comments, so I think my solution for now will just be to start banning IPs that produce comment spam. If that doesn't work I'll get a little harsher.

Update (4:06pm): The first spam to have its IP logged came from a dynamic IP pool under http://interbusiness.it.

It's Wet Outside*

January 07, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So it started raining this morning. Not hard yet, but even just walking across the street to pay (cash) for my parking was frigid thanks to a whipping wind. The little image to the left is a thumbnail of what our local radar looked like when I pulled it up just now.

To really understand how much rain LA's gotten recently, take a look at these pictures from USC's Facilities department. That's a lot of water, in a lot of places it shouldn't be. City Hall's having the same problems, according to an article in today's Daily News.

Update (12:21pm): I just walked to the little market next door to pick up a 2-liter of Coke, and they were working to move merchandise and cover up items near a couple nice drips from the (very high -- 20ft?) ceiling. There was a decent amount of standing water on the floor.

Doh

January 06, 2005 by Eric Richardson

One of the things I needed to do before I left for Michigan was pay ahead for my January parking, since I wouldn't be back until today. I went down to do that the morning of the 21st, but they weren't really prepared for people to do that, so they told me just to pay when I got back. That's cool. So what do I do? I leave my checkbook in Michigan. And I should have extra checks around here somewhere, but I can't find them for anything.

So now I need to figure that out in the morning, before the rain comes.

It's Good to Be Home

January 06, 2005 by Eric Richardson

As good as it was to be back in Michigan for a few weeks, it's definitely nice to be back in LA, sitting at my own desk, about to sleep in my own bed.

The flights were uneventful. On the Detroit to LA leg I sat next to a guy who's running the Bentley exhibit at the Auto Show. He was cool; we talked some during the flight and then ended up giving him a ride to his hotel since it was right downtown. I need to get over to the Convention Center sometime to check out the show. I went a few years ago and enjoyed it, but haven't been back.

Watching the Weather

January 05, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Things are a bit slow in this last day before I head back to LA. I'm still a little in shock over the game last night. My heart told me we would win big, but all the things the "experts" were saying were starting to convince my head it would be close. Moral of the story: If the media ever picks USC to be out-physicalled in a bowl game, put all your money on SC.

The big question mark tomorrow is the weather: how's the snow situation going to look both here in Muskegon and in Detroit? And then from there it's back to LA and to several days of rain. I'll take it over the snow. It's too cold for me here.

Creating Community Online

January 04, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I spent all afternoon today at Gospelcom, where I used to work here in Michigan. I went out to lunch with some of the tech guys and then sat around at the office keeping people from working. My time was sort of split between talking about eThreads and talking about downtown. The downtown part's what I want to get into here, though.

One of the things that I've really wanted to do since May, but haven't, is develop my ideas on a very localized community site. This sort of extends back to the blogging paper I didn't write: while the Internet's a global medium, my life is local. Most of what I do online these days centers around LA. I read LA writers, LA news, LA weather, listings for LA shows, etc. I'd love to localize that even more, and create a hub not for LA, but just for downtown. The challenge is to figure out how you make this interface ordered enough to navigate sporadically, but also make available enough continuity to involve people in a running sense of community narrative.

That probably doesn't make sense... Hang with me, though. I want to develop this further.

Right now, though, I need to eat dinner before watching USC win the Orange Bowl.

Learning from the Movies

January 03, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I went to see The Aviator with Kathy and her parents tonight. The moral of the story? All geniuses are crazy. Therefore: It's ok to be a little crazy if you think there's a decent chance you're a genius.

I think that's a good thing to keep in mind.

All I Want is a Cheap Ride

January 03, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Starting next Monday I'll be going from downtown to USC and back three days a week. This semester it was two, and I used the bus most of the time. Since I was adding a day, and on one of those days I would most likely be making multiple trips (I have a six hour break between classes), I thought I'd look into getting a bus pass. Metro offers a reduced fare pass for college students, and even though it would be a few more dollars than I'd be putting into transit otherwise I figured the convenience might be worth it. Looking at the application, though, this assumption might need to be rethought... — Continue Reading...

Please Excuse My Ping

January 03, 2005 by Eric Richardson

One of the things that annoy me most on the web is sites that ping when they haven't in fact updated. I've talked about this before, back in September. In eThreads' blog module I try to be smart about it and only ping when a post happens that is going public for the first time. However it appears sometimes that's not how it happens. I was just updating a spate of old posts that had bad links in them and afterward found the blog had pinged as if I had made a new post. Oops. It's not good to participate in the things you dislike.

I was looking at blo.gs yesterday, and it appears that it might be smarter about this problem (by going out and getting the page and doing an md5 sum). I need to ask jim more about that.

One Year Later: The Cat's Still Crazy

January 02, 2005 by Eric Richardson

At my house there's a cat that my Mom got when us three kids had gone off to school. It's crazy. In fact I was too lazy to take a new picture of it, so I'm reusing one I took last year (when it was a good bit smaller). What did I caption it then? "crazy cat" And it still is. As I type this the cat is hurtling around the room, trying to burrough under my laptop case, and seeing how far it can go hopping from furniture piece to furniture piece without touching the ground -- pretty much all at once. Or at least they're fast enough that I can't tell.

The Internet: Where Everyone's a Source

January 02, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I was wandering the stats today, as I do most days (I don't know why... They never have anything interesting to tell me). A new referrer had popped up for the main site: Abortion and the Rights of a Child. I'm a little fuzzy on how the dates are working for this, but in any case a paper I wrote Freshman year -- Refuting Judith Jarvis Thompson -- ends up in the footnotes.

That sort of thing's always struck me as a little funny. I put my papers online, but I don't usually expect people to actually read them. Every now and again, though, I find myself quoted or referenced in a well-reasoned work. That always trips me out a little. It's cool, I'm just not used to it yet.

Taking Back Your Bad Advice

January 01, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Every day I have two google news searches I check out: downtown "los angeles" and "los angeles" mta. Today the top story for the MTA query deals with the rain and taking transit to the Rose Bowl. One of the stories grouped as related is an LA Times piece that google lists as being titled "Going to Rose Bowl Game? Take a Bus and an Umbrella." However if you click the link you'll find a story titled "Going to Rose Bowl Game? Take a Bus and a Raincoat." Hmmm... I wonder if it was a little late in the day when the editors at the Times realized that umbrellas are prohibitted at the Rose Bowl?