I’ve had enough. More than half the comments on this post were from Oler, and they were generally nonsense, and generated a lot more unnecessary posts to respond to him. When I compared it to this post, in which he didn’t participate, and there was a reasoned and intelligent discussion, I just wondered, “why”? I can’t help but think that the correlation is meaningful.

The signal/noise ratio from him being zero, to first order, I’ve banned him from this blog. I, and my readers just have better things to do with our lives than to respond to his fantasies.

I just discovered that Sitemeter has been putting tracking cookies for realmedia.com on my visitors’ machines. There may be some others as well.

I went in, cleared cookies, refreshed Transterrestrial, and the Realmedia cookies showed up again. I’m going to quit using Sitemeter, but I need to do a little research and figure out what to switch to for stats checking. In the meantime, you might want to block cookies from realmedia.com (and the others mentioned in the link, such as specificclick.net) if you don’t want them selling your browsing habits without your permission.

The latest loony missive from Robert G. Oler:

I should add. I think that about 1/3 of the GOP is batshit (grin) insane…nuts actually. Vince Foster, wmd [sic] smuggled to Syria, Bush is a moral man…etc etc.

They are dumber then [sic] dirt in terms of their ideology. So is the far left and I enjoy pointing out their flaws as well.

It is fascinating to watch, because it illustrates how nations can go off track. It is almost like investigating an airplane (or any kind really) of accident caused completly [sic] by human error not technology failure [sic–missing comma]. It is great post mortum [sic] to watch the “walls come tumbling down” in the decision making [sic–missing hyphen] process.

Speaking of the Rev [sic–no period] Jerry [sic–presumably Falwell–Robert is into his own nicknames for his imaginary enemies, so one can never know for sure to whom he’s referring]. I watch his act on TV some just to see how the “cover the bust of lady Justice because she has a bust” wing of the gOP [sic] operate (dont [sic] worry I watch nuts like Casey Sheehan as well [sic–his missing comma]…wasnt [sic] it a hoot when they saw all their money get bonked [sic])…

A month before the 06 election he was promising the faithful that “God wont [sic] let the GOP lose control of Congress”. Suckers [sic]

All laping [sic] it up. Just like the jet fuel folks on teh [sic] far left.

OK, I’ve had enough, but I want this to be fair. Open comments section.

Do Mr. Oler’s pompous, ungrammatical, and unjustifiably arrogant contributions add signal, or noise, to this web site? The results will tell whether or not he continues to pollute the comments section here. He is welcome to make his own case, but based on history, he will only continue to keep digging…

[Update a few minutes later]

As can be seen from the first comment, he’s decided to get a sharper spade, and attempt to find a deeper bottom…

I’m not in the general habit of banning commenters, but having already established the precedent with Anonymous Moron, I guess I need to do a better job of policing. I am going to henceforth ban anyone who uses the acronym “LOL” in response to something that they themselves wrote.

Why? Because it is juvenile, and stupid. Anyone who does it apparently never learned the old wisdom that one doesn’t laugh at one’s own jokes. It looks particularly stupid when they’re not funny. In fact, it looks stupid to the max when they are never funny. But then, folks who do it are generally not the type of people who are able to realize how stupid they look.

In addition, most people (at least in this comments section, but I’ve noticed it in other fora as well) who do so also tend to add zero signal, and a lot of noise.

For that matter, I also want to add some tips for people who want to quote other people, to avoid confusion and ugly comments. There is a simple HTML tag, that looks like this: <em>quoted text</em>. Please use it. Also, please put your name in the “Name” field, unless you’re determined to remain anonymous. I have no interest in seeing a name in a comment.

Just in case there was any confusion, like Glenn, I link to things that I find interesting, and/or think that my readers might find interesting. A link doesn’t mean that I agree with everything found at the link, or even anything found at the link. A link does not constitute an endorsement, unless I…errrrr…endorse it. If I have useful thoughts on it, positive or negative, I will express them.

[Update mid morning]

Jonah Goldberg has related thoughts. Also a follow up here.

It took the fortieth commenter in this post to tell me that the first link was broken. As I note there, it simply confirms my long-standing observation that many commenters here respond only to what I write or excerpt, without troubling themselves to go read what I’m basing my comments on. For instance, Bill White didn’t respond at all, instead using the opportunity to grab my bandwidth and disk space, and my readers’ eyeballs, to post and link to blather from Barack Obama.

Often, of course, people who do this make fools of themselves, when I link to a satirical piece, because they don’t have any idea what I linked to, instead just responding to the opposite of my point.

Here’s a suggestion for everyone. Read more, and comment less, until you actually know what you’re commenting about, and have had time to give it a little thought.

Kind of short notice I know, but there is a bloggist bash planned for this afternoon in Fort Lauderdale for any south Florida conservative/libertarian bloggists, in the bar at the Cheesecake Factory on Las Olas, starting around 4 PM.

John Scalzi, on how he decides what to put up on his blog:

I’m not nearly organized enough about this site to say to myself “Hmmm, you know, I have a book tour coming up, maybe I’ll do a whole bunch of self-promotey things, and then after that I’ll write some more about politics and then put up a picture of my cat, because the kids always love that.” Honestly and truly, what I write about here is whatever I’m thinking about at that moment. There is no plan, there is no agenda, there is nothing except me sitting in front of my computer banging out words. Sometimes you’ll get what you want to read, sometimes you won’t. The only thing you know that you get from it is what I want to write. That is the guiding principle.

Same thing here. Some people complain because there’s too much politics, some people complain because there’s too much space (though probably not lately). Don’t come to this site with the expectation that you’re going to get either. What you’re going to get is me, in whatever mood I’m in, set off by whatever event set me off that day. This isn’t a regular publication, with publishing deadlines, themes, advertising. It’s just (as Virginia Postrel used to call it before the word “blog” caught on) a me-zine. Take it or leave it.

OK, if I have a spreadsheet in Excel, now do I convert it to a Word table?

More to the point (for the real mavens) if I have an Open Office spreadsheet, how do I convert it to an Open Office Write table?

[Friday morning update]

OK, I ended up “pasting special” into Open Office Writer as an Excel spreadsheet. Duh. And thanks for all the tips.

Well, that was a nice little break. I got to focus on building a new linux box, and resting from this cold that just won’t quit (it’s settled into my chestal regions now, and continues to wrack me with aches in my kiester and lower extremities). My thermostat is screwed up–I’m always either too warm or too cold. It ebbs and tides–just when I start to think I’m getting over it, I head back downhill overnight.

Yes, obviously it was April Fools, but it got the expected responses. Particularly from the mental cases who actually believe (or at least claim to believe, since they repeat it with such robotic regularity) the nonsense that I wrote yesterday. One would think that something that was an “emergent property of golf statistics” would display more intelligence.

Hopefully, regular blogging will recommence shortly.