I know comments are fubar. I’m working on it and should have it fixed in a few minutes. Don’t take the message personally, unless you really are a scum-of-the-earth spammer. You know, if the shoe fits, yada yada yada…

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, seems to be fixed now. Let the calumny and trolling recommence! (errr…just kidding)

I woke up yesterday morning to over three hundred trackback spams. These are a real pain in the ass, because when they come in a flood like that from a single spammer (in this case it was pr0n), it’s hard to search through them to find the random ones from others, which needs to be done to clean them all out.

Joe Katzman has been having similar problems, on a much larger scale. I’ve been thinking about shutting down trackback as well, but before I do, I think I’ll try this idea, via Annoying Old Guy in Joe’s comments section.

It looks interesting, and if everyone did it, it would make life much more difficult for these supreme scum of the earth. As I type these words I just got two series of half a dozen or so from mortgage lenders. Who knows how many they would have hit me with if I hadn’t been at the computer and could cut them off at the pass? I just wish I could cut them off at the nuts.

So I installed a new Fedora Core 5 on my laptop, and was trying to build the drivers for the wireless. Step one was to do an upgrade of the OS.

In the midst of doing this, I was attempting to listen to a podcast from Firefox. I don’t know whether this happened as a result of the upgrade, or of the podcast, but at some point, Firefox crashed, taking down all running instances of it. And it wouldn’t reload. When I click on the icon, I get a little tab in the taskbar saying “Starting web browser” which hangs on for a few seconds, then disappears.

I completed the upgrade, and rebooted. But Firefox still won’t load. I removed it with yum, and then reinstalled it. Firefox still won’t load.

Does anyone know what’s going on, and how to fix?

[Update on Wednesday morning]

OK, I removed Firefox, removed the folder containing its settings and reinstalled. All is well now. Except I had to resurrect my settings from scratch.

I got into LA late morning, but I’ve been busy all day. Maybe I’ll check in later, if the wireless works in the room.

I’ve been running cables and speaker wire for the move of the television from the living room to the new family room created by opening up the kitchen walls. And packing. I’m back to CA in the morning, for the week. Wall patching will have to happen next weekend.

Oh, and I’ve added a couple new sites to the space blogroll, Michael Belfiore and Jeff Foust’s Personal Spaceflight blog.

In addition to dropping Andrew Sullivan, I’ve added Space Cynic to the roll. I don’t always agree with the posts there, but they’re usually provocative, and occasionally present good devil’s advocate positions to help hone arguments, one way or the other.

Andrew Sullivan has been near the very top of my blogroll since I started this blog, but I haven’t read him in months (except to follow someone else’s link to something in particular) because he seems to have come unhinged against the administration and his critics over “torture” (but I really think it’s about the gay marriage thing). Things like this are also why. I’ve finally removed him.

In case anyone was wondering over the light posting. I’m paying for my holiday weekend by frantically reviewing/rewriting CEV spacecraft system requirements and verification statements to hit a deadline.

Some cretin has set up a spam system to send emails to a vast number of people with the return address as *@transterrestrial.com.

While I was up at the cape, I got over two hundred emails to the effect that: so and so is out of the office, such and such a spamfilter blocked this email, etc.

All with return addresses of random names from my domain. I can’t imagine that they’re originating from my machine, since I don’t even use that domain myself for outgoing email.

Question. Other than blocking all incoming email to *@transterrestrial.com other than simberg@transterrestrial.com, what do I do about this, if anything? There’s certainly nothing I can do to prevent a third party from sending out email with a return address with my domain, though if there was, torching their genitals would be too good for them.

We’re going to go, and trust to luck (it’s about a two and a half hour drive, not counting inevitable launch traffic once we get close). No blogging until return–I don’t have wireless (though maybe I should get Verizon). See you tonight, hopefully with Discovery safely in orbit.

[Update at 8 PM EDT]

Well, another wasted day. The frustrating thing is that the weather wasn’t a problem for the launch–it was a problem for the extremely unlikely “attempted suicide in order to avoid certain death” maneuver of a Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort. Unfortunately, at the last minute, as I was listening to the MMT poll, I also heard that there was a boat in the box, with no estimated time of removal.

As is often the case, the launch commitment criteria created an overconstrained system. Sometimes it amazes me that we’ve ever launched this thing.