I’m flying back to Florida Friday night. It looks like the first business of the day will be putting up the shutters. I sure don’t like the track of this storm. If it holds up, it’s headed right for Palm Beach County.
[Update late morning EDT]
The latest track looks a little better for us, but not good for the Keys.
There’s an after-lunch session on arcane areas of space law. Because it’s after lunch, and an abstruse discussion under the best of blood-sugar levels, I’m not going to even attempt to blog it. It’s not that it’s not interesting, but it’s all over the map in topics, and it’s just too hard to blog, I know that the difference between “inherently risky activity” and “inherently dangerous activity” is important but I just can’t write down every jot and tittle of the discussion. At least right now. And it hardly seems worth reporting without doing it, other than saying that “three lawyers discussed space law.” Maybe Clark will do better.
I have to say that I really like Delta, at least that flight. Leaves Florida at 7 AM and gets me in to LA at 9 AM, non-stop (the American non-stop leaves at 9:15 and gets in at 11). Comfortable, not too packed (empty seat next to my window) with DirecTV on the seat back, which allowed me to follow the war on Fox and CNN.
Too bad I’m an elite flyer with American.
Probably not much blogging–I’ve got a lot of work to do over the next couple days, then I’m driving to Vegas tomorrow night or early Friday morning for the conference. Maybe some live blogging from there, though, wireless permitting.
Once in a while, the good guys win. I got pinged this morning (and the pings are still way, way down from what they were before I renamed scripts):
A new TrackBack ping has been sent to your weblog, on the entry 6459 (The
Big Lie Continues).
IP Address: 209.123.8.127
Title: airlines
Weblog: british
Excerpt:
british
It takes you to a page that just links to airlines.
I forwarded the notification email to the web host at prohosting.com with a hope that this was in violation of their terms of service. I just got the following email from them:
This account has been removed from our servers for violating our Acceptable Use Policy. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.
I’m sure that the cretin will quickly find another host, but at least any time spent spamming us with that URL is now wasted.
Since renaming my scripts, I have gotten zero, count ’em, zero spams on either comments or trackback. It won’t last forever, but it’s a nice breather. And I hope that they’re wasting a lot of time on the honeypots.
[Update on Saturday morning]
OK, got one ping spam overnight. But it’s still a huge improvement.
[Late afternoon update]
Still one and counting. I should have done this a long time ago. Even if I have to do it weekly, it would be a vast improvement over the time I spend dealing with these cretins now.
[Sunday morning update]
Oh, well. I knew it was too good to last. I got nine pr0n spams overnight. All from one domain, though. It’s still a lot better than it was. Hopefully, I can at least keep it down to a dull roar.
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 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 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.