Thursday, 5th October, 2006

Note To Self

Don't Blog Drunk™

Comment Spam (Revisited)

Arriving home after being away for a few days invariably involves (at some point after cracking open a bottle) picking through a tiny handful of stray comments that slipped through the net and left a whole bunch of links to various porn sites in obscure entries in my weblog.

They annoy me more — I guess — than the large Spam Splurges™ that sometimes happen on the front page. Those are just embarassing, but easily fixable, whereas the ones that are dotted all over the place mean I have to pick through old text files manually.

I mean, I could tighten up the defences, but I think I'd just get myself locked in a vicious circle of playing 'catch-up' — adding new blocking words and trying to spot patterns on the spam — so I made a bit of a decisive, um, decision a few minutes ago.

Actually, it's something I've been meaning to do for ages — the 'conversational' nature of this'ere thing renders a new comment left on (say) Sunday, 13th March, 2005 (which for some reason took a fair bit of an attack since Sunday) pretty pointless.

I'm not likely to go back and rekindle a conversation on that page — and I'm not entirely sure anyone ever goes back to read my old stuff¹.

So I've decided — partly because of the spam, but partly because it makes sense to me — to disable the comments for any day that's over a month ago.

¹ That's something that bugs me. There's been a wealth of interesting discussions over the years, and it bothers me that they somehow get 'lost'. I'm not really sure what to do about it.

I just wanted to give you a hug

Thanks hon. Ignore me though — I was just feeling sorry for myself.

I guess it's times like this that you breathe a sigh of relief that you don't publish a full feed

Indeed I must confess that I have wanted to publish a full feed — but I've never quite been able to conceptually 'square it' in my head as to how it would work.

Have you considered an 'on this day' feature to offer links to past entries?

Hmm, maybe But I think what I really need to do more though, is whenever I 'revisit' an old theme, I need to actually link to the old conversations rather than just saying "I've written about this before". I also need to go back through a lot of them and pick out the good/important ones and classify them somehow. The "best of list" on the about page is widly out of date.

Might return to that at some point...

Maybe a "Hit the vertically-striped button" version

Eurgh — captchas Can't stand the things.

Stuck In The Shadows

Sorry More dicking around with texture baking...

I mean, I know half my readership switches off the minute I talk about Second Life, but do I care?¹

I just thought maybe someone, somewhere, maybe, would like to see part of the process I use to pre-bake the shadows for a room

I'm sure there's an easier way to do all this, but I rather like planning it all out by hand in Illustrator

And after a fair amount of carefully controlled Gaussian blurring in Photoshop, with a dash of hand-tweaking, I get stuff like this...

...

I realise that there are a million and one things I should be doing today, but I decided shortly after I got up that I needed one day where I just totally indulged whatever I fancied, and enjoyed a bit of Me Time™

¹ I do, actually.

Ok, I admit it, you can't graffiti in SL

Yes you can

Actually, in all seriousness, I should really do something about the fact that I've not set the land to 'no build' or gotten around to changing the autoreturn. It would be very easy to graffiti all over the place...

Photo Splurge (#241)

Just shoved a small backlog of photographs from my phone onto Flickr. There's a few from recent trips to Manchester and wanderings around Leeds, along with more of the ones I took while I was taking M's Cinquecento to pieces to replace the cylinder head gasket...

I should have mentioned, actually, just in case anyone was wondering about the two pictures that were already up, that it wasn't my car I was elbow-deep in the engine of

Although I do need to do something about my squealing alternator...

If anyone would like — by the way — to see the photograph I took of myself, covered in oil that evening, I might be persuaded...

Figjam

Oh, the joy of the net...

Through Daring Fireball , I found this which led me to this, and finally this

5\/\/33T