I just checked my Akismet spam listing, and see that at some point on October 20th, 2007, Akismet tagged the 20,000th spam comment on my blog. Wow, amazing. And that is after tweaking WordPress to use a unique filename to process comments. Most days I get around 2 to 5 spam comments, although my gut says that the rate is increasing, with mostly spam from humans. See Blocking WordPress Comment Spam from April 2 for details of my tweaks to WordPress’ wp-comments-post system.
TV Sets at the Gaspump
Submitted to BP.com:
I just visited the BP gas station nearest my home. Sometime in the past week, they have added TV screens at each pump playing news updates and weather. Ugh! I wont’ be back, despite the convenience of this gas station. There is an Exxon across the road, which is just as convenient; plus at least 4 other gas stations along — Road that are also on my way. If I wanted to watch TV, I would watch TV. I get the weather in my car. Plus I know you are going to start playing commercials for the stuff you sell in the convenience store. Who needs 8 TV sets, all blaring their loud audio, slightly out of sync with each other, so I’m listening to a jumbled mess while I’m trying to pump my gas. I know you won’t remove these TV sets from this station just because of one complaint. but think about the people who won’t take the time to complain. Sorry, but I think the TV sets at the pump is a silly decision. Thanks for your time, Michael
Verizon Billing Sucks II
Last month, Verizon screwed up my billing when I tried to change to a less expensive for the same features calling plan. The rep promised me that it would be all fixed and straightened out in my October statement. Guess what? The October statement is still screwed up. They still have me for the Triple Freedom plan. Amazing. I’m guessing that DirecTV gives a kickback to Verizon for every customer that Verizon gives them. I hope it’s worth it to Verizon, becuase now they have a seriously ticked off customer to deal with.
So my options are:
- A cell phone
- Asterisk, a VoIP system on a computer here at home
- Vonage, or some other out-sourced VoIP service
What do you think? I’d love to hear some comments about alternatives to using Verizon.
My iMac died
Well, hopefully it is only a heart attack. It was fine yesterday, went to turn it on this morning. Nothing. I read these pages at Apple.com:
- iMac G5: Troubleshooting when your computer won’t turn on
- iMac G5: Loose power cord could cause power loss
- iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues
And hooray (hooray ?!) my serial number is in the range probably covered by the extended repair program. I have an appointment on Monday morning at the local Apple Genius bar. I did call Apple tech support, and got someone on the line. He was as helpful as he could be, he walked me through a couple steps and acknowledged it probably is a hardware problem.
I should have gotten the extended warranty (Applecare) plan, but I forgot about it until after the year had passed after getting the iMac in December 2004. Hopefully, the machine will be able to be repaired for free.
Watching Your Web Server
I have often wished I could have a real-time visual indicator of what my web server is doing. I never really got past simply using a tail command piped into a grep command so I could see interesting things. But Erlend Simonsen came up with a very cool program called glTail. It’s a Ruby script that analyzes your log files and shows you what is happening by whom on which web site. I put my 10 most popular web sites into the script, and it runs beautifully. I just looked and I’m already 3 versions behind the times, so I’ve just upgraded.
I did have to install Ruby, and RubyGems onto my Powerbook. And that took a while, but the instructions at MacOnRails.com made it pretty easy, although I didn’t quite understand everything they were saying.
You can read about how Dougal Campbell is using glTail.
Problems at Google?
Is Google having some kind of problem with their servers? I tried to do some maps with Maps.Google.com, and the images that come back never quite fill in completely. I end up seeing 4 or 5 of the 9 large squares, and the browser’s status window says “waiting for mt#.google.com” The number has been 1 or 2, I think I saw a zero once as well. Very strange.
Real World Time to Receive Spam #6
It took 1.49 days to get spam this time from my tagged email address I released on Wednesday. Wow, that’s the quickest yet. This one was advertising a web directory service. By the way, the process I’m going through I’m calling a blogtrap. 815a2aa2e435a70246cf153fbedb9891@planetmike.com
Real World Time to Receive Spam #5
It took 11.08 days to get spam this time from my tagged email address I released earlier last week. I guess the spammers are slipping; although they did send three of the messages at once. This spam was a pharmacy scam. 09137f629215aa18491f15c61529a282@planetmike.com
Verizon Billing Sucks
Remember a couple weeks ago when I shared my glorious experiences with Verizon? And I was assured my billing would be ok? I just got my September Verizon bill in the mail. Any one want to take the bet that the billing was ok?
My old billing is still in place. I called Verizon, yelled at their phone system that insists you talk to a computer instead of pushing buttons on my phone, and eventually got a real person. She said my order would go through on September 15th, because of my DirecTV order. I kindly explained I never ordered DirecTV, and I didn’t want to hear about the Triple Play. All I wanted was the Double Play. She looked up my records, I placed my order on September 4th. My September bill was processed on September 7th, and my new billing (for the DoublePlay) would go through in October’s bill.
I asked why it didn’t go through on the September bill, after all the 4th is before the 7th. She said the DirecTV order caused it to start after the billing period, and that Verizon is unable to bill in partial months. WTF? I know that I’ve had partial bills for months in the past. And it’s not like Verizon has a roomful of monks with abacuses (abaci?) figuring out the billing. It’s all computerized. I should only have to pay my old rate through September 5th or so; and then the new (lower) amounts should kick in for the rest of the month. So I end up paying around $20 extra for the month of September.
I asked if it was possible for me to get DSL without a phone line (aka “naked DSL”). She looked it up and amazingly yes! I can get the same DSL I have right now, for $41.99/month (and no taxes or fees), with a one-year commitment, vs. the DoublePlay package for $64.99 (but it’s ~$83/month with taxes and fees). So I can save $41 a month by getting just DSL. Then I could either get a VOIP number; or even better a prepaid cell phone for my main phone line.
Verizon, I’ve been with you as my phone service my entire life. Through seven different addresses spanning 20 years, I’ve been faithful. My parents retired from Bell Atlantic. I have memories of visiting C&P Phones and seeing the entire state phone book on one microfiche card. I remember being in the room when my mom would record the weather forecast for the C&P weather phone line. But I’m sorry, I think it’s time we parted ways.
Review of BlogRush.com (Syndicating your blog)
The hottest new widget on the web is BlogRush.com (yes, that’s an affiliate link). You put their widget on your site, then they syndicate your headlines out to other blogs in your same category. On your blog you’ll see five headlines from other blogs. You’ll get one of your headlines displayed on some other blog for every time the widget is loaded. Plus you get credit for people you refer to the service. Their Terms of Service says not to spam people, or to otherwise harm the Internet, but I’d be willing to bet we start seeing BlogRush.com spam fairly soon.
The system is still gearing up. I think they may have been better off to have a limited beta system (take a tip from Google – invite only is good for gearing up) so they can iron out the bugs. After one weekend, they already are having trouble with generating the reports for user’s Dashboard. Once you’re logged into the site, you can’t get to the site homepage. You also can’t get to the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. Actually, it might be a simple HTML error, the footer of the page doesn’t show up once you are logged in.
I also wonder if the system will scale well. Getting credit for up to 10 generations of referrals is nice, but eventually the numbers will overwhelm and you won’t be able to actually use all your credit. This is very similar to the model that Banner Exchange used back in the mid 1990’s. For every two ads you showed for other web sites, you’d get one of your ads shown elsewhere.
How do they make any money? It appears that 10% of the blogs showing up in the widget are actually ads. I think that might bother me, since there’s no disclosure of ad vs. blog in the widget.
So be aware that BlogRush is coming, it has potential to increase your site’s traffic. But I’m concerned by the advertising embedded within the widget.