There are essentially 4 steps to steaming vegetables:
If you are going to forget just one of these steps, I highly recommend that it not be step 1.
Category: Random
Laura and I saw Serenity this weekend, and it was very good. Since we both loved Firefly when we watched the whole (criminally short-lived) series on DVD, our expectations were high. Joss Whedon certainly did not disappoint (which was by no means certain). I tore through seven seasons of Buffy DVDs because of his masterful ability to convey all kinds of ideas, feelings, and emotions in a very direct and moving way through his characters, and his willingness to look hard at anything and everything, without pulling his punches. I loved Firefly for the same reason. Serenity was that same approach distilled down into two intense hours.
I definitely recommend watching the series first, since character-driven stories are more powerful the better you know the characters and you simply can't get the same level of connection in two hours as you can in the longer exposure of the series. That said, I was impressed by the way he introduced everyone and their relationships quickly but without feeling rushed, so I have no doubt that it would stand alone quite well. It's Whedon at his best.
The only downside was that it brought a sense of closure that the aborted series never had, which severely dampened that small glimmer of hope that someday, somehow, Firefly would return to be the many-season show it so richly deserved to be.
Category: A & E
Number of attempted Joe-job spams since yesterday: 68. Number that actually ended up on the site: 0.
It's really nice using a simple perl weblog, so that I can hack around problems quickly and in a way that the spam scripters aren't as likely to have encountered elsewhere.
Category: Geek
While I'm on the subject of vile things, I heard the most disturbing commercial on the radio the other day. Verizon is now offering a service where you can customize your ring tone, not just for yourself, but for your caller. You get to pick songs that will play for specific callers instead of the ringing sound.
In other words, you can pay extra to take away a standard, useful piece of feedback, and replace it with something that is almost guaranteed to make the caller feel like they are on hold with a company that “values their call”. Nothing tells the people in your life you care quite like playing muzak at them.
I think I'll pass though. I'm holding out for the ability to require callers to first navigate an annoying automated menu driven by a peppy but chronically deaf voice-activated system. The ability to periodically break in to the muzak in such a way that the caller will think they have finally gotten though, just to give them the critical news that they in fact are still waiting would be a nice bonus, but I'm flexible on that point.
Category: Society
So when I finally sit down to post again after long neglect, I find some net vandal has just left me spam on not fewer than 35 of my old posts. At first, I was confused, because the spam pointed not to cheap drugs, porn, or gambling, but to a couple of what appeared to be random personal weblogs. That seemed pretty odd, so I followed one and found a bunch of comments saying, basically, “Why are you spamming my weblog's comments?”. I tried another, and hit pay dirt: a likely theory as to what the heck was going on. Apparently one of the anti-blogspam methods is to maintain a big blacklist of sites that pay to be listed in comment spam, and subscribers automatically ban anything related to that site. So the slime molds of the spam industry took their giant list of weblogs, and started randomly spamming them with links to other weblogs on their list, in the hope of totally mucking up the blacklist by filling it with legitimate, innocent sites. That's really, really dirty. I really wish that we could track down these spammers on by one, find something in each of their lives that gives them happiness, and do everything possible to ruin it for them out of spite. Just so they'd know how it felt.
Anyway, cleaning up spam is a tedious process with my weblog setup, so after the 30 minutes or so it took to erase the damage I am completely fed up (and it really didn't help that I got another one while composing this post). There's no obvious way to block these posts by content, so I'm doing something I really didn't want to do: making commenters jump through hoops. I'm trying to start small—a check-box indicating that you are not, in fact, spamming. If the spamming programs (or people, if it's actually an army of soulless peons) are smart enough to check the box, I guess I'll have to do something even more annoying. I absolutely refuse to use the standard captchas, since they are an accessibility nightmare, so I'm hoping I won't have to consider what I would use instead.
In conclusion, I'm back, and I really, really hate spammers.
Category: Geek