Month: January 2005

The Century Mark

Between 6:00 AM yesterday and 6:00 AM today Postini stopped 102 messages from reaching my in box. Do you think that they know this is a business address? Most of the come-ons are about stocks. There are the usual pharmacy ads and of course a couple references to the size of my manhood and it staying power, but I bet 75% of the spam is about stock opportunities, my favorite: Under The Radar Stox from xfxjkvrjmzlt@dora.com.

Winner of best spam message overall today is: don`t be an asshole Tom from ovnhc@move2va.com

Converting a Pivot Weblog to Movable Type

Last May I converted two of my blogs from Movable Type to Pivot, mostly because I was severing from frequent database crashes. I was stuck using the flat Berkley DB because of my web host and I thought a different blogging system would might help. Plus I like a challenge every once and a while. I had over two years worth of entries that I exported and easily imported into Pivot.

While mostly happy with Pivot, there a couple of things I didn’t like. The main one was I could never get a spell checker to work right when posting and boy do I need a spell checker. MT had so many more people developing applications for it and I longed for some of their plug-ins. Plus I now had a new web host that did allow MySQL DBs. It was time to change back to MT. Unfortunately this is not any way to easily export your Pivot entries in a form that Movable Type can import.

I searched the Pivot support forum with no luck. There were a few folks asking the same question, but no one had an answer. Here comes that challenge thing again, so I read the Movable Type manual for importing and I read their import file format pages which led to a series of steps that allowed me to convert my pivot weblog into one of Movable Type.

This procedure worked for me, your mileage may vary. It was fairly time consuming, I converted two separate instances of simple Pivot weblogs into one MT blog and it took most every waking hour of a full weekend.

Good luck.

Letters, We Get Letters!

Back on December 16th I posted about how the email spammers had scored a new record by hitting my work email with 75 messages, well that record has fallen. Not once, but twice in the last two days. Saturday the Postini program blocked 85 slices of spam. Sunday it stopped 92 and was circumvented by 2 more.

The spammers must be busy this time of year, because last Friday’s total came close to that earlier record too, but was just one shy at 74.

OW!

Stubbed my toe on the leg of the futon yesterday. Really hard. It hurt like the dickens, but settled into a dull ache by the end of the day. When I took off my sock to shower the middle toe on my right foot was an ugly shade of purple black. I took an Aleve and went to bed.

Today at work the plant nurse confirmed my uneducated diagnosis, broken. She was nice enough to tape the ugly toe to the nice pink one next door, all the while explaining how if I wanted I could go to the doctor and they would give me a wooden shoe. Not like the little Dutch boy shoe, but a contraption with a very stiff sole and some sort attachment that would prevent me from putting any pressure on the toe. Or I could just live with the tape job and be careful. I’m going with the tape.

I could have saved her the trouble if I had only found this site on the web last night: FIXING A BROKEN TOE WITH DUCT TAPE AND BUNGEE CORDS

Started down, went up, went back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 10

Comments

Since the beginning I have had comment moderation turned on for this blog in an effort to prevent comment spam. Users either had to have a Type Key registration, and be signed in, to post a comment that would appear immediately. Unregistered commenters had their comments queued until I approved them before they showed up on the site. Comment spam would be held up and I could delete it before it ever saw the light of day. This is good in theory, but there are probably 100 people in the world with a Type Key registration and none of them read my blog. (OK, to be fair every one who has downloaded MT from the movable type web site has a Type Key registration, I’ve got one even.) But it makes for an extra step in the commenting process and who’s got the time?

So I’m trying out a different approach, post a comment, go ahead. I ain’t moderating them. I’m not even going to require a name or an email address.

Operating on the principle that 99.9% of all comment spam is posted to older entries, Alan Carroll has developed a MT Plugin that automatically closes the comments on old entries, called amazingly enough MTCloseComments.

From now on, you will only be able to comment on entries that are still showing on the main page (the last 10 days worth.) If you stumble on an old post and want to comment you will have to resort to emailing me.

Started down, went up, went back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 8

Steven’s Creek

Steven's Creek

Went for another hike in the woods this weekend, same crew, Donna & I and Carol & John, but different trail. I took this of the “gang” as they rounded a switchback in front of me. Carol, who doesn’t like to have her picture taken, will be pleased that I snapped this at just the right moment, as she was mostly hidden behind a tree. 🙂

You Lost?

Last evening, top down, we were stopped at a light in downtown. It had just turned red and we were the first in line in the left lane. As we came to a stop Donna and I noticed two cop cars blow through the red light. No siren or lights, just rolled on through. I mumbled, “Stupid cops.” Donna said, “They are Greenwood County Sheriff?s cars, must be lost.” Greenwood county is about 50 miles north of us. With the recent train derailment in the next town over, it has not been unusual to see out-of-town law enforcement cars around.

It was then that I noticed the lead cop car pull a u-turn behind me. To Donna I said kiddingly, “They’re after me, must have heard me call ’em stupid.” The trailing car stopped about 150 feet back and sure enough, the first car pulled up right next to us. Uh-oh.

“Hey good peoples,” the deputy goes, “Can you tell us where the Aiken County Sheriff?s Office is?”

We have lived here nearly 16 years and have no idea where the Sheriff?s office is. I guess that is a good thing, but we did know where the town Department of Public Safety is, so we sent him there.

As the light turned green, off he went quickly followed by the trail car. As I made my left I noticed about 6 or so more sheriff?s cars pulling similar u-turns and chasing the “leader.” Couldn’t they have called somebody on the radio? Gotten directions before they left?

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 6