Who got 10 out of 10 on the Washington Post Phishing Scam Quiz? That's right, one idiot did!
It appears that the search engines can't find the Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Groups page for Sahara Smith. I don't know exactly why I thought it'd be useful to link to a search results page for her, rather than the actual Sahara Smith fan page itself, but we'll see.
For my loyal readers, follow the second link, join the group, even if only temporarily, and download "Twilight Red" from the Files section (there are a couple of versions of it, and I'm not sure which one matches the one I have). And wear a short-sleeved sirt, so that the goosebumps aren't so uncomfortable.
Those of you who have been following the blog closely may have noticed that all the latest "commenters" are things like "texas holdem", "order levitra online", and the like. Up until the point when my blog went offline for a few weeks,my approach to comment spam had been to simply delete the odd spams by hand. This was easy, because the approach the spammers used was usually to comment multiple times on the same post, or just comment once with lots of links to their sites.
But now, they're posting single comments to a whole slew of my blog posts. Presumably this helps them with their Google rank (or at least they think it will) because links from different pages seem more relevant than multiple links from the same page. But it's a real bitch for me, because unfortunately Movable Type is not set up to handle editing of comments in general. There is a "power editing" mode for posts, so I could delete a whole series of posts if I wanted, but not comments, unless all the comments belong to the same post. To delete a comment with the MT interface -- I timed myself -- takes around 45 seconds, and that's if I'm really focused. Thus, to delete 20 comments takes at least 15 minutes, probably much more in reality.
So, since I have a job and a life, I've thrown up my hands, for the most part, for now. I've changed a setting so all HTML is stripped from new comments (that way, even though they can still leave their spam, Google doesn't follow their links, so it doesn't actually help them), and on those occasions when I do feel like spending a little time chipping away at the spam, I close commenting on some of the posts if they're old and I'm quite sure no real humans will want to comment on them. My next plan is to convert the database backend for the blog from BerkeleyDB to MySQL. This should make it possible to make modifications quickly without going through the Web interface. Unfortunately, setting up MySQL is kind of a bitch. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard to do, but the tutorial that comes with the mysql distribution is really hard to read, and the MT instructions for converting from BDB to MySQL aren't very specific about things like what your username should be, etc. So it'll be a day or two, depending on how everything else is going.
FINALLY!!!11!1 And, two weeks too late, but a couple of hours early, Speakeasy has gotten me back online. The scary thing is that, within minutes of getting back online, I started to get hits from comment spammers to my blog. That's life, I guess.
I once mused to my then-roommate that the Home Makeover crew would never pick me for one of their shows. It wouldn't matter how badly I needed it, or how much I could benefit relative to someone else. They would quickly identify my cold, analytical, scientific mind and unemotional personality, and realize that I'm not someone who's going to go jumping up and down screaming and sobbing, or saying "that's awesome" to whatever they cook up. I would just be bad TV. Has anybody ever got one of these professional makeovers, and then told the crew that it wasn't quite what they had in mind? That I'd love to see.
Boy, has it been hard getting my DSL back. Two or three days after the order is supposed to be under way, I decide to check on the progress. Come to find out they haven't even started processing my order because they are still waiting for Henry's authorization to transfer the account to me. WTF?!! First of all, he already gave his authorization a week prior. Second of all, how does getting the service back to exactly the way it was before the phone service change hinge on his authorizing putting everything in my name? The DSL is gone, out. He either wants to keep the DSL going, which is exactly what I'm asking for; he wants some kind of change in service (perhaps moving it to his new number), in which case he'd be on the phone demanding your attention; or he doesn't care about the service, in which case it couldn't possibly affect him adversely if they go ahead and change it to my name. Sigh.
Then, a couple days later, I check the progress report again, and find that I don't exist to the phone company. Could have fooled me; I've been using the phone since the 19th. So I call them up, and I don't know just what they have been waiting for, but for some reason, nobody has marked the order as completed. So the lady on the Verizon end of the line clicks some icon, and says, "OK, now it should show up as complete." I mention the new completeness in a note on my service ticket; it seems to get ignored for a few days.
Finally, yesterday they started making the kind of notes that indicate that things are moving apace. The date for me to get hooked up is 11/9 -- three calendar weeks from the time I lost service, 15 business days. The worst part has been that the linux driver for the built-in modem on my computer doesn't work with the 2.6 kernel, so I've been forced to use OS X whenever I want to dial up[1] from home. A close second is the fact that my blog sort of (I really mean "sort of" here) depends on being online at a certain IP address.
[1]I'm separating the preposition from the verb, since it is being used as a verb, but for some reason this one isn't as clear cut to me. I almost used "dialup" as a verb, and I don't think it would have jarred me to see it written that way. It's rarely used as transitive, so you'll almost never have "dial it up" as a counterexample to show that the words can not be joined. I certainly don't expect to find the right answer out there in the tech literature, though.