Some maniac is, again, manually inserting comment spam in my recent posts. The thing is, I kinda dig his/her writing: “It was pretty obvious you were suffering from lack of some desperate sex right here right now, and it didn’t cross my mind at first to just cut you downright. I became drugged with your silly nothings, was incredibly curious as to where you were going with all that crap. So I pissed you off a little, but went on roll and got everyone down on the slippery slope. I know who the bastards are now and no, thank you, never again. The tactile feeling is not that of a…

Due to a huge spam attack yesterday, which took me a while to clean up, I’ve decided to add a small step to commenting – the good news is that it’s very easy for anyone to figure out. You can still comment anonymously and without leaving an email address, but I’m sorry to place any part of the burden created by viagra-selling assholes on my readers… Necessary evil and all that.

So this new anti-spam approach is such that pretty much all automated spam attempts are junked… but in less than a day, I’ve recorded over 20 spams entered by hand just on this blog and my brother’s! The funniest part of this is that none of those spam attempts were published to our blogs; they were automatically held for our approval by the system… Hell yeah! Take off, you hosers.

I’m fiddling with software settings in the background here, mostly to alleviate some of the hits our site is taking from comment spam, but also to improve usability on the admin side. If you have any problems with comments or notice anything strange, please let me know. I have also folded my moblog and the School of Rice blogs into archives here and here to simplify things (since they are no longer updated). Categories (on the sidebar) have been rearranged, but remain a poor way of finding specific posts. Using the search function is better for that. You can always contact me if you need help finding something; I can…

I just fixed the “Remember personal info?” function of the comments so it actually works now. For the record, the problem I had was fixed with the solution on this page. It happened when I upgraded, and I couldn’t figure it out until I had a couple spare hours to research it. So, have at it since you’re spared filling out the fields every time now! The fix also fixed a script error that was appearing on individual entries when viewed with Internet Explorer. I hadn’t used IE for so long that the error simply went unnoticed!

I updated MovableType to version 3.32 just now and it seems to be working a lot faster than the 3.31b version we were using before. Anyway, now I have Widgets and StyleCatcher to play with, so you things might change around a bit; don’t be scared off. I might let my feminine side take control of this blog’s design for a couple days, but things will probably return to normal after the estrogen levels decrease.

So e-mail for our domains is now handled by Gmail; the switch was a simple matter of changing MX records and adding existing users of cosmicbuddha.com email to the Gmail for Domains web panel. The way I was using my cosmicbuddha.com e-mail before was simply to have it forwarded to my Gmail account, and archived on my webhost’s mail server. The way I will use it now is the same, except that my cosmicbuddha.com account is also hosted on the Gmail server. This should reduce some stress on my webhost’s mail server, which is theoretically a good thing since it should reduce their costs, if even by a minute/insignificat amount.…

I have applied for the Gmail beta for domains for cosmicbuddha.com. I hope it comes through. Gmail is the killer web app as far as I’m concerned. I recently switched hosting providers for this site and chose Dreamhost. The biggest complaint I have about them so far is that their webmail app, Squirrel Mail, is crippled for the sake of stability of all Dreamhost users, and as a consequence, does not support the languages my users need most besides English: Thai and Japanese. This is a deal breaker as far as using our cosmicbuddha.com e-mail goes, because in addition to POP and IMAP accounts, we really need the webmail option.…

BIG MAN is one of the first landmarks you should memorize in Osaka, and I learned this the hard way ten years ago when somebody told me to meet them there later. I was all like, “what big man?” Everyone within a two kilometer radius spontaneously combusted in laughter at the country boy chawing on a rice stalk, with cow shit caked on his boots, driving his daddy’s tractor. So yeah, this is me giving props where they’re deserved.