Wish I’d found this page links to ages ago! Got me in a tinkery mood, so I spent pretty much the whole morning downloading more plugins to play with. Like, uh, about fifty of ‘em. Yeah, several of them are supposed to do the same kind of thing – I want to figure out which one works best for me.

Think I fixed Wordbook; seems it needs to be completely reinitialized every time it’s reactivated, and since it has to be deactivated to avoid posting new pages and edits to old posts and pages, well, I may try this other FB plugin someone mentioned on Wordbook’s discussion page. Guess we’ll see.

Still can’t add new tags. Don’t know if that’s a Seamonkey incompatibility or a plugin problem.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

aaanndd suddenly I can’t add new tags to my posts. and apparently Wordbook isn’t updating to FB? Phooey.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

About a month ago, my apartment management left a note on all our doors to let us know that effective July 14, they would be switching cable companies, and to make things easier for the new company, could we please indicate what other services we’re using with the existing cable provider? I filled out the name/address/phone and “yes, cable internet (BTW, prefer email, am tech-savvy, can install my own modem kthx)” and dropped it in the office drop box.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Technorati! Seriously! A site based on tracking and organizing blogs ought to have people who understand how to send mass-emails to its userbase without enabling them to mass-reply to everyone who got the first message!

:: facepalm ::

They sent me (a link to) a survey, and before I even thought about whether or not to participate, I had two more emails. One of them is an automated “I don’t use this email, use this other one” message, and the other is in Spanish, apparently reminding Technorati that not everyone on the web speaks English, and if they want him to understand what they’re talking about, could they please offer a Spanish version?

:: sigh ::

Given how big Technorati’s userbase is, I think I need to set up a separate filter for this. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

After my last post, I was bombarded with trackback spam for almost a month before I was able to get rid of the spammer. The admin of the first messageboard I contacted responded with dismay; his board had been hacked and significant content had been deleted. The violation of his website (and the loss of so much content) had him so discouraged, he wasn’t sure he was going to try to restore the board at all. The next few didn’t respond, but the spammer moved from one to the next as I alerted them, so I guess they took action when I notified them of the hacking. Then he moved on to Harvard, of all places, putting trackback spam pages in one of their subdomains. At this point, I was fed up. Six or seven spam messages every day for a month is too much. (I know, the popular blogs probably get hundreds or thousands a day, but I’m not making a living from mine yet.) I did notify the webmaster at Harvard, but I also checked the spammer’s IP address and tracked it back to his ISP. After that, the bombardment finally stopped.

I mention this because it’s up to us, the haters-of-spam, to take action to stop spam. We have to work together to take away any benefit they could get from it and block them wherever possible, whether they’re barging into our email inbox or sending messages through instant messengers or using the comment/messaging systems of your favorite social networking site. I freely acknowledge that I’m not the be-all and end-all of internet wisdom, but I’ve been around for a while, so I’ve got some advice on the subject.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been less-than-pleased with WP2.5 so far, but this weekend I’ve found solutions to some of the worst problems.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

I decided to go ahead and do one last system recovery on this stupid VAIO (no, I have no idea how many that makes) and just replace the DVD-R drive after that, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the hardware configuration preventing the recovery.

So much for that. The recovery went through just fine; runs right, says it’s reconfiguring everything right and all, reboots - and dies. I didn’t change the BIOS (the recovery would’ve balked at that) and I haven’t changed the hardware since the *last* time I reinstalled the opsys. I have no idea what’s wrong this time.

Right. Goodbye Sony. Mom’s old VAIO works much better since I overwrote the whole thing with Debian (well, except the part where I broke it trying to install a printer driver, but reinstallation is easier with Linux - no arbitrary anti-piracy measures). It’s time to shop for new hardware and a cheap copy of Elements (already bought a standalone copy of XP Pro, just in case) and build a whole new machine. How much is a membership at Costco again?

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

Why oh why do I keep trying to get useful information out of Sony’s tech support? I should know better. I do know better. And this time, I found a link that let me copy the transcript, despite the fact that their Java-based chat disallows copy-paste (a right nuisance, that). Removed his name out of pity. Formatting’s wonky enough that I can’t intersperse comments without making it look really strange, or take forever reformatting it by hand; stupid Java chats. Yeah, ended up with “take forever reformatting.” Bleah.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

Oh, all right, Dr. Seuss I ain’t

Anyway, last night I decided to show my dad the trailer for the new Batman movie; my boss had showed me at work, and I’d written down the URL so I could find it again later. Unfortunately, I wrote it down wrong. It wasn’t ATasteOfTheTheatrical.com, it was www.ATasteFORTheTheatrical.com, which is much more entertaining and less frustrating.

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Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.

A few days ago, there was an exchange on one of my YahooGroups (that was actually meant to be offlist, but whatever) and one member was expressing frustration because her attempts to pay for a seminar or class of some sort weren’t working. I mostly skimmed the post, assuming that it was a typo when she said she signed up for PayPay. Further messages in the thread indicated that, while she hadn’t typoed, perhaps the original poster had, because there really is a PayPay.com.

Originally published at Chrystalline. You can comment here or there.