Month: November 2006

Invasion of the giant Russian crabs – Specialist – Times Online

(via reddit)

While NATO stands by and does nothing.

I’m not a squeamish or prudish person particularly, but going through comment spam to check for real comments creeps me out time and again.  It seems worse than email spam, but that’s probably just the different formats, with email spam easier to remove before you read it (subject lines usually being a giveaway).  Repetitive links to similar sites with a thousand variations and amalgamations of the various topoi of perversion, mixed together in a primordial ooze*.  Gambling and various financial scams as well of course but mostly the bottom-of-the-barrel sexual stuff.  I get probably one or two dozen a day.

(* or “Urschleim” as Ernst Haeckel termed it, which is a word I’ve been aching to work into a post for months.)

WordPress is great for spam blocking, btw.  I don’t think I’ve *ever* seen a comment spam it didn’t block.  It’s just that it blocks over half of the real comments so I have to go digging for them in the spam.

Other things I want to get around to blogging: notes on wedgies and the eye twitch in 21st century kids’ animation, and how easy it was on the mac to suck a video down off YouTube and make a VCD out of it.  But I’m too sleepy now.

YouTube – PC Pitstop: Laptop Battery Fire

Via digg.com.  This is terrifying.  Educational, too.  If in the presence of an exploding laptop, just get the hell away from it, don’t try to fix it or investigate it or put it out.  Call the fire department.  Cause it starts bad and gets worse.

Tim Bray: Java Is Free

Wow.  That’s pretty awesome.  It would be more awesome if it happened several years ago — arguably Java is getting less and less important in the programming world as the years go by.  But it’ll be cool, for example, to get Java goodies better integrated with Linux.

I swear I’ve never met Scott Adams.