football, a halloween picture and a rant
For some odd reason I just wan't inspired today. I fiddled around in Photoshop for several hours on and off and this is the only thing I actually saved. and I'm really not very happy with it. Ehhh, sometimes you have to know when to just throw in the towel.
I don't watch much football but today I saw a really great game. I was flipping channels and caught a good play at the start of the 3rd quarter in the Wisconsin-North Western game and stayed to watch the rest of the game. Wisconsin is ranked, 14 I think, and NWestern isn't but it was hard to tell from the quality of play. They were both great--at least the offense was. The score ended at 51-48 and the play was intense as both teams struggled to stay ahead. The score at the half was 17-10 in favor of Wisconsin so almost all the scoring was in the second half.
RANT SECTION I really, really find word verification on blogs to be annoying. You all know how it works...
When you see a picture like this one to the left, you type the letters into a box and if you do it right your comment posts and you go whistling on your way to the next blog. The pictures aren't readable by automated SPAM agents so they keep spam out of the posting area. So, what's my beef, you ask?
It's two fold. One, they make some of the pictures very difficult to read. Sometimes squeezing in as many as 10 letters and they intentionally use letters that are easy to mistake like 'q' and 'l'. Since the spammers can't "see" the picture at all, you don't need to make it hard to read--you just need enough letters--3 or 4--to keep the spammers from being able to jump over the protection with blind "guesses". You don't need a large number of letters. The 7 in this picture is overkill--even just 2 letters would have something like 650 combinations, adding a third letter puts that over 15,000 combinations. Far too many for the spammer's software to guess through. Two, it's not worth it to use the protection in the first place unless you get a huge volume of hits. I don't have word verification on my blog and I get maybe 5 spams in a bad month. Compare that to how much time I have to spend to post on sites with the verification. Deleting a few spams takes a lot less time than doing the word verification on every post I make on other blogs. Phooey!
RANT update: (8pm EST, Sunday) Carmi took word verification off of his blog and within 15 minutes he had two spam messages posted to his blog. I don't know why I don't get many, but it might not be true for most. So perhaps the word verification (annoying!) scheme is necessary.
I don't watch much football but today I saw a really great game. I was flipping channels and caught a good play at the start of the 3rd quarter in the Wisconsin-North Western game and stayed to watch the rest of the game. Wisconsin is ranked, 14 I think, and NWestern isn't but it was hard to tell from the quality of play. They were both great--at least the offense was. The score ended at 51-48 and the play was intense as both teams struggled to stay ahead. The score at the half was 17-10 in favor of Wisconsin so almost all the scoring was in the second half.RANT SECTION I really, really find word verification on blogs to be annoying. You all know how it works...
When you see a picture like this one to the left, you type the letters into a box and if you do it right your comment posts and you go whistling on your way to the next blog. The pictures aren't readable by automated SPAM agents so they keep spam out of the posting area. So, what's my beef, you ask?It's two fold. One, they make some of the pictures very difficult to read. Sometimes squeezing in as many as 10 letters and they intentionally use letters that are easy to mistake like 'q' and 'l'. Since the spammers can't "see" the picture at all, you don't need to make it hard to read--you just need enough letters--3 or 4--to keep the spammers from being able to jump over the protection with blind "guesses". You don't need a large number of letters. The 7 in this picture is overkill--even just 2 letters would have something like 650 combinations, adding a third letter puts that over 15,000 combinations. Far too many for the spammer's software to guess through. Two, it's not worth it to use the protection in the first place unless you get a huge volume of hits. I don't have word verification on my blog and I get maybe 5 spams in a bad month. Compare that to how much time I have to spend to post on sites with the verification. Deleting a few spams takes a lot less time than doing the word verification on every post I make on other blogs. Phooey!
RANT update: (8pm EST, Sunday) Carmi took word verification off of his blog and within 15 minutes he had two spam messages posted to his blog. I don't know why I don't get many, but it might not be true for most. So perhaps the word verification (annoying!) scheme is necessary.
Comments
Michele sent me here.
In my case it is because I am thinning way too much directly on top, and didn't wish to go the "Monks" route anymore if I kept my hair longer, so I started shaving it down, usually just a military style buzz cut actually but on occasion I do get out a razor and go "clean" and don't even think about what it looks like, I just know it looks better (to me anyway!) than when the 'before' pics were looking in the hair post! LOL!
As for the football... a high scoring game is less boring, I'd say. But someone isn't playing very well if you are allowing that many points. It's possible for a team to have a few exceptional plays that you can't be playing all that well if you are allowing your opponent to score 7 or 8 TDs! At least in this case they both were equally challenged (and gifted, I'm sure).
:o)
(I'd like to git him out here for a real live Rodeo, teach him to ride western on a manly kinda 1/4horse instead of the foo-foo English Arabians he rides in the holodeck... oooie, YEE-ha!)
As for deleting spams, I found that moments after I deleted one, another one would invariably be sent ... like the bots were monitoring my blog for activity or something (which isn't efficient because there isn't much).
Of course, the real solution is to find out where the spammers are and smite them.
Here via Michele, btw.
Ah, I can dream, can't I?
Back from Michele's tonight.
Andrea, I think you misunderstood the situation.
Judy! I'm not all that agitated over the word verification but more the tendency of people to do bullshit like this. To try to solve minor problems with things that are big problems. Damn Republicans!
Aaron, the smiting thing sounds fun. Where do I sign up? I haven't had any problem with spam being resent to me but I've never had much of a problem with it except that one week when they were coming fast and furious--and soon after so many people installed anti-spam software without really accessing the nuisance value.
Oh yeah, Michele sent me....
Well, within 10 minutes, I had received two rapid-fire pieces of comment spam. Fascinating stuff - and not to worry, Utenzi, I'm not at all upset. I'll leave word verification off overnight and see how it trends out.
It amazes me how much garage is circulating out there. It would all go away if the minutely small percentage of folks who actually go for this c--p would smarten up.
Sigh...the journey continues.
I used to blog with MovableType. Until I started getting several hundred spam messages (both comments and trackback) in like a 15 minute time span...10 times a say. I couldn't EVEN begin to keep up with deleting it. I get alot of hits, but I wouldn't call it a huge volume. I switched to WordPress because it had better built in spam protection. Now I hardly get any. But to me, if someone needs to use the word verification thingie to avoid that major annoyance, it's not that troublesome for me to type some silly letters. JMO, of course. :)
Here from Michele's today.
My eight-year-old just told me about the 18 inning game! Yikes!He's up too late as it is watching the Yankees... oh well, tomorrow's a holiday!
Btw, Michele sent me!
Next time you talk to Carmi can you let him know that I want to comment on his site...but he only accepts blogger comments now and I'm not on blogger.
Michele sent me this time.
I am a newbie when it comes to blogging but I had to turn on the verification because I was getting several spam hits. Guess you are lucky my friend!
'like your interesting blog. Check out mine.'
Word verification doesn't bother me too much. But I do find the squishing together of similiar letters a pain.
it's easier to remove it from the comments than doing anything against it.word verif is annoying.
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