Yet Another Fricking Blog

No spam filter is perfect; I still have to wade through a few emails every day that spamassassin doesn’t catch.

Some of the most successful ones are those that insert chunks of text from freely available sources. (One spammer frequently samples works from Project Gutenberg.)

Usually these will get run through some primitive form of Markov Chainer, which will munge the contents up enough so they’re not easily matched to existing sources, but language-like; …enough to fool the heuristics on most spam filters, anyway.

Since I still browse most of these emails using PINE, I am thankfully spared the graphic ad (usually for male enhancement supplements) and instead only see [IMAGE].

But I usually glance over them, just to double-check. And today I found myself reading the whole message body from one of them. It’s a somewhat jumbled, but otherwise touching, glimpse into another person’s life. My guess is that someone got some spyware on their computer that ransacked their inbox or their sent-mail, and it stole their email.

Here’s the content of the email, formatting preserved and all:

(more…)

The LOLCATS phenomenon is cute and the pictures are sometimes pretty funny.

The premise: An animal picture (cure, funny, whatever) with a caption which is usually misspelled. Why? Because cats (or whatever) no can spel gud, use grammar, etc.

The pictures I can deal with. However, the comments about each of the pictures submitted to the site are usually so over-the-top that it’ll make you stabbity. I think it’s the combination of “cutesy wutesy itty bitty aww” cat people coupled with the fact that most comments on the internet are completely moranic anyway — and then it’s intentionally encouraged and taken to the next level by writing in LOL-ese.

I’m a big fan of cheese on the internet, but that’s too much for even me.

You be the judge.

This also makes me wonder whether ‘Orientais’ is also considered less PC than terms like ‘Asian’ in other cultures besides the one I’m familiar with.

Blog was apparently borked for about 5 days, D’oh. Fixed, thanks to smart monkeys.

I couldn’t believe that after seeing the Mac HTPC blog, with the nice calendar and everything, that default WP blogs don’t come with the calendar enabled by default.

I’m sure it’s only a two minute thing for most people, and sure enough, I soon navigated to the (path to blog)/wp-content/themes/default directory, and edited sidebar.php to stick a call to the get_calendar() function in there. And there you have it, a fully functional calendar.

I’m just surprised it’s not on, right ‘out of the box!’