I had to nuke over a hundred comment spams today. They all got caught by the moderation filter and none made it onto the site, but it’s getting ridiculous.

Therefore I have started using the blacklist. I didn’t really want to do it, but I don’t really have a choice. Posts with blacklisted words now get insta-nuked – they don’t come to me for moderation. They’re just sent straight to the bit bucket. So if you post a comment and it doesn’t appear, it’s possible you’ve used a blacklisted word.

(What are the blacklisted words? Well, if I use one, this post won’t show up so I can’t tell you. Just look inside your own spam filters for examples. I will say that talking about various parts of male and female anatomy, modern popular chemicals, and certain card games will trigger the filter.)

I hate to do this, because it puts part of the onus on you guys to not use certain words or phrases in your posts, but I just don’t have the time to visually look through a hundred comments a day and see which ones are valid and which ones are spam. Sorry, guys.

I was out sick yet again yesterday.

This is getting ridiculous. I do not understand it. I’ve been to the doctor, gotten a prescription, and taken it religiously for over a week. I’ve got so much penicillin in my bloodstream that nothing else should be able to survive, yet every day I wake up wondering if I’m going to feel better or worse today.

And I’ve done very little work on my projects and this site is getting very rote.

I need to get better so I can do something interesting again before everybody stops reading.

May your day be full of family, football, and food.

Especially pie. There’s just nothing like pie.

I’ll be doing Thanksgiving again this year. At least I got more than twenty-four hours notice.

Of course, this past weekend was supposed to be spent cleaning up the house. But my wife was sick and very little got done. It’s pretty much time to panic at this point.

Now, the odd thing is that I’ve been looking forward to this. Everybody seems to like my Thanksgiving dinner and I certainly like making people happy. It’s just that circumstances have made it difficult for me to do this in anything less than the same rush I did it last year, and that frustrates me.

Plus, I probably won’t have a chance to try anything new. I had originally planned on doing a ham as well as a turkey, but I don’t think I’ll have time now.

Oh, well. It’s a good excuse to clean up the house. And there will be pie. Oh, yes. There will be pie.

The problem with my primary computer was that I was getting lots of snow on the screen and the computer was crashing pretty regularly – sometimes even when the computer was first starting up, before Windows started to load. It seemed like either my video card was going flaky or the BIOS on the motherboard was going bad…either way, bad news. This was what drove me to my secondary computer.

Well, last night I decided to take another crack at fixing my primary computer. I took my video card out of my computer and put it in my wife’s. It worked fine. Hmmm…so the card itself wasn’t the problem, it was the interaction between the card and something else.

Now, a friend recently sold a computer back to me that I had built for him about two years ago…he had upgraded to a spiffing new Dell and didn’t need it any more. Since his computer was practically identical to mine, that meant I had another motherboard of the same type as the one in my primary computer, and it actually had a slightly faster CPU on it. I swapped out the motherboard and CPU. Crud, same problem…but that meant that the BIOS hadn’t been going bad on my old computer.

The video card worked, the motherboard worked, the processor worked…hmm, I wondered, could it be the power supply?

I swapped the power supply in my computer for the one from my friend’s – and all the problems went away! Somehow the shielding on the power supply must have failed, giving my poor video card a nice continual stream of noise – no wonder it was complaining!

So now, not only do I have my primary computer back, but it’s actually better than it used to be, with a slightly faster processor and a half-gig more RAM!

Now if only I’d done this last Friday night…

Still coughing and my voice is still off. Still have a general lack of energy.

So the odds are good there won’t be a video blog this week. Sorry.

Okay, back at work today. Feeling mostly normal, except for an annoying lingering cough. Hopefully I’ll still be able to do the video blog tomorrow.

Certain people were having trouble with the comment system not remembering them and therefore having to register every time they left a comment. I went ahead and turned registration off. This will probably cause an increase in comment spam, which I will fight as best I can.