I have to moderate posts from new visitors the very first time they make a comment. Once their initial comment is approved, they can post as much as they want. So far, this has worked out okay, and no one has abused the comment functionality.

I use the Akismet plug-in for WordPress, the blogging software Gibberish uses. It blocks most of the automated spam, but I still get about five or six comments a day that I have to manually mark as spam.

Over the last three months, I have been getting a new type of semi-spam comment. A comment will appear for moderation, and it looks like a real comment. In fact, it might be a real comment. The poster will comment about a game I’ve reviewed, or a product, or about riding my motorcycles. I even approved one once, only to find the poster commenting on random things that I wrote months or a year ago.

Then I started looking at the Web site addresses the poster used as part of their identification. It changed from post to post, but it always advertised a gateway for a product. It wasn’t a store or e-tailer. It wasn’t another blog. It was a gateway designed to appear high in search results by keyword bombing popular terms. They also get higher rankings by being linked to by other sites — such as in a blog’s comment section. A search engine like Google searches Gibberish, picks up the gateway Web address via the poster’s name, and boom the gateway site goes up in Google’s rankings.

To a lesser extent, have not approved comments from people who were just out to troll. I don’t mind people who have a different opinion from mine, but a dissenting comment has to at least add value to the post. “You are stupid” may be true, but it does not add anything to the discussion.

So, here are some new policies on comments:
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Saw this in my usual stall in the men’s room at work:
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Every once in awhile some big mutant bug decides to colonize my property. Hardwood stump boring beetles, Japanese beetles, drunken hornets, you name it. Now I seem to have some sort of alien parasite near the base of my steps.
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That’s about the last thing you want to hear on an airplane, right after “ALLAHU AKBAR” and the sound of a dead man’s switch being activated.
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Yes, I know this is similar to the title I used when I wrote about the hardwood stump borers I find every now and then. But these bugs are just as damn scary, and this time they are inside the house.
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Never, in my entire life, has it felt so good to quit a job. I just put in my two week’s notice where I was contracting. I am going to work for a company here in town, but even without a place to jump I probably would have left after today anyway.

I had a dream last night that I told my boss to shut up during a conference call. It almost came true today.

“DrFaulken,” she said in her extra-loud voice, “why didn’t you review the Web site I sent you and evaluate it for this wireframe [that I had built]?”

What the fuck was she talking about? I began to sweat.

Everyone else on the call was silent.

I am a paranoid dude by nature. I’m the guy with over two thousand rounds of rifle ammunition, for fuck’s sake. But working for this woman the last three months has taken my ass-covery to a whole new level. I flipped back through my notes, a trickle of sweat rolling down my left side.

“On March 24th you specifically told me not to evaluate that site as it was using a new technology and it would generate more questions than answers.”

The line was silent again, and then she continued on without missing another beat, talking about why she loved this other site so much and how we should redo all of our work to replicate it.

She apologized to me in private after the call was over.

I feel badly about leaving some good people behind and not trying to be part of the solution, but simply ducking away from the problem. However, I would become accustomed to my boss’s behavior, and come to accept it as business as usual, and not the gross lack of professionalism that it was.

Please keep discussion of the business or people involved anonymous, Gibberish gets spidered by search engines and I don’t want this popping up somewhere when people search for “pissed off employees of XYZ.”

Whew.

When Bond showed me his 2004 MINI Cooper S I liked it so much I bought one for myself. While I’m on car four since then, he’s kept his Coop in great shape.

That is, until a deer decided to jump in front of his car on the interstate last weekend.
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If you browse long enough on the Internet, you’ll find some crazy ass shit. I was reading a forum on the Star Wars PocketModel game, and someone made a side-comment about Endor being destroyed by fallout from the second Death Star. That lead to another Web page about the different theories about the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, which led me a completely over-researched yet engrossing study entitled: “The Truth About the Endor Holocaust’” by Gary M. Sarli. Written in the summer of 2004, Sarli attempts to disprove the idea of an Endor Holocaust using physics, images from the Return of the Jedi movie, and canonical and official source material.

I found two things interesting about Sarli’s thesis. The first was, “holy fuck, someone put a lot of time into this.” The second thing that impressed me was how methodical Sarli was, from determining what the cutoff point was for establishing a bit of information as valid (including what constituted an acceptable variance in the size of the second Death Star) to analyzing screen captures from the movie on a pixel-by-pixel basis. There is a fair amount of statistical analysis in the document, as well as incredibly detailed discussions about relative and absolute size of objects in the movie, and how those objects are used to extrapolate additional information. I think the most mind-bending part of the thesis was the math behind how it was not accurate to use a screenshot of the second Death Star from outside the Millennium Falcon’s forward viewport.

Even though this is old news if you’re a Star Wars geek, I figured it was interesting enough to post. There are a few math-minded Gibberish readers and they may appreciate (or perhaps critique) the methodology Sarli uses to draw his conclusion. For me, the document was another example of how no matter how crazy and obscure a topic is, the Internet will have at least one expert on it.

Almost a year ago I wrote about giant mutant beetles (okay okay, they’re Hardwood Stump borers) that had surfaced in our yard. I killed another one of them this year already, so I know they’re around. At the time, we figured as long as they stayed outside they were harmless. It turns out that their incursions may have resulted in one of our oaks contracting slime flux.
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I went out to see my friend Bond, and our mutual friends yesterday evening. We met at Arby’s, a somewhat fast food joint that we all like. The weather was cool and there was a breeze, so we sat outside. I ordered some roast beef sandwiches. I squirted some Arby’s Sauce on the bun — Arby’s Sauce is sort of spicy, vinegar-y, er … condiment. A couple of bites out of my sandwich and wanted more Arby’s Sauce. I up-ended the bottle, and out came a big chunk of spices. Or not.

It was a dead bee, that had crawled into the open nozzle of the Arby’s Sauce dispenser and died. I asked my friend’s wife to look away, and then spat out the large bite of sammich that was in my mouth. Bond took the bee-bottle inside and got me another. I ate the remaining three sandwiches without incident (or anaphalyactic shock).

Oh well, at least I get to use my “mutant insects” tag again.