Happy New Year, friends. Start making those resolutions.
And speaking of resolutions, Potter couldn’t have said it better… what better resolution than to grow in your faith and your walk with God.
Do something fun today / tomorrow. It’s the first day of a new year.
I have to say that WP-Hashcash has done the trick. I’ve gotten fewer than 2 dozen spams in the last 2 days, and the log shows almost 1500 blocked attempts… sweet!
So while on the topic of spam, Scotty asked me today about fighting e-mail spam more effectively. Even though I’ve used SpamAssassin for a couple years, I would still get a few hundred spam e-mails a week that made it through the filter. Thunderbird would collect about 90% of those, which meant that I didn’t have to look at a lot of spam… but still far more than I would have liked. Plus, any time I looked at my mail from a webmail interface, I had to sort through a few dozen spams.
I read up a couple months ago on SpamAssassin tweaking. Let me summarize some steps I took that caused the number of spam e-mails I get a week to fall to under 10.
Read the rest of this thought »
Interesting.
I installed WP-Hashcash as a helper to Akismet. So far, no more comment spam. I usually get 3,000+ a day, as Akismet shows…
Akismet has caught 268,126 spam for you since you first installed it.
I finished up a bunch of miscellaneous tweaks to the blog to tide me over until I can finally get a new theme up, with Nic‘s help. Poke me if commenting suddenly broke horrendously, but I did try to test it. I also finally got around to backing up all my websites. Since that includes all of ZetaBoards’ skin files and graphics, as well as a few thousand dollars worth of projects I host for various companies around town… yeah. I should have done that a long time ago. Hopefully they aren’t reading this 
I now own INTC, MO, PMI, and SPY, and have updated the sidebar to track them. I’m looking to spread out into 2-3 more companies before I’m done with the money I’ve set aside for investing. While I was messing with the sidebar, I finally got around to fixing the “Latest Comments” and “Link Blog” sections. I’m going to try using ma.gnolia for the linkblog, because WordPress’ built-in one just doesn’t cut it. Icky.
The first link in the new linkblog happens to be YouMail, which replaces your cellphone’s normal voicemail service and adds some spiffy features. You can record greetings for each different phone number that calls you (but of course record a default greeting for everyone else to hear), and you can listen to and delete / save your voicemail messages from your computer. Very cool, and free (it does use cellphone minutes to check your voicemail, but I have plenty of those). Check it out.
I went shopping for a refrigerator today for my dorm room, but came back empty-handed. Too bad. However, I am keeping up my inexorable pace of one blog post per day rather nicely, if I do say so.
I took advantage of ShareBuilder’s “Make a trade and get $50″ promo by just buying 1 share of Intel… even if Intel goes bankrupt tomorrow I’ll be up $25 
My TD Ameritrade account is fully functional and ready-to-go, so I’ll probably pull the trigger tomorrow. I’m not looking to get rich quick, but just have a good time and make a bit of spare money. Plus, everyone wants to be able to sit down at the table and talk about how XYZ is up eleven points but it still has a lot of headroom to rise higher, etc.
After 6+ years of service, my computer is pretty ready for replacement, as I alluded to earlier. I put together a semi-final list of parts last night and it comes in about $950 without the video card (I’m waiting for lower-end DX10 cards before I get one of those). It’s going to be rather whiz-bang; I’m very excited 
I punctuate paragraphs with smilies a lot. I suppose that just means my paragraphs are thematic. Which all paragraphs should be.