Teleidoscope

Thu, Dec 21, 2006

Snowbound

Posted at 8:29 pm MST to Current Events

I live on Davidson Mesa, near the town of Superior just outside Boulder. The snow stopped falling about noon today, but we may get more tomorrow night or early Saturday, after highs of 40 tomorrow. The wind was very strong during this storm so there was a lot of drifting, and I'm not going to be going anywhere for a while.

My landline phone is out, even though my DSL is working. My cellphone is fine, and the line that the DSL is on might work if I plugged a phone into it. Power going out is not usually a problem here except during thunderstorms, and if it went out I'd still be ok: I have a woodstove, a full cord of wood, and plenty of candles, oil lamps and lamp oil (also lighters). I also have a month's supply of bottled water (my well water makes good oven cleaner) and plenty of food and other supplies.

I'm a little low on dry catfood, but I have canned tuna and salmon and chicken (not to mention mice, ick), so Dinah won't starve, though she may get grumpy at having to eat people food. Actually, it might be a bad thing for her to decide that tuna and salmon are good to eat, so I hope I can get to the store by Saturday.

There are a half mile of 3-foot drifts between me and the nearest paved road that has been plowed.
I say "has been plowed", not "might have been plowed" because the snowplow garage is just half a mile farther down the paved road and half of the snowplows have to go past the end of our gravel road to get to wherever else they need to plow. About half of the gravel road distance should eventually be plowed by the county, but we are very far down the priority list. Especially since school is out for the holidays and the school buses don't need to get up onto the mesa (I'm not sure there are any school age kids in the neighborhood this year, anyway).

My neighbor has a small garden tractor that has a snowplow blade. The drifts are a bit much for it, but we will get out eventually. We all drive 4-wheel drive vehicles here on the mesa, so we'll be ok once we get the drifts chopped down enough (or melted enough) that we don't high-center every 10 seconds.

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Dealing with the Spam

Posted at 7:38 pm MST to Code

Comment spam is very stupid. Aside from the fact that very few people read this blog, the spam comments keep showing up on one particular message from the first day of the blog, where people would have to dif for it to see it.

So far I've had spam for sex, meds, gambling, dentistry, real estate and home-based businesses. The filters should keep most of those from re-occurring, but I've added a step to the comment-posting process that should be easy for humans and hard for bots (or at least not included in the standard bot script) so that additional kinds of spam should not get as far as the filters.

The category of a blog post is displayed at the top of the Comments display page. If you want to post a comment, you need to copy the first word of the category into the proper field of the comment form. (Caps or small letters don't matter). This is a compromise variation of the CAPTCHA images that make you try to read squiggly letters: Instead of testing your image processing I am testing reading comprehension.

Please email me if you have any unexpected problems.

I'm also looking into some code to lock out commenting on blog-posts that are more than a certain number of days old, or explicitly lock specific posts. But that will take a while.

In the meantime, if anyone has been exposed to offensive comment spam before I got it cleaned out, I apologize.

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