Our network is running like molasses, there's some weird problem with my (personal) e-mail and I can't get in and read it, thanks to my lack of diligence in checking Snopes.com, I just discovered that I got caught, again, posting an "urban legend" as truth, and in general it's not starting out to be a banner day.

The good news is that I got my alarm clock reset last night so that it goes off at 6:30, instead of 7:30. So I was on time to work today.

The bad news is that I sat up until nearly midnight, fighting comment/referrer spam, so I'm a little tired.

Software drives me bonkers. It works just fine for a while, then one day it starts giving you fits and there's no understanding why.

The I.E. on my work computer has taken to giving me messages about script errors and no matter how often I check to make sure the boxes saying, "don't do that" are checked (they are), I can't make it stop.

And things that used to display in java on my machine aren't displaying any more...although, naturally, advertisements all over the internet continue to jump, flash, scroll, and generally annoy me.

My MT-Blacklist (on my blog) went bonkers last night. It was limiting the number of changes I could make at one go and I had to close my browser window and log-in again from scratch between every change. It appears that 3,500 entries was too many.

I deleted the entire list and reinstalled it. I also condensed a lot of the various strings to single words. I shrank the list down by over a third, which should make commenting go a bit faster. If you get a message saying you've used a bad word, just type it with spaces or choose a different word.

I hate to be reduced to banning simple words like dr*gs, p*lls, p*rn, or p*n*s, which we all know are in common use on this blog, but I will if I have to.* This is another time when my tendency to create weird and unlikely acronyms for things I discuss frequently might come in handy.

Scanning my referral logs, I discovered I was getting hits from some swinger. It's really none of my concern (or interest) if his wife is happy with his hobby but I don't need his traffic. I banned him. I also found a few, I assume, start-up companies fishing for traffic. Banned. There's a web-hosting company in France I'm tempted to ban. They seem to host most of my "hits" which, since I can't possibly be that popular in France, might mean they're either spawning or routing spam. I view them with dark suspicion, but I haven't taken action against them yet. (Those of you in the cult o'LJ don't seem to have this problem. I wonder what they use?)

I use MT-Blacklist to ban comment and ping spam. I have trackbacks turned off. I've added a string (Perl?) to my htaccess file to kill referrer spam. It isn't that I'm not trying to help the world o'blog be spam-free, it's just that no human being can keep up with it.

Especially a human being who doesn't understand how to code things. There's a complicated set of instructions for clearing your MT-Blacklist log. I'd like to do that. I'm sure, with the amount of work my Blacklist is doing, the log is huge. But I only understood about one out of every three words in the instructions.

At some point, dumb luck and crossing your fingers just isn't enough, you know? You have to actually know what you're doing.

My next (scary) idea is that I should upgrade my version of MT. I read the support forums and I didn't understand the problems people ran into, much less the solutions, so I don't think I'll attack that this week. I'd just hire someone to do it...but I already paid $400/blog to have these two blogs designed, then I had to pay someone else $400 to recode one of them because it wasn't working right and the original person wasn't responding to my requests. I hate to fork out yet another $400 for someone to upgrade the code in both of them, you know? I just paid my annual hosting fee and the leasing on both of the domain names.

People who accuse fans, fandom, and fan-writers of free-loading have no idea. If I had back all of the money I've spend on fandom over the years, I wouldn't be sweating my retirement quite as much. (I mean, if I'd invested this money across the years, instead of spending it.)

(More about the Great Pen Theft of '05 later today.)

__________________________________

* I'd miss p*n*s. It's a cute little word, isn't it? Short and funny. Not unfriendly, but a bit shy, maybe. Heh. And the day the spammers start using "pr0n" instead of "p*rn", we'll all be crying.