Prepare to (not) be shocked: apartment hunting sucks. I am currently undergoing my semi-yearly reminder of this universal truth, and it never seems to get any less sucky. Either that, or I just get older and crankier.
At least the Google Maps “Street View” feature has got my back. Check it out – this photo of an apartment building was on the Craigslist ad for a vacant unit:

I thought, “Hmm… looks like it could be nice. Or at least OK, anyway.”
I’ve gotten in the habit of checking possible future addresses in Google Street View because it shows what a place looks like in context with the rest of the block. For the building in question, that context was… rather revealing:


If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a reasonable question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out
A Lethe
Konradical
Life 2.0
Lucrezia's Delight
The Moving Target








Spam Bots: Flattery Will Almost Get You Everywhere
November 22, 2009 | 3 comments
Credit: hegarty_david (Flickr)
Throughout the nearly four years of this blog’s existence, the Akismet plugin has consistently kept C&B free of comment spam. As I understand it, what Akismet does with my blog comments is pretty much the same thing that spam filters do with your email inbox. There is one difference, though, at least in my experience.
I use Gmail, and I’d estimate that maybe four or five spam emails per month manage to sneak past Gmail’s filters and get to my inbox. No big deal. Once or twice a month I scroll quickly through my Gmail spam folder to check for false positives, and there normally are one or two. Pretty good spam blocking overall, wouldn’t you say? Me too.
Well, get this: in the history of this blog, I cannot recall even once finding a false positive in my Akismet comment spam queue. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: comment spam, Gmail, Google, spam