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. On perhaps five or six occasions, spam comments have eluded Akismet and temporarily appeared on C&B. I keep a pretty close eye on comment activity here, since cultivating comment activity is an important goal for any blog. I can use all the legitimate comments I can get, so I check the comment spam queue regularly, hoping to find a false positive. But there never is. Stupid Akismet. Stupid… unfailingly accurate, reliable Akismet.

The most nearly admirable thing that can be said about spammers is that they consistently become cleverer and more sophisticated. This morning a comment in the Akismet spam queue almost fooled me for a moment, using a certain ploy more authentically than I’d seen before from a spam bot. Seeing as how I live in Hollywood, you’d think my Empty Flattery Detector would be more highly-attuned than average.

Check out the ego-stroking comment highlighted in the image at left. “Well, mister commenter,” I thought, “I really hope you mean that. Your URL does look a little spammy… but maybe you really are an actual person, sitting in front of your screen at your crappy web store call center job, and you really do think I’m a professional-caliber writer.” As the green markings show, I googled the email address to find out.

The result:

“Pfft! I knew it. You rat bastard, you say that to all the blogs.”

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:

This morning brought a pitch-perfect jibe of a post by Anil Dash, a veteran tech blogger. He goes on just slightly too long, but does nevertheless hit the humorous bullseye. A sampling:

The whole worldA small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there’s been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature…

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry. …

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of “It’s alive! Go get your name!” posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can’t get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can’t get to the feature at all. The phrase “The Facebook Username debacle” is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that “Facebook Username” can be abbreviated “FU”, and each thinks he is the first to think of it. …

That’s probably more than I should excerpt, so check out the entire post over on Anil’s blog.

(Hat tip: Brooke Van Natta)

the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles

The photographer’s name rang a bell. Carel Struycken…
a name that Dutch isn’t something I see every day, but I couldn’t place it. I clicked through to his profile on 360 Cities, and was immediately ashamed that I hadn’t. He was the Giant on Twin Peaks!

For the non-Peakers out there, he also played Lurch (the butler) in the Addams Family movies. Oh, and apparently he was on several episodes of something called Star Trek: The Next Generation, whatever the hell that was.

Who knew? Turns out that Mr. Struycken is quite into panoramic photography.  He has made a whole bunch of cool panoramas of different spots in the L.A. region and elsewhere, which you can check out at his site: www.sphericalpanoramas.com.   Short people, if you’ve ever wanted to see how the world looks to someone who’s seven feet tall, now you can.

This little Facebook meme has found its way to me. OK, what am I supposed to do?

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I’ll do it, and I’ll send it to the friends who tagged me in theirs, but no way am I going to require 25 of my Facebook friends to write lists too. My friends have more important things to do… well, most of them, anyway.

25 Random Things About Me

1. I am a compulsive copy editor and a remorseless grammar nazi (in case you hadn’t noticed).
2. I am geeky enough to use HTML markup when posting things on community web sites. In case you still hadn’t noticed.
3. I’m seriously considering getting a bicycle to use for getting around town, in order to both save money on gas and get more exercise. The only drawback I foresee is the increased chance of severe injury due to LA’s shortage of bike lanes and surplus of reckless drivers.
4. I’m discouraged at having already written this much and only being on #4.
5. Guiltiest dietary pleasure: ice cream.
6. I just decided that if I’m going to write this much, I’m damn well going to make it a blog post — come to think of it, then it’ll automatically become a Facebook note anyway. Screw it, I am now composing this on WordPress.
7. I first used a computer in about 1981 when my elementary school obtained three or four machines and stationed them in the library. They taught us to program a little bit of BASIC, which never really came in handy. Within a couple of years I was writing school essays on my family’s IBM PC and telling people how totally choice WordStar for DOS was.



8. I am not a grammar martinet with regard to casual conversation. The standard for spoken English is necessarily much broader than the one for written English. How dull and colorless would conversation be without the wild cards of things like dialect and slang?
9. I inadvertently stayed up working on something until 2:30 A.M. last night, and it’s altogether possible that I’ll fall asleep before I finish this.


She’s worth every penny

10. Pretty soon I’ll need to go pick up my dog Bella from her bi-monthly cardiac ultrasound re-check appointment at the vet. I’ll feel lucky if we get out of there for less than $350.
11. I can’t believe I already need to do laundry again.
12. Every so often I hear the Italian woman in the building next door having sex. Usually it’s when I need to concentrate on something else, but can’t, because she apparently likes her nookie with a generous supply of fresh air via her open window. C’est la vie, she’s clearly faking it most of the time anyway.
13. In my opinion The Office has fallen off a little bit lately, especially compared to 30 Rock, which still consistently cracks my shit up.
WARNING: items 14, 15 and 16 contain a high level of geekery. Viewer discretion is advised.
14. I’d love to be able to uninstall iTunes (and the irritating Apple Software Update app piggybacked onto it, which pesters me daily to install something called Bonjour for Windows) and use Songbird for everything. The problem is my iPod, which I like to use for listening to podcasts. With Songbird’s graduation from Beta into its full 1.0 release, its functions for podcast reading, metadata editing, and iPod device support went from “useless or nonexistent” to “kind of a pain in the ass, but it works.” It just ain’t there yet.
15. Which reminds me, I have a couple of web-related crusades of principle going, so I think I’ll give them each a number on Ye Olde List here. First in line: the iTunes Store. Think we’re supposed to stop hating them because they’re finally selling songs without DRM now? Think again. The new “DRM-free” media files they’re selling still have the customer’s registered e-mail address embedded in them, making any future copies thereof potentially traceable to that customer. Also, if you want DRM-free versions of music you already bought from the iTunes Store, they’ll give them to you… for 30 cents per song. That’s right, they want to charge you again for music you already paid them for. Say it with me: the iTunes Store sucks. Buy your MP3 music downloads from Amazon, where they’ve always come without DRM and at the higher-quality 256-kbps bitrate that iTunes just now started providing.



16. Next, a Colbertian wag of my finger at Internet Explorer. I would say “people who use Internet Explorer,” but Google Analytics tells me that would implicate 40% of the visitors to this blog over the last month, and I dearly love each and every visitor I get. Even the ones who use a shitty browser. Never mind that IE is the bane of any web designer’s existence (unless you’re a web designer, in which case I don’t need to tell you). There is simply no humane reason for anyone to deny him or herself the improved ease of use, configurability, speed, and stability of the superior alternatives: either my favorite, Firefox, or any of Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Flock, and the Mac-only Camino, among others will do (but for God’s sake, not AOL Desktop). Seriously, do yourself a favor.
17. Now that I’ve heard Terry Gross interview Darren Aronofsky on Fresh Air, I really want to see The Wrestler.
18. All due credit to the Cardinals for peaking at the right time, but I’m rooting for the Steelers.
19. Every move Rod Blagojevich makes still leaves me saying, “Can you fucking believe this guy?” Wow. Not even a decade in, and he’s already making a credible run at Douchebag of the Century.
20. I believe that my biggest liability as a blogger is my constitutional inability to write something brief. However, in this instance it was not I who decided the list had to be 25 items long.
21. It is downright nippy in my apartment right now, but after last month’s bill I don’t want to keep cranking up the thermostat.
22. I haven’t used most of the Amazon gift certificate my brother gave me for my birthday yet. Possible items include Season 2 of The Shield on DVD (God, I already miss that show). Earlier today I also thought of two more glaring holes to fill in my music library, namely, Sam Cooke and Junior Walker & the All-Stars.
23. I’m having trouble restraining myself from putting up little cop-out entries for these few remaining list items… whoops — see, that one got by me.
24. Our refrigerator in this apartment is at least 25 years old. When it first cycles on it makes a sound like a garbage disposal that a piece of silverware fell into, which lasts for about ten seconds before trailing off. I barely notice it anymore, but it tends to startle guests.
25. I’m far from perfect, but one thing I’m very good about is always putting the toilet seat down.

Since I ended up not doing this on Facebook, the tagging people thing doesn’t really apply. I’ll forward a link to this post to some friends and hope some of them leave comments here. Even if their comments are just to ask why I wasted their time with this frivolous crap. Don’t be shy, mock me!  I’ve teed it right up for you with this list, so bring it, bitchez!