KJToo

The camera in my Treo 650 seems to be dying by degrees, if the ever-expanding row of green pixels that appears on more and more of my photos is any indication. Perhaps the sheer manliness of my 5 o’clock shadow has begun to overwhelm the sensitive CCD. Can testosterone destroy electronic devices? The evidence would seem to suggest it can.

Posted March 30, 2007 Comments(3)

According to the stats at MyBlogLog, KJToo.com has 23 readers, which sounds about right to me; there are also a handful of people who read the posts via the RSS feed, but I really have no idea how many. That’s not exactly a huge audience, but the number of spam comments filtered out by the Akismet plugin ranges anywhere from a dozen to several hundred on any given day; if you’re reading this, the comment spammers really want you to see their junk.1

Today was a high-volume day for comment spam. The online pharmacies, insurance agents and purveyors of various forms of taboo (if not downright illegal) sexual practices attempted to hit KJToo.com with roughly 500 spam comments in the past twenty-four hours, only one of which made it past Akismet. Since I’ve been using the plugin, less than a half-dozen legitimate comments have been incorrectly trapped and perhaps two dozen spam comments have made it through the filter. Considering that Akismet has trapped more than twenty-one and a half thousand spam comments in the past two years, I’d say it’s a pretty good track record.

There’s some concern that WordPress users are putting all of our comment spam fighting eggs in one basket with Akismet; the plugin relies on external servers to function, and a failure of those servers could result in a flood of unfiltered spam comments on thousands of blogs worldwide. Nasty! It’s a risk I’m willing to live with, though, as Akismet allows me to let people comment on KJToo.com without having to register or enter a CAPTCHA code.

So, comment to your heart’s desire, all twenty-three of you. Akismet has your back, and mine.

1. Or at the very least increase their Google ranking for erectile dysfunction medication, auto insurance and naughty, naughty boys and girls. [back]

Posted March 29, 2007 Comments(18)

Mick Bradley and Julia Sullivan went AWOL recently, leaving Chris Miller and I to record the latest episode of The Round Table. Undaunted, we interviewed Tee Morris, co-author (with Lisa Lee) of MOREVI: The Chronicles of Rafe and Askana, co-author (with Evo Terra) of Podcasting for Dummies, author of Billibub Baddings and The Case of the Singing Sword and host of The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy podcast.

Chris and I also had a discussion about Marvel Comics’ Civil War crossover series and the death of my favorite super hero, Captain America.

Mick will be back for the next episode, but Julia will likely be absent for much of Season Four as she carves a bloody swath of carnage and destruction across northeast Ohio. In the meantime, give The Round Table a listen, won’t you? For the children?

• Visit The House of the Harping Monkey
• Download The Round Table, Episode 04-02
• Subscribe to The Round Table

Posted March 29, 2007 Comments(4)

I really need to start keeping some sort of changelog for this site to make troubleshooting things like the current Slightbox issue a little simpler. Slightbox is the WordPress plugin that used to load images (like the 5 o’clock shadow pictures) in a nifty overlay “above” the main page when they were clicked. The key phrase there is “used to”, as sometime in the past couple of days the plugin stopped working. Instead of getting a nice, smooth image overlay, clicking on image links takes you to a new page containing just the full-sized image.

I was already aware that Slightbox wasn’t working if the image link was embedded in a list, but now it doesn’t work anywhere. I don’t know if it’s a JavaScript problem, a conflict with one of the dozen other WordPress plugins I’ve got installed, or something else I’ve managed to screw up in my endless fiddling.

The nice thing about the WordPress community is that plugin developers are generally happy to help when people encounter problems. I pinged Slightbox developer Taras Mankovski with an earlier issue I was having with the plugin and his response was not only quick, but correct. Of course, it’s one thing to say “your plugin is working but there’s a quirk that I can’t figure out” and an entirely separate thing to say “your plugin doesn’t work at all.”

On the bright side, I did fix an annoying glitch that caused the right sidebar to be rendered improperly in Internet Explorer (which I only noticed because IE is the standard browser at work). I knew that the culprit was italic text and when I Googled Internet Explorer italics CSS, the first hit was a page that described the IE/italics bug and provided a simple solution. That’s because I used the very same page when I was stomping out a similar bug in my own early attempts at WordPress theme design. I dashed off a quick note of thanks to Bruno Fassino, who wrote the page, and he sent me a note indicating the the problem has apparently been fixed in IE 7, but other italics issues have been introduced. Par for the course with IE, it seems.

Maybe if I just stopped fiddling with things, everything would be fine, but that’s just not my way; I’m going to keep adding new plugins or replacing the ones I already use with updated versions, tweaking the sidebars and the comment form and the page layout because it’s fun and interesting, even if I do wind up breaking stuff now and again.

Posted March 28, 2007 Comments(6)

Ah, Spring. ‘Tis the season of high pollen counts and rapidly fluctuating temperatures. Today eighty-five, tomorrow forty-three. My sinuses hate it and for the past few days have been making their displeasure known.

Saturday wasn’t bad, but Sunday put me through the wringer. The pressure was so bad that I was in bed by 7:00, which is nearly unheard of for me. I stayed home from work Monday and today, but I think I’ll be back on the job tomorrow morning at the crack of 9:30.

I’ve been popping generic DayQuil and NyQuil for the past three days and today I decided to try something my mother suggested: NeilMed Sinus Rinse. This basically involves squirting four ounces of warm water/sodium chloride/sodium bicarbonate solution up each nostril and giving the old nasal passages a good rinsing.

Now, I’ve had water up my nose before; pleasant, it ain’t. So I wasn’t exactly looking forward to squirting four ounces of anything up my nose, especially given that the product instructions quite clearly indicated that the solution would be exiting via either the other nostril or the mouth. Yummy!

I do have to admit that despite my trepidation, the process was entirely painless and not at all as disgusting as I anticipated. Sure, there was salty water spilling out of my nose and mouth, but it didn’t feel like I was drowning or like I had accidentally snorted water through an ill-aimed strawIt’s been known to happen.. Turns out that squirting plain water up your nose is extremely unpleasant, but the solution completely eliminates that nasty burning sensation.

So that was an hour ago. I’m still a little drippy at the moment, but I suppose that’s to be expected. We’ll see if adding the rinse helps with the Spring Sinus Curse.

Posted March 27, 2007 Comments(2)