Category: Uncategorized

Comment Spam

If you are not a blogger you would not necessarily know that the reason many blogs use CAPTCHAs and moderate their comments is because of comment spam. Even though I have had my blog on-line for almost a year, I have had very little comment spam. Somewhat on the order of 3-5 a month that I have to filter out.

That was until this weekend. I got 28 comment spams on Saturday. I decided to enable the plugin Akismet that comes with my blogging software. Before I got it running I had another 35 spam messages. That put my number up to 60+ in just a few hours. Since then the software has caught and blocked over 500 spam messages and I have had to manually mark as spam another 100 that the software has missed.

I don’t know why I got so popular all of a sudden, but maybe this kind of popularity is not what I am looking for.

I am curious to hear from other bloggers as to how many comment spams they get each day.

Missionary Talks 07: Larry Allred

This week’s missionary is a co-worker here in town. Bro. Larry Allred has been here in Mérida for 6 1/2 years and has started a church here.

This was a fun episode. The plan is that he will be interviewing me in a few weeks. His wife is scheduled to be on the show next week. She will be our first wife on the show.

In this show I did something different to make the audio shorter. I had 25 minutes of audio to cut down to 15. In the first run through I knocked out all the “ums” and “ahs.” Also there were some repeated phrases that got thrown out. That brought it down 22 minutes. Next edit I got it down to 18. Then I got down to 16 finally.

In Audacity, there is a way to speed up the audio without changing the pitch. I sped the whole thing up 4% to get me under the 15 minutes. Even knowing that, you won’t be able to tell it is not normal speed. Very cool.

Einstein and the Zune

It appears that after his death, Albert Einstein found himself working as the doorkeeper at the Pearly Gates. One slow day, he found that he had time to chat with the new entrants.

To the first one he asked, “What’s your IQ?” The new arrival replied, “190”. They discussed Einstein’s theory of relativity for hours.

When the second new arrival came, Einstein once again inquired as to the newcomer’s IQ. The answer this time came “120”. To which Einstein replied, “Tell me, how did the Cubs do this year?” and they proceeded to talk for half an hour or so.

To the final arrival, Einstein once again posed the question, “What’s your IQ?”. Upon receiving the answer “70”, Einstein smiled and asked, “Got a minute to tell me about what Microsoft was thinking when they released the Zune?”

(Apologies to the Fortunes program which included this in it’s original form and to Prof. Einstein for bringing him down to the level of Microsoft.)

Missionary Talks 03: Shane Rice

Episode 3 is out! I am excited about this one. Not that I was not excited about the others, but this one was actually the first one I recorded. Shane and I have been friends for about 6 years and I knew he would step up to the plate to help me get my feet wet and get this started.

The hard part about this episode was that to keep within my 15 minute goal, I had to cut a bunch of stuff out. Also, I had to remove some of the silence between questions and answers, so it does not sound as natural.

This was the second recording since my computer ate the first recording. I had it all recorded, but ran out of space. When my computer was trying to convert the raw files to mp3 with no hard drive space, it just lost it all. It was kinda good. Gave us a chance to do it the second time around without being so stiff.

Enjoy!