Yesterday was a beautiful spring day. Sunny, temperature getting up to about 70F. We had the windows open, took down the Christmas tree, ventured outside to take down all the Christmas lights, brought Caligula outside for a bit while we washed both the cars with buckets of soap and water and the garden hose.
This is all very strange, since it’s January and the average high temperature for January 6th according to weather.com is 38F. The record high before yesterday was 63F, set 14 years ago. I’m not complaining right now, it was nice to be able to get these things done while it was warm out, and the winter car washes you get at the automatic car was places just aren’t as good as scrubbing the car yourself with sponge. But I do want it to snow sometime this winter.
Yeseterday I also managed to get some computer work (professional and personal) done, which makes me happy.
On the personal work side I manged to get the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin installed on 13thHour.net to combat the spam problem. For the entire life of the WordPress-based site I’ve had all comments by non-members moderated, I’d check the moderated comments every month or so and have to delete everything because it was all spam. Then I realized that the site was pretty dead, all I was doing with it each month was deleting spam on old posts! So I decided 2 things:
1. I would start using the site for dumping funny/interesting sites/podcasts I encounter – it’s relatively #13thHour based, since we talk about everything and often post links in channel.
2. Make comment feature usable.
So I started looking around for solutions that wouldn’t be too difficult to implement (I didn’t want to have to bug Michael to edit the apache config or install more software on the server) or get around for normal humans. The Match Comment one seemed like the best option, and it fit my criteria. I’m going to keep it all moderated for about a week to see how well it works, it’s been about 20 hours now and I haven’t had any.
Unfortunately I was suffering from a nasty headache yesterday and didn’t get much else done. All evening I sat around with Caligula and zoned out in front of the television. Headaches suck.
This morning I got up and was almost completely headache free – yay! I spent about a half hour this morning setting up the scripts and crontabs for ircstats for #13thHour and the ircstats for #Deep13.
And now I’m going to stop writing and enjoy the fire Michael made in the fireplace. Perhaps I’ll play around with getting the National Digital Forecast Database XML Web Service running with R2D2…