Someone is attempting to spam my blog pretty heavily through trackbacks. This is stupid. It’s never going to work since I have so few comments here anyhow that I moderate all of them. It only serves to annoy me by generating an email saying that I have comments to moderate. My original thought was to block inbound packets from the offenders. It would be pretty simple. Add a table to my firewall config and then use a little shell script magic (grep, awk etc) to pull the addresses from the log an load them into the table. But a quick pass through sort confirmed that these attacks were coming from mostly different addresses. For now I’ve disabled trackbacks by disabling the php file that supports them. Next up change my mail filter to quarantine the emails appropriately. Sigh.
Why math is important.
While I was sleeping we seemed to forget how to do math. This guy was quoted a rate of 0.002 cents per KB to use his Verizon Wireless Data Card while roaming in Canada. When he got the bill they charged him 0.002 dollars/KB. His story is here. What makes it sad is that the verizon customer service people don’t understand the difference and continue to quote him the lower rate while insisting that the charge on the bill is correct. All of this would be a non-issue if the marketing weasels at Verizon would just fess up to the fact that their price for roaming data is $2.05 / MB.
Exercise
I rode my bike today. It was the first time in a while which is bad. I went from Home to the yacht club to the beach and then back home. Maybe it was 10 miles. I’m gonna check with Google Earth later. I’m a little tired right now. Once I got to the yacht club I tried to figure out if I had spent 1/3 or 1/2 of my energy. I guess I was between 1/2 and 1/3 and figured that the extra three miles to Silver Sands Beach would probably fit in. I was barely right. Still you have sto stretch yourself once and again.