due to last week's deluge of perfectly innocent looking spam comments, which i've no idea how to filter anymore (they come from random ip addresses and contain normal looking plain text) - comment posting is now switched to manual mode.

this means that comments will only appear on the site after i read them, which might delay them a bit. however, given the low comment traffic on this blog, there shouldn't be a noticeable difference to readers.

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this blog is two years old. oh my.

i'll put up the birthday graphic again for the occasion.

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so my hit counter has reached 100,000. too bad most of those are automated spammer bots. i've tried to exclude these in the past - more successfully so when i still spent a little more time on it.

but still - sometime yesterday, my blog pages were requested by someone or something for the 100,000th time.

[confetti]

the 100,000 visit was actually from a spam bot (most likely), reading an entry from july 8th 2004 (ironcially about comment spammers). the visit occurred at 15:36:43 local time, yesterday, january 25th. the ip address is registered in an unknown location, but with similar ip addresses located in moscow, russia.

this ip address is now blocked.

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i think this is pretty much it. i don't see myself updating this blog in the near future.

hope you had a nice ride while it lasted. i might come back with a more research-focused version of this later on.

update sep.23 - actually maybe i shouldn't call it dead quite yet. i might just write less frequently.

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ok, it's time to face up to the facts. my planned travel date is nearing and i still haven't got most of the shit together. so slim chances that i'm gonna be writing before i leave for a month long trip into the unknown.

guess it's time to officially douse the juice on this blog for a while.

still haven't decided if i'm gonna run my travel log from this location, but i'm guessing that internet access might not really enable that very well.

so since it's gonna be a while before i return, and i don't expect anyone to hang around...

if you want to get an email when i'm back and back writing here, send me an email to .

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comments are back up. let's see how it works.

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due to server trouble, i can not reliably display/add comments.

the feature will be back up when the sysadmins will have fixed the problem.

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so it's been a year since i started this blog. hope i lived up to most of my promises.

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trying to post my comment on the previous blog post discussion, my bloodhound-y spam filter wouldn't let me. i had to look at the log to find out why: i used the work 'socialist' in the post, which includes the illegal string 'cialis'.

to quote yariv: 'can you imagine how much of the current socialist agenda is blocked all around the world?'

seriously!

no wonder socialism died when the internet started. imagine there was a you-know-what (don't want to attract any more spam) drug called 'pitalis'. that would be the end of the free market...

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added a favicon to my blog. since it's a png file, though, i think it won't work with internet explorer on windows.

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"If one candidate's trying to scare you and the other one's trying to get you to think, if one candidate's appealing to your fears and the other one's appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope."
- Bill Clinton, Philly, Oct 25

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the last image i saw before waking up today was me walking down a pier towards an oilrig. someone unknown to me was standing on a small float in the bay and shouting towards a larger ship, on which my good friend was standing. he was using israeli army jargon that is impossible to translate.

lately i've been consistently waking up 5 minutes before my alarm clock.

i also had other, sadder, dreams. dreams that are better forgotten.

much to write about these last few days, and no wish whatsoever to do so.

with that i am signing off, at least for a while, 8 months and two days after my first entry.

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got hit by about 150 comment spams tonight promoting cialis. i just hope it's not from a real ex-girlfriend of mine or something.

i had to manually remove them from my files, which was a royal pain, and i reverted to some scripting. if i deleted one of your comments in the process, please accept my deepest apologies.

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just short of deleting yesterday's o'reilly entry, i adjusted it and took out some - true, but irrelevant - paragraphs. the whole thing got carried away out of my glee for someone who is such an asshole getting hurt, and looking back a day later it seems unproportional.

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rapidly approaching my 20,000th hit.

update: quicker than i thought - my 20,000 hit came from arlington, ma - by someone who was googling my name.

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two simple pleas to website designers and bloggers:

• please put your links and shit on a right-side bar, especially if you have tons of information there. i'm sick and tired of waiting for all the information i am not in the least interested in to load before the actual content loads. if you're nifty with css or html and can make the bottom of your page load to the left side, big up yourself.
• please do not open external links in a new window. i know, as most people do, how to open links in a new window if i'm so inclined. that should be the choice of the reader, not the writer. why would you want to make your site feel like a porn site?

this has been a public service announcement sponsored by citizens concerned with my sanity.

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weird network phenomenon happening on this site. at this moment almost all the searches leading to my blog are related to the ali g commencement speech. the only thing is that they all lead to the searches page, which is filled with referencs to the words 'ali g commencement speech', so my search listings is a big hit on google for these words, which only reinforces this phenomenon.

i guess it's time for a robots.txt file...

update: er, except that i don't own the top level directory in this domain - so i'll have to improvise something especially for googlebot.

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off to nyc

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nine days after it was announced, the the countup is complete. thanks for participating. the 10,000 log entry belongs to a reader from israel, who reached my site searching for this blog specifically.

naturally, apple beat me to it.

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off to l.a.

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in perfect sync with apple's countup to 100 million songs, i'm counting up to my 10,000th blog hit since march 2004. this count started at around 9270 entries.

the winner here, too, will receive a gift certificate for 100 free viewings of future blog entries.

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since we're on the topic of comments, here's a quick streetpoll - what's the level of interest in a 'recent comments' section on the right bar?

there's no real easy way for anyone (except me) to know about newly posted comments.

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i can't believe i didn't think of that before! it was so obvious.

google ripped off their 'label' idea from my blog categories. guess they couldn't resist the striking logic of being able to file something under multiple categories, and then filter according to each one of those 'labels'.

now, a google press release confirms my worries:

there you have it. i can't believe these guys.

update: the incriminating press release has since been removed from the google web servers.

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if you have noticed that my rss feed doesn't support the 'check update' feature in mozilla's cool rss reader panel, you can now rejoice. it's fixed.

it's mishandling on the panel's part if you ask me, but whatever. i'm compliant.

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in case you wondered, schmuddelblog says it best:

(links not fit for professional environments)

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comments have been disabled.

please feel free to email me if you'd like to comment on anything on this site.

for users of my php code, the comment section has been neatly commented out and can be utilized in full by removing the '//' tags from the obvious 7-or-so lines in functions.php.

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apologies to IE users and some other windows users - the comments feature seems to not work/work badly/ruin the layout on some of these systems.

i'll try to fix it tonight.

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after multiple requests (admittedly only by a single reader), this blog now has comments. you are invited to speak your mind if you so desire.

read more...

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불상해 (apparently something akin to "poor baby" in korean)

and this is my name: 가이

oh, i love new languages. and they say korean can be learned in a single morning.

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with the blog's 3rd month clocking out and blog entries piling up, the blog code has been updated to only show the 20 most recent entries by default. all entries can still be shown using the filter links on the right, which now also include by-month filtering and counters for the various months/categories. enjoy responsibly.

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i finally saw my page on IE on windows. i had no idea that these were the colors y'all have had to look at. all other browsers showed it nicely. apologies.

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will be on the road from tonight and until the 29.4 - posts may slow down to a trickle.

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click on the 'searches' link on the right to see what people searched for when they ended up on this page.

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each entry now has a little 'direct link' that you can copy/paste to save, to link to or to send your friends. i'm still undecided on whether this should link to the entry's anchor on the main page or to a separate page with only the entry on it. i guess it doesn't matter much.

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you can now filter the blog by category. the list of the current categories is on the right, and you can also directly link to index.php?cat=whatever .

and as long as we have the mic on, note the new rss feed and the oh-so-open source blog php code that you can download just below the picture of that handsome bloke on the right. the code is experimental, unedited and come with no warranty, so it might not be suited for young children.

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a first stab at displaying right-to-left hebrew is up. haven't tested it on different browsers yet, so drop me a line if it displays weirdly on any of them.

here's my first column this year, illusions in a knit vest.

and here's my second (last week's): robin hood of the bottle caps.

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this might be a totally stupid idea, but this morning i felt both the urge and the motivation to start a weblog.

read more...

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