Internet trials and freelance progress
I did not post anything on Saturday. For shame. Actually, I would have been happy to post a TED Talk or some musings on Saturday evening, if only the internet in my building had been functioning. It went down (sort of) by 3 p.m. and was not back up until at least 8:30 this morning. Over 40 hours. I had to go and buy some Dazbog coffee in order to get online this morning. (Well, ok, I could have walked to the library, but that’s a 20-minute walk and it was snowing.)
By “sort of,” I mean it was doing the Linksys router thing. If you aren’t familiar with it, every Linksys router (at least the four or so that I’ve encountered) suffers the same flaw. It works for some time — days, weeks, maybe months — and then one minute it kicks you off. The signal is still strong, often the strongest possible, but you cannot fully connect because either a) the attempt stalls and you don’t get assigned an IP address, or b) the attempt stalls and you don’t get assigned a network address. Either way, no intarwebz for you. Either way, the fix (always temporary) takes less than half a minute: find and unplug power to router; wait a few seconds; reconnect power to router; wait a moment while your intarwebz are magically restored. For some reason, forcing the router to reset in this way clears whatever was jamming up the connection. I don’t really know what’s going on, I just know it’s annoying, but an easy fix, but will repeat itself in due time.
And by “I had to … get online this morning,” I mean I actually had a responsibility to take care of that couldn’t wait until the manager got off his bum and reset the router. I finally had some comments to edit for the freelance project. I started at the office on Friday and finished working on the file (offline) over the weekend, but I’d promised to upload it and update the project manager this morning. So I did that.
Now I have four more files to work on (overall totalling about 1.5x the word count of the first file). The manager sent them a couple hours after I posted the finished file. So, cool.




Blog mechanics: Comment spam
I have to wonder how the comment system works on WordPress (or other blogs, probably, but this is where I am and this is where I can see stats). There is always a steady stream of spam comments from I don’t know where. The interesting part of it is that I know these comments are spam, even the ones that trouble themselves to compliment my blog theme (it’s the newest one WordPress posted, incidentally, and I kind of like it). How do I know? The comments appear on days and times when there have been no visitors whatsoever to this blog.*
What I don’t understand is how they can do that. How can someone (person or bot) submit a ‘comment’ to one of my posts without registering any kind of visit on my tracking stats?
Also, why is every single one of them submitted to one of my xkcd posts? (Even more obvious way I know they’re spam: they compliment me on a great article, when I have done nothing but hotlink and link to a single comic from xkcd.) But really, why?
* I wonder what Hofstadter would say about the self-reference. There are some interesting quirks to the way we determine the referent of a pointer like ‘this’ — a phrase like ‘this sentence,’ for example, could be referring to itself or to some other sentence under discussion. But we almost never have to think twice about which it is, when we see it. (‘It’ would certainly have similar issues.)
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