Unbelievable!

I fell asleep while reading my email and watching the Pats-Raiders game last night, and I dreamed that Al Michaels was sending me spam.

I'm back, maybe

So I'm slowly recovering from last week's trauma. Maybe ready to resume blogging again.

Of course, right now I'm still hung up on housekeeping issues. I did indeed cut and paste in all my Haloscan comments, despite the best efforts of Blogger's spam controls. Apparently, there's some maximum number of comments you can post within a certain amount of time; if you exceed it, Blogger thinks it's spam and disables all commenting on the entire blog for several hours. This happened three times before I figured out that I could get around it by repeatedly disconnecting and reconnecting my internet connection, which changed the IP address and tricked Blogger into thinking I was a different person.

I also added and cleaned up some of the links, got rid of some of the little icons I didn't like, and changed some of the colors. Nothing too drastic, but I at least like it a little better than the defaults for this template.

Anyway, I should hopefully have something more interesting to say soon. Not that I'm sure you don't love hearing all about my comments or the color of the links, or that I learned how to make a favicon, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's probably not that interesting to you. I don't know. I could be wrong. But in any case, I think I'm done with the tinkering for now, and actual substantive posting should resume shortly.

Oh, and by the way?

One whole week. Still no spam.

Just saying.

Events in real life currently have me wanting to stick my head in a vise and twist the crank real hard.

In other news, it's been one day since I registered my new, nineteen-letter email address (see it in all its glory at the right), and I am happy to report that I have not gotten a single piece of spam. Not a one. (Knock on wood, of course.) By way of contrast, the four-letter address I was using previously started getting spam immediately upon registration. It happened so quickly, I got email whiplash, if such a thing exists. And if it doesn't, well, I just made it up.

Spam, Spam, Wonderful Spam

It seems like all I've been posting lately is adminstrative garbage. Unfortunately, most of my creativity (yes, I have creativity, thank you) has been diverted to other pursuits, so there hasn't been much left for the blog. I hope that will change in a few weeks.

For now, though, the latest change is that I've gotten a new Hotmail account to use as the contact email for the blog. It didn't really occur to me when I first chose an address that the spammers use random name generators as a way of producing lists of addresses to send spam to. The hfgm-at-hotmail-dot-com got more spam than I've ever seen, likely because it was so short. It got to the point where real messages were getting overlooked because they got buried in all the spam.

I remembered another hotmail address I once had that was much longer (thirteen letters), and which rarely, if ever, got any spam. I thought that if I chose a new, much longer address to use for the blog, I might not get so much spam.

The new address is at the right. Time will tell if my attempt at thwarting the evil spammers is successful.