So on Friday, I had dinner with Stark Bledfast and his sizable family: his wife Lynne, two daughters (Rachel and Hannah), and two young sons (Daniel and Joshua). They were in town for Polaris' product expo (as he is a dealer, he was invited to attend). Hanging out with them was quite fun. I'd met Mike, Lynne, and Daniel last September, but I enjoyed meeting his whole family, especially Rachel, who is a smart-ass of above-average quality. I actually caught myself almost flipping her off at one point, which may sound strange, but believe me, that's a compliment. ;)
Anyway, Saturday I hung out with them some more, but ultimately it ended up just being me and Mike at Polaris' Proving Grounds, where they had several different ATVs set up for people to test out the new batch of Polaris machines (since everyone is a dealer, it's ideally so that people will order some to sell). It's something I've never done before, and I had so much fun. I also had so much sun burn on my neck; when I got home, it was incredibly red, and I could see where my name tag had been hanging on my neck all day. I took a nice hot shower, though, and it's been good ever since.
Anyway, my Sunday was fairly uneventful, though I did spend the evening in the company of an incredibly lovely young lady (who had just come from a wedding, so I felt like I was totally undressed, even though we just ate at Steak n' Shake).
...I'm going to write up a summary of each day on the day it happens. I'm still trying to write up everything, and I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. Not only that, but I haven't made much progress on it, because I haven't had much extended time to just sit and write.
Grr.
Wow, I'm not entirely sure of what I did, but I fixed the blacklist. All I did was delete and readd a few entries (basically "*.spamdomain.com"), and all of a sudden I could check for spam again.
I'm turning the Blacklist back on, and will be mass de-spamming over the course of the day.
Wooooo!
Okay, so not only was the Blacklist broken in the sense that I couldn't check everything, but it also was causing people to be unable to comment to any of the blogs. That sucks.
As a result, I've turned off the Blacklist. This means that there's about zilch protection for the blogs, which also sucks, although slightly less than not having anyone be able to post does.
I'm going to try to fix it as soon as I can, but I make no promises as to when the hell that will be.
*sigh* This is so what I want to come home to from a nice vacation.</sarcasm>
Whee, I'm back home. As much fun as I had hanging out with Tim and Danny and everyone else, I'm really glad to be home. Driving my car, sleeping in my own bed, having my knife on me at all times... yes, I've missed this.
However, I've been awake for more than 24 hours now. Not quite sure when I'll go to bed... I'm alternating between being really tired (like I was when my dad picked me up from the airport) to being quite energetic (like I was when I was singing my heart and soul out in the car driving home).
After two rather quick flights (Detroit has a nice airport), I'm now in Pennsylvania. Wooo!
Not long after we got here, Tim took me over to his friend Andy's place, where they have a regular game that goes on. I have to say, I did quite well for a newbie; Tim knocked Andy out, and then I knocked him out. The other guy and I kept switching chips back and forth, until we finally decided to split the pot (which means I made $20). I'm very, very happy about it. :)
Just a tiny little Lair update, but I can't feel too bad; I've got tons of other stuff I need to get done before I leave tomorrow morning, so I'm just happy I got any of it done. :)
Anyway, the first thing you'll probably notice is the slightly redesigned front page. Now all the stuff is horizontal, similar to how it was laid out before the redesign. It's all done with tables, which is bad and yadda yadda yadda, but I don't care; CSS was failing miserably at laying everything out the way I wanted it. I'll try to tweak it a bit more, with the eventual goal being that I ditch the tables entirely, but for now, they're there. *sigh*
Also, I added a new Rant by Pikeman. It's quite good; the fact that I call this a tiny update in no way reflects upon his always-enjoyable Rants. :)
Since I'll be leaving for MacWorld on Saturday, I'm aiming to update the Lair on Friday. Right now, I've got a redone front page, more in line with the old index (3x2 horizontal listing of recent Rants and Reviews, with Jokes and Store Spotlight under that), as well as a new Rant from Pikeman. I'm hoping that I'll get a Review or two nailed out this week; if I can, it'll get added as well.
I'm going to be spending a total of 6 hours in the air, plus another 3 hours on the ground between flights, and then however long it takes to get from Pikeman's place to Danny's. Over the course of all that time, I should get a substantial amount of work done. My primary focus during all this will be to finish converting the Joke Archive, as well as to add a fair number of jokes (I'm thinking of adding 50, just to make it an even 600). To break up the monotony of all that, I'll probably write a Review or two; the new Foo Fighters and Garbage albums have been getting a lot of play in my CD player, and I'll be loading them onto my laptop to take with me.
When I get back, I hope to actually get back into a steady pattern of updating the Lair again. I've got a shitload of saved up Jokes and Quotes that I'd like to start adding to the site on a regular basis; I'm thinking that I could add 20 new Jokes and 10 new Quotes on a bi-weekly basis, with additional content getting added whenever I have it.
Something else that I'd like to do, because I apparently like to punish myself, is to start converting some of the sections to be database-driven. Specifically, I'll start with the Quote Archive. I've got some great ideas bouncing around my head that I'm sure you guys will love, as well as a cool Empire addition that is closely related to it. But I've already said too much... <cryptic grin>
(wow, this is my fourth blog entry in a row. go me!)
After fixing the Blacklist, the first order of business was to clean out all the spam that accumulated over the weekend.
Total number of URLs added to the list: 4
Number of comments deleted: 658
Number of pings deleted: 123
The real problem was actually just a single URL, which represented 639 of the comments and all of the pings.
And I'd like to go on record as saying that mass-deleting that much spam all at one time is not fun. The system can only reliably handle 100 "delete-and-rebuild" functions at a time I've found, so I have to search-and-destroy all that stuff in bunches of 100. It took 15 passes, averaging about 40 seconds each time, but I finally got it all.
What an excellent way to spend the Fourth of July!</sarcasm>
The Blacklist is a little screwed up right now. It still protects against existing blacklisted sites, but it would seem that you can't add anything to it. That sucks.
I'll be working on it tonight and tomorrow. I'm 99.99% sure it'll be up and running properly by the time I go to MacWorld (and if it isn't fixed by then, it won't be touched for another week).
Yay, had a fairly good haul from Target just now. Eight shirts, a new belt, and a ten-pack of hangers for about $100. Oddly enough, the belt was the most expensive single thing I got. :)
I'm gearing up for my MacWorld trip (in exactly one week, I'll be on the plane headed to PA). As a result, I thought I'd buy some new clothes to freshen up the ol' wardrobe with. As a result, I got several dark red and green shirts, since those work fairly well on me, though I also got a few dark gray-ish colored shirts that looked nice as well.
A lot of stuff was on sale. While this is good for the bank account, this means that the one really cool shirt that you found is probably the only one left. More than that, when you get back from the changing room, you won't remember where you found it, and will spend about 20 minutes going back and forth in the mensware department trying to find the damn hanger cluster that you got it from (even though you got it from the big mish-mash of miscellaneous clothing). Grrr.
All in all, I'm quite pleased with what I got. More importantly, I was grasping at straws for something to post to the blog. Huzzah! :)