“This new type of man turns his interests away from life, persons, nature, ideas — in short from everything that is alive; he transforms all life into things, including himself and the manifestations of his human faculties of reason, seeing, hearing, tasting, loving…..The world becomes a sum of lifeless facts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs; the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. He has no plan, no goal for life, except doing what the logic of technique determines him to do. He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot.”

–Erich Fromm

Hmm..looking at the comment accumulator here, it appears that the tribal blogs are getting hit pretty hard.

The best way to stop it that I’ve found, and at the very least, not displaying the links and thus depriving the spammer of their motivation, is to set comments with links to be moderated unless they have had a previously approved comment.

To enable this feature, go into your admin panel, then options. Select “discussion” and enable “Comment author must fill out name and email”, and “Comment author must have previously approved comment.” Then in the Comment Moderation section, set the threshold link value to one.

God I hate spammers.

K@ and Taylor - you have some comment deleting to do. If you care.

So…as you have all probably noticed…the site has sucked ass for about 2 weeks now. At first it was completely down because of the aforementioned router issues. Since then, it has been periodically going down on the order of 20 times a day, when the cable modem mysteriously decides to reboot, all on it’s own.

At first, I called Comcast, and was told they couldn’t send a technician out until September 1st. I was pissed, but resigned myself to the fact I would have to go to the Comcast office and kill every single one of the motherfuckers pick up a new cable modem on my own, which would hopefully fix the problem and then the tech wouldn’t need to come, and I could get back to playing WoW in peace. Yet, that idea failed since the account is in my bosses name, and they didn’t want to give me a new cable modem.

I called Comcast back, told them the situation, and said I wanted a tech here sooner, or I wanted these last two weeks pro-rated and the bill lowered. At that point, they said they found an opening for yesterday between 11:00am and 2:00pm. That sucks…but was acceptable.

The tech showed up at 2:07pm…and of course, the modem behaved perfectly, and the tech could detect no problem. He said that within 72 hours a lineman would come out, and verify all the cabling to the building was fine. He left, after browsing the Internet from my computer for an hour, to “make sure it stays working.”

I got home from work, logged on to WoW and within five minutes the modem rebooted and I was disconnected.

So today I called them back again. This time, the guy on the phone said he could clearly see from his remote tests that the modem had a problem and that we would need a new one. The earliest he can get a tech here to give me a new one is the 30th of August.

I told him that was unacceptable, but there was nothing he could do. So I called back again, posed as my boss, and had Dimitri’s name added into the notes on the account stating that he would be coming to pick up the modem because “I” can’t get away from work to deal with this nonsense.

So that’s the update. We’ll see how it goes. If everything works as it’s supposed to (unlikely), we’ll have a new cable modem up and humming by 5:00pm or so tonight…otherwise, we’ll be screwed until the 30th.

UPDATE: Got a new modem. It’s installed and working. So far I’ve played Warcraft for roughly 1.5 hours with no disconnects…so hopefully we’re back in business. Keep fingers crossed.

I think I may very well have to buy this: The BBS Documentary

It’s really crazy to think back to the BBS days, which really didn’t seem that long ago, and which I was very sad to see go.

You can always head over to “The Cult of the Dead Cow” if you want to take a trip down nostalgia lane along with me. Also, www.textfiles.com contains an impressive archive of the old BBS text files of yore. I used to stay up all night long on my 386 w/ 4MB of ram and read all sorts of crazy things on local BBS’s, or playing Barren Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon, or Tradewars. Before the internet, you could even dial up to an O.D.O.T BBS to get weather and road condition reports from all over the state…

I’m not alone in my nostalgia either…searching the web turns up many people expressing a similar sadness over the demise of the BBS scene…such as this article, or or this one at the cDc.

While there is vastly more information on the internet, and it’s reachable at a much greater speed, it’s got a hollow feeling that can never compete with hearing your modem dial for the five millionth time and finaly get a carrier instead of a busy signal so that you can respond to your friends posts, and get your daily door game fix.

Oh well, all good things come to pass I guess.

A very apt quote from one of the above linked articles:

“We experienced the golden age. The problem with golden ages is that it is a description used after it is over. The net will probably never return to the good old days but small pockets of freedom will always exist, like hidden oases.” - Stein Gjoen

So the Mac Endub shipped me arrived today. It’s the first Mac I’ve ever had. A G3 350mhz. It’s sweet, a bit on the slow side, but suprisingly great for it’s age.

OS X, for those who don’t already know, is by far the best PC operating system, EVAR! I knew this even before I received my own Mac, but now I’m totally convinced.

It even makes my blog look better. Fonts are smoother, and things just generally have an air of coolness to them that Windows lacks. Back with OS 9, I could understand people claiming PC’s were better, but it’s not the case anymore. Mac’s running OSX are simply the cream of the computing crop, there’s absolutely no comparison.

Back to retro gaming now. Thanks for reading my nerdgasm.

Prison terms on tap for ‘prerelease’ pirates | CNET News.com

File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, under a bill that’s slated to become the most dramatic expansion of online piracy penalties in years.

The bill, approved by Congress on Tuesday, is written so broadly it could make a federal felon of anyone who has even one copy of a film, software program or music file in a shared folder and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released. Stiff fines of up to $250,000 can also be levied. Penalties would apply regardless of whether any downloading took place.

If signed into law, as expected, the bill would significantly lower the bar for online copyright prosecutions. Current law sanctions criminal penalties of up to three years in prison for “the reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies or phonorecords of one or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more.”

Absolutely brilliant. Nothing quite like draconian law making to fight a “problem” you will never be able to defeat without shutting down the internet.