Vision of the future

I opened the copy of Opera on my laptop for the first time in a few days, and was greeted with the following dialog box:

I can only assume I missed hearing about the other 80 major versions in between.

Commentings

Last week I mentioned that my Movable Type installation was being severely pounded by comment spammers, to the extent of causing the server to keel over a few times under the load. Even after renaming my comments script to not be the default MT filename, the attack persisted. I guess these days their bots actually check the action value of the URL to get the script's location, rather than merely assuming. (Ohh, not like the comment spammers we had in our day...)

At the weekend I implemented a slight hack in an attempt to completely prevent bots from finding the comments script. It worked disturbingly well, to the extent where I was paranoid I had eliminated everyone's ability to comment, even though I had tested it! I went from having 3000-3500 comment attempts per week before the script renaming (nearly all attempts blocked successfully by Movable Type), to about 150 per day after the renaming, to one in three and a half days. Marvellous.

Since unfortunately the solution (leaving the form action URL blank in the HTML, and writing it in with Javascript) blocks users without Javascript from commenting, as well as bots, it's just a workaround solution that will stay in place until we implement something like Jeremy Zawodny's got, that will also only let humans comment. But I'm loving it for the moment.

Just say No to swallowing

The flu finally has me. For the past two years it has punctually taken me down at the beginning of Week 3 of term, but this year I managed to stave it off until the end of Week 4! Go me!

I fully reserve the right to blame my mother for infecting me at the weekend.

It's come on rather suddenly — last night my harmless cough suddenly decided to move into my chest, and this morning (and several times through the night) I woke up with a burning sore throat, swollen glands and a slight temperature. Things that were causing me pain: talking, swallowing, coughing. Most of which are handy things that unfortunately came in useful this morning.

I went into my 9am lecture anyway, because it's quite a hard subject to follow just from the notes, but found myself unable to concentrate on anything that was happening. I excused myself from my 10-noon French lesson, and (rather cunningly, I thought) drove to Sainsbury's on the way home to purchase appropriate quantities of soup, lozenges and soft food.

It was fairly embarrassing at the checkout to discover that I had left my wallet at home. Not quite as embarrassing as it would have been to discover this at the uni car park, where I wouldn't have been able to leave, but luckily the barriers were up today, so no tickets required.

I think I'll stay at home for the rest of the day, stay warm, try to soothe my throat with lots of hot liquids (this is a time when drinking tea would come in handy; unfortunately I must make do with hot chocolate), and freak Kevin out by taking lots of Benylin and appearing to enjoy it.

Grab a keyboard

I'm an infrequent blogger. In the past year, I've managed about 3 posts per month, on average. Maybe it's laziness. Or maybe just that I've been out of the habit so long, it takes a lot to get me to make the effort of blogging in the first place.

How funny would it be to optimistically sign up for NaBloWriMo (yes, like that other thing, but with an even more mangled abbreviation), hoping to make a blog post every day in November, and then check on December 1st and find I'd still only done 3 blog posts? You know it's likely to happen.

But I'll try anyway. (Although of course, if I fail dramatically, this post never existed, riiiight?)

I'm still feeling lousy from my bout of flu, which isn't fair because it's been five or six days and it's totally supposed to have gone by now. I've been hovering between proper flu (wanting to sleep all day, and still feeling tired) and a mere bad cold, but I think I'm heading flu-wards again today - temperature, exhaustion and aching eyes. Not to mention the nose that will not unblock (at the weekend I managed to go through 180 tissues in about 18 hours), the sore throat that will not go away, and everything else.

What I would like, please, is for the world to stop for another few days, or even a week, and then I can stay at home and get better and then go back in to uni without missing anything. As it stands, I haven't gone back in since Thursday morning, so I don't feel I can reasonably miss any more lectures. Not to mention that I have to go in for before 9am tomorrow to pick up some French homework (from last week's missed seminar) to complete in the afternoon before class on Thursday. Bah. Getting up before 7am (Kevin's not here, I have to take the bus) might just kill me.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do for the rest of today. I want to nap, but that could defeat my aim of going to sleep really early tonight, so in the meantime I need to find something to do that doesn't require actual brainpower and, hopefully, not staring at the computer screen and making my eyes ache even more. Doing well so far, aren't I?