Peoii’s Place

I went out shopping last weekend with my grandmother as she was out for a visit, and we did a LOT of grocery shopping. What was the one thing I could really go for we didn’t get? Some salmon. Course, living in northern Idaho, finding said salmon isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world. Allow me to explain.

See, I grew up in Bremerton, Washington, which is right on the wonderful Puget Sound. One of the bonuses to living around there was the abundance of amazingly fresh seafood that we had available daily. It wasn’t frozen EVER, it wasn’t “day old”, no, many times what was available was caught earlier that day. So now that I’m even 400 miles inland, I find myself having a hard time finding that elusive fresh seafood that I had grown up loving.

What makes it all the more difficult is reading one of my favorite cooking websites on the planet, seeing a recipe for Gravlax and feeling my mouth start to water. Not only is it an amazingly simple dish to prepare, but it looks oh so tasty! Go ahead, check out that listing, and provided you like seafood at all, that should send your mouth watering. But don’t say I didn’t warn you (especially if you’re not living on the coast with easy access to said seafood).

At any rate, I’m now trying to figure out how to get my salmon locally or have it delivered (say… overnighted perhaps? ). Because something this sinfully easy has to be good.

I’ve always loved things that mess with your head. They intrigue me, frustrate me, and in general, are just amazingly fun. Well in my normal random browsing of the Internet this morning, I ran across a post on a blog I had not read before, that made my head just start pounding with confusion. His post (entitled “Sucker for illusions) left me to believe that looking at the image (which I have posted below), I am not alone in this world being completely befuddled by it. Ahh hell, here’s the picture, you try to figure it out:

Now I know what you’re saying, “Ok, so what’s the trick?”. Well you see, block “A” and block “B” have the same background colour. Yes, that’s right, they’re the exact same thing. Go ahead, test it, pull it up in photoshop or some other editor… You’ll come up with #787878 for both. And if my scaled down version isn’t working (who knows what the compression might have done), go check out the original source of the images over here. He’s got proofs, explanations, and such for your viewing pleasure. Problem being? After reading all the proofs and such, it’s still hard for my wee little brain to accept them as fact! Damn my eyes for tricking me!

Now, with that off my chest, I think I’m going to go get a drink, and let my head expunge that information out of it. Because if I sit here and think on it much more, my brain is going to melt down.

More later.

SPAM, it’s gone from a humble potted meat product to something that everyone (except those making it) hates. Wait a second… ok, so it hasn’t changed in thought much, but it has changed in medium. Ok, yes, I kid. I actually do enjoy the SPAM meat product when prepared correctly, but hey, work with me on this one. At any rate, the digital form of SPAM has started to drive me insane. Fortunately thanks to the tools that the stock install of Wordpress provides me, I can easily capture and dispose of most of the spam before it even hits my blog walls. However, there are those slippery buggers that get thru from time to time, so I’m starting to focus on that now.

The next step in this series is to check out plugins that would allow me to fight back against this spam… And so, the first plugin I tested is known as Bot Check, which forces spam authors (at least in theory) to go thru an additional step of verifying a graphic string before allowing them to post random crap on my blog. Great idea, but upon attempt to install, I discovered my host is lacking one of the libraries I need to run it. Sure, I could email them and ask em to enable it… But I’m feeling rather lazy, and should I decide to move hosts, I don’t want to have to carry a huge list of addons I need for them to activate on my account before I can get up and running. So, on to the next option.

Next in line? A rather interesting non-Wordpress specific package known as Bad Behavior. What’s it do? Well, I’ll let them explain it…

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spam bots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spam bots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referrer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

Sounds pretty cool huh? I thought so. Not only was the installation a BREEZE, but it allows me to log all the bad requests, find out what their doing and how, and even goes as far as to allow me to white list people in the event that they were blocked when they should not have been. All without me really having to modify anything at all in this package. Me like!

What do you know, tried out two packages, and the second one did everything I wanted and more. Not only that, but I get the peace of mind that now spammers will have to fight thru yet another iron curtain to get into my blogs comments. This is very very appealing to me, and I can’t wait to find out how much of an impact this is going to have on my current spam levels. My prediction? I think it’ll help significantly. But only time will tell, and here’s to hoping.