Just because I can. I am in a Kinkos in Pasadena, CA right now, visiting LA for thanksgiving. It turns out Kinko’s will let you use their internet for free if you use your own laptop.

I am here checking my email and downloading (and using) a program, PodWorks which allows one to extract songs their iPod back to their computer. I needed it because I needed to burn a CD from songs on my iPod (my rental car only has a CD player), but the songs were on my external hard drive at home in New Jersey. The CD just finished burning.

I am such a geek.

…and on my little updated, unread blog. I think they spammed every entry, and several were spammed with up to 4 comments. I know lots of people have been having these problems; I just can’t believe it filtered down to me.

It would have been a huge PITA to remove all those comments without MT-Blacklist plugin. I had heard of it before, but found it on the Movable Type main page. It wasn’t too difficult to install, just download, unpack, upload and change permissions. I could imagine it being complicated for someone who doesn’t know UNIX though. I expect to get an email from Sam pretty soon.

It worked great. Its default list got most of my spam. I added a custom field (fda.gov – someone was posting with that fake address) that got rid of the rest.

Really, what is the point of all that spam? Am I or my nonexistent readers really going to buy viagra from you? Assholes.

Just got through processing a bunch of digital photos I took this halloween. I was starting to use iPhoto but, I was quite frustrated with its slowness, especially on my large photo library. So I started opening the images with Photoshop’s file browser. It was much faster, of course. The images were also smaller, but they took about as long to load in photoshop as they did to preview in iPhoto. Photoshop also recognized the automatic rotation that my camera embeds in each file, meaning that all the verticals were vertical in the right orientation. That saved a surprising amount of time. Most importantly I could do a batch action on any group of files I selected, saving lots of time, letting me alter each image, and letting me edit. Very useful when I had a bunch of shots I wanted to e-mail people: I could select the images and the go do something else while photoshop resized them, preformed some basic tonal correction and saved the jpegs in a different spot. I could even automatically create a web gallery based on the images I selected.