Back from vacationing in Maine as of yesterday evening.  It’s good to be back in the land of oversized pick-ups and SUVs that is Detroit – everyone on the east coast drove Volvos and Subarus.  That said, sparsely populated Maine was a literal breath of fresh air.  I was able to walk in Thoreau’s footsteps on Mount Kineo, in Moosehead Lake, and climb Dorr Mountain in Acadia National Park, and I ate enough seafood (chowdah, lobstah, crab, shrimp, haddock, scallops, clams, etc.) to last me for quite a while.  I’ve got some catching up to do, some articles that I bookmarked for blogging – if they aren’t already out-of-date, I’ll try and hit some of them tomorrow or Sunday.

Now, I’m off to the Tigers game, although they’re out of the playoff race.  Enjoy the weekend.

(Update – 03-18-2008)
I don’t need you to tell me how great my post is.  I let google analytics and awstats do that for me.

Henceforth, any and all comments of the “Great post, I’ll be reading your blog in the future” will be classified as spam and summarily deleted.  There are few enough exceptions to this rule that I can safely say “there are no exceptions to this rule.”  This rule likely falls on deaf ears, because I’m confident that 99% of these “comments” are automatically generated in an attempt to game some search engines’ algorithms.

If you honestly want to tell me how great my post is, I’m sorry I have to lump you in with these mass-marketing bastards.  But you don’t have anything substantive to add to the discussion, so please don’t add anything to the discussion.

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I finally have to do it. Country Code of .cn will henceforth be blocked. This is inclusive of comment body, so don’t link to a .cn domain. I imagine this will alleviate more than half of the spam I get.

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I use Akismet to control comment spam. So far it’s been fantastic. I review every spammed comment – usually 10 or so a day, and I’ve noticed some patterns, so I’m going to be building a blacklist. Because a significant portion of comment spam appears to come from message boards hosted by schools, I’m changing my settings to disallow comments if the writer’s homepage has a “.edu” top-level domain. (NB: this also precludes you from linking to a .edu source in future comments – sorry!)

Most of the comment spam is also written with BBS code, which is HTML’s bastard child. I’m going to also blacklist things like “[url=” and some other BBS-fare. If you use the trade-name for that purple pill that gives old men boners (or any of its competitors), your comment will be spammed. Many spammers bold part of their content. Accordingly, you cannot use <b> or <strong> tags in comments. Also, you can’t link to .jpg, .bmp, .gif files, etc. Sorry. I am not sure how this will affect approved users – those whose comments appear without moderation. My guess is that the particular comment will be spammed.

The Contact Me form also works now. It should also be spam-proof. Apparently, it was broken for some time, so if you submitted a comment to me that way, don’t think I was ignoring you. Feel free to resubmit.

More restrictions to follow as events warrant.