Category Archives: The Internet

See, I’ve got records on y’all now!

Since doing the clean install of my site on the 19th, my security has noted that my first spambot attack came from IP blocks in Malaysia, Poland and California at three in the morning, Seattle time. These were searching for … Continue reading

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Remember FOAF and Atom?

Yeah, me neither. Due to the requirements of technical skill, the WWW, RSS, Atom and FOAF never evolved into the decentralized social networking and news dissemination platforms that smart people in 2001 hoped they would be. Instead we got Facebook … Continue reading

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Recovering from a Spambot Attack

So, sometime towards the middle or end of March, my site got hit with a spamdexing attack. Nearly all my pages got littered with links to illegal boner pill sites. I suspect, and I really can’t prove this, the attack … Continue reading

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Old News About the Divided Internet

This fulmination I’ve repeated many times and is about ten years out of date. And it’s full of remarks that people smarter and better paid than me have already long made. My time online is now divided between two realms. … Continue reading

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Education Still Stinks, But Might be Getting Better

About eight years ago I wrote a short essay about how education has remained largely unchanged, aside from the introduction of mass education after the arrival of the printing press, since the Pyramids. This is a particularly bitter pill for … Continue reading

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A preliminary review of Roll20

Despite all my quixotic efforts to be the hippest thing on this planet, many things still surprise me. As early as 2003 (and 2005, twice.) I’d been wondering if there were software tools to do bookkeeping and physics for turn-based … Continue reading

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Why don't I embed video on my site?

Well, this gets into my endless arguments about W3C standards, interoperability and freedom from any proprietary software. But basically I hate Adobe’s Flash utility. Yes, it’s widely supported but, it’s proprietary and, I’d rather not have the Internet held to … Continue reading

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More blathering about decentralized, interoperable social networks

So, since many of my friends overseas or far away are there, I’m forced to use Facebook. I find Facebook objectionable for many reasons, most of which, most people don’t care about. Facebook has a lot of powerful functions and … Continue reading

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Tabletop RPGs on the Internet

So over the last few months, I’ve been using VoIP to join in tabletop RPG sessions with friends around the world. With players in Bahrain, Thailand, NYC and San Diego, we’ve been running play sessions nearly every alternate Thursday for … Continue reading

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Recognizing comment spam

Now that my site is back up, spambots are bludgeoning it with comment spam, which was also true in my Movable Type days. Luckily I have things set here to require my approval before allowing them to appear on my … Continue reading

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