: P

I’m out of town, so don’t expect too many updates until Tuesday night or so. In the meantime, leave me lots of comments and write ABC to save Pushing Daisies.

My website got taken down for a short while because I had some trouble paying my bills. Specifically, the credit card being charged for hosting expired a while back and I forgot to update it in the online payment center. Anyway, we should be good now.

Justice Jam 2008 is in the planning stages right now, and we’re getting ready to start promotion. Check out the website:

http://www.justicejam.com

If you haven’t talked to me or read Janelle’s blog lately, we’re all moved into our new house. We’re still improving some things (finishing up some painting and varnish, cleaning out the previous owner’s stuff from the basement, installing space-age litterboxes… you know, common stuff), but it really feels like home. Also, compared to our last place, our new kitchen has SO MUCH SPACE. This diagram should help you understand our last kitchen:

Also, I’m typing on a relatively new 19-inch monitor, which we found in the basement. (It was marked “Kids’ Computer”—but it’s my computer now!)

I’m actually terribly sick right now, so I’ll keep this short. Pictures are coming once we get a little more cleaned up.

Would you adopt this cat?

I found it on PetFinder.

Oh, and I got promoted to Senior at work today. So my new title is tentatively Senior High Wizard of Affiliate Technology (but they’ve said I can make up anything I want with the word “senior” in it).

I recently received this comment in my for moderation bin:

Dr. Riekeyword – Child Abuse Avoidance Suggestion Tool

We like your blog!…

[…]Mabuhay, my colleagues and I heard of your blog over at McBrides, so we thought we would take a look. We’ve read several of your posts and we all agree that you have a fine writing style[…]

I checked out the website. It’s a legit site dedicated to researching how to prevent child abuse, based out of the Philippines. I checked out the IP address, and it is indeed an IP from the Philippines. I was still a little suspicious (for those who don’t know, IP addresses are easy to fake), so I Googled it. It turns out this same comment is showing up in blogs all over the Internet. Why? Because it’s likely to get approved. But once a comment has been approved, subsequent comments by that registered user are automatically approved. So what we’re probably looking at is a spam bot that’s working its way into thousands of blogs. One day, a switch will get flipped and those thousands of blogs will be absolutely flooded with spam.

I thought that it might be possible that the creator of this website is trying to get backlinks to her site (for SEO rankings and to cash in on other blogs’ popularity). But if so, a little more effort would probably be put into the comments. It wouldn’t be the same comment, word for word, pasted into hundreds of blogs. And anyway, blogging software by default puts a nofollow on outgoing links in comments, so they don’t get any SEO rankings for backlinks from blogs.

If you’ve allowed this comment into your blog, you might want to delete it and delete the user as well. Let me know if you have any evidence to the contrary.

Andrew’s blog just won a thinking blog award. I thought, “You know, that’s a really good idea. I should start recognizing blogs that make me think.” But then, I thought, “Wait a minute—do I want to reward thinkers, or doers?” So, on that note, let me present the new Pulpexplosion blog award:

Feel free to nominate folks.

That’s right: I caved in and installed WordPress. I’ll work on getting all the old content moved over to the new format in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll try to write a few entertaining posts to keep you entertained.