Sorry to pollute your feeds, folks - just need to see if I found the problem or not.

Gary LaPointe usefully pointed out that a mess o' spam links popped up in my last post. It was the weirdest thing - only appeared in Google Reader, and I couldn't see them in source anywhere, although he could. Anyway, a little searching turned up some help in the WordPress forums, so hopefully this is all fixed up now.

One of the games I like to play on the Xbox 360 is Viva Pinata. It's a gentle game, kind of silly but still fun. The gist of it is that you have a garden and you can grow various plants to attract different kinds of pinatas. The fun lies in getting a new special species of pinata and/or in decorating your garden with outlandish stuff. It's a good game. So we picked up Viva Pinata 2: Trouble in Paradise when it came out, and I was kind of excited to see what they had added. Unfortunately, I think they've broken it. It's not fun anymore. You see, in the first game, there were bad guys who would come in and break ...

It seems I'm not really writing posts anymore. I'll be contemplating what to do with this space going forward. You can still find me at Twitter and elsewhere.

I bought a new laptop this week - one of the new 13" MacBooks. It's very pretty and I'm enjoying it very much. My HP laptop died a month or two ago, so I'd been waiting on tenterhooks for the announcement of these new Mac laptops. I tried to go get one the day after the announcement, but the Briarwood store was useless and didn't have any. But my dear friends wouldn't let me be deterred and we went out to Novi on Wednesday afternoon. They had them there - yay - and now I have one. It was an interesting sight at the store - one after another after another new laptops walking out the door. I made an apple ...

Sometime yesterday afternoon, something went wrong with the video driver or monitor on my PC laptop. It just beeps at me when I turn it on. Beeeeeep Beep Beep -> black screen. Now, I have been itching to get a MacBook now that my main machine is a Mac, but I don't want to right this second. Rumor has it that the line is due for an update before the holidays, so it just doesn't seem wise to buy one right now. The two main uses of the PC laptop were Microsoft Money, where we keep all our accounting data, and the boys use it to look up walk-throughs for the console games they play while sitting in front of the tv. ...

I've avoided having an automated bookmark posting plugin here, but now that Delicious allows 1000 character comments, it makes a good micro-blogging tool. So some Delicious posts should appear here and I'm going to take them out of the sidebar.

If you're using Plurk, you may not want to see your karma score. It can be annoying to watch it yo-yo. Today, the folks at Plurk made it possible to change the look of some things on your page via CSS.  So I found the places to change the color of the karma score. If you change the color to the same color as the background of the box, it will essentially disappear. Here's the code; you'll have to change the color to whatever is appropriate for your style. (So, for example, if yours is black, it would be color: #000000; ) #dash-stats span.karma_hover { color: #A35BAE; } #dash-stats span#karma.karma_yellow { color: #A35BAE; } #dash-stats h3+a.link_arrow { color: #A35BAE; }

Oh dear, with a picture and everything. And big thanks to Ed Vielmetti for being a good sport. Now. Go sign up for Startup Weekend.

musings on Twitter, spam, following and blocking I like Twitter. The main two reasons I use it are keeping up with local people and getting interesting ideas and opinions from a wider circle of interesting people. Another reason I like it is that spam is kept to a minimum by virtue of the way the system is set up. Because you decide who to follow (ie. listen to), it's impossible for someone to send you unsolicited messages. So it's not very easy for spammers to get any traction. That doesn't mean they won't try, though. The chief way spammers seem to be trying to get their message out is to follow a ton of people. When you follow someone, the system generates ...