sethrichards.com » General

Blog Notes

Seth Richards — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:29:54 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, so it was about time. I’m not sure what type this is, but I stumbled across a small cluster of them while out hiking at Salamonie a few weeks back.

Salamonie Flower

If you’ve been visiting the site recently you’ve probably noticed I’ve been playing around with a few changes. Probably the most notable is that I’m no longer posting full-sized images directly in the posts, as it was making it too difficult to find themes to base the site on. Instead, you can now click on the inline image to view the full-sized one in a Javascript popup. Leave a comment if you encounter any problems…

Back in… white?

Seth Richards — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:06:35 +0000

Sorry for the rather lengthy outage on this page. Here’s the story. As I posted before, I’d been getting an increasing volume of comment spam for a while, and it was getting completely out of hand. To the point where I was getting more emails in my inbox telling me there was new comment spam posted than I was getting normal email spam, or indeed legit emails. And disallowing new comments wasn’t even helping; there was apparently some other vector into the site than the comment box. So I had to do something.

So I took advantage of the opportunity to take the site down for a while, and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, and do some reorganization behind the scenes while I was at it. Unfortunately it took a lot longer than I expected, since I got quite busy and then went on vacation, and I’m just now getting around to fixing it. Sorry to all three of my faithful readers.

Also, I apologize for breaking any permanent links, bookmarks, and RSS feeds you might have been using. The RSS feed can now be found here, and you can email me if there are previous posts or other stuff that you can’t find. Also if you find broken links let me know.

Also also, I know the new all-white minimalistic theme is something of a departure from the previous look, but it’s just a placeholder that I pulled off the web until I can put something new together. I liked the old one, but it was getting a bit dated and didn’t support the new features in WordPress 2.0. We’ll see if I manage to come up with a replacement in a reasonable timeframe, but I wouldn’t hold my breath…

A Comment on Comments

Seth Richards — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:13:13 +0000

I’ve been dealing with an outrageous amount of comment spam on this blog lately, despite not updating it very often. So this is just a reminder that I’ve got comment moderation enabled, which means that comments get emailed to me for approval before they show up. After having to log in and remove over 100 spam comments in the past week or so (each of which generates an email in my inbox) I’ve decided to add some words to the blacklist, meaning that if these words appear in your comments they’ll be deleted and I’ll never even see them.

Not to worry though, none of the words on the blacklist show up in legit comments. Anybody looking to discuss ringtones, “swingers” or any of a wide variety of prescription drugs is out of luck, I’m afraid. Everybody else should be fine.

Long time no post

Seth Richards — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:30:49 +0000

So I’ve been pretty much shirking my bloggerly duties for the past month or so, and I apologize to my regular readers (both of them). In an attempt to rectify this situation for the future, I’ve decided to open up the posting a bit and allow some others to post to the site. So please welcome my first guest poster, who also happens to be my brother…

An Abundance of Sensitivity

Seth Richards — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 09:59:43 +0000

As Ross pointed out in the comments to my last post, the RIAA has dropped the suit mentioned in my previous post. I’m sure it had everything to do with “an abundance of sensitivity”, and nothing at all to do with the deluge of bad press they were getting…

Oh, no… you won’t get away that easily

Seth Richards — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 23:24:09 +0000

Anybody who’s been following the various copyright battles over the last few years is aware that the Recording Industry Ass. of America has been on a campaign of ~~extortion~~ litigation against alleged filesharers, where they contact you demanding that you settle for some thousands of dollars, with the threat of taking you to court if you don’t settle. It’s been working pretty well for them, since the cost of going to court to defend yourself would typically be higher than the amount they’re asking in settlement.

Well, it’s been working well if you believe that there’s no such thing as bad press. We’ve seen such gems as the RIAA pursuing a Snoop-Dogg loving grandmother, a 12-year-old girl, and suggesting that students drop out of college to pay their settlements. It’s like they’re actively aspiring to be moustache-twisting silent movie villains, cackling wildly as they evict the helpless heroine and her children from their home.

I think the latest one takes the cake though. When the defendant dies partway through the suit, what do you do? Why, go after the family, of course! To be fair, they magnanimously granted the family sixty whole days to grieve before they haul them in front of the court for the sins of the father. How gracious of them.

It’s unbelievable to me. Even if they’re not sensitive to the demands of common decency, you’d think they’d have some sensitivity to the fact that these cases make the entire recording industry look like a bunch of heartless, money-grubbing middle men. I know every time I see another one of these stories it makes me think twice about buying more CDs and continuing to pump money into the industry that may turn around and sue me for my troubles…

Sorry

Seth Richards — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 12:13:28 +0000

Sorry about the lack of updates recently, and for missing the Friday Photo last week. Unfortunately when things get busy the website’s pretty much the first thing to go. Hopefully I’ll get some time to make some posts this weekend.

Commentary

Seth Richards — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:02:02 +0000

A while back, I enabled comments for posts, but never mentioned it. If you’re interested in leaving one you can click on the title for a post and leave a comment at the bottom of that page. The tiny text on the right of the title block shows if there’re any comments for that post, and you can also click on that to leave a comment. Yes, I realize it’s nearly unreadable; it’s one of the many bits of CSS I need to clean up on the site.

If your comment doesn’t show up immediately, it’s probably been sent to me for approval (to cut down on comment spam). Unfortunately, I just realized this evening that there have been a couple comments for an old post hanging in the moderation queue for a couple weeks now, and I never noticed. Sorry about that, guys. I’ll try to watch that more closely in the future. Might have to see about backing down some of the moderation settings while I’m at it.

Hooray for Companies with a Conscience

Seth Richards — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 22:13:58 +0000

A few weeks back, I found out that SendStation was giving away Firewire PocketDocks for the cost of shipping. The PocketDock is a little widget that restores functionality that Apple removed from the 3rd gen and later iPods, allowing you to use any old Firewire or USB cable (depending on which dock you get) to attach the iPod to your computer without messing with Apple’s special dock connector. Not something I really wanted to pay 20+ bucks for, but a pretty good deal at ~$6. So I went ahead and ordered one.

It’s a nice little product, but that’s not really what this post is about. When I went to check out on SendStation’s web store, they have an option to use an “ecologically friendly cardboard package” for shipping. It was no extra cost, so I checked the box, and kind of forgot about it. When the thing arrived in the mail a few days ago, I was pleased to see that the only packaging it came in was what you see above. A lightweight cardboard sleeve and a small shipping envelope. In this day and age of oversized, hard to open plastic blister packaging designed to make items hard to shoplift and stand out in the sea of product on store shelves, I just found this really refreshing. Kudos to SendStation for putting a bit of thought into the simple things!

“This means something. This is important.”

Seth Richards — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 02:27:43 +0000

Thanks to the magic of Javascript, I now have randomly switching header images at the top of the page. There are only a couple of images at the moment, but I’ll be adding more in the future, promise. If you’re still seeing the waterfall, you can reload the page until you see the new one. Fun!

Props to Rob for the scripting help with this. Saved me a ton of time reading and messing around with this stuff…