comment spam

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse -- easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I've seen on Jeremy Zawodny's blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer's script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, "what the the color of the sky?" or "3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?"

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in Wordpress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me...

NH State site with community profiles

This is one of those hard to find, but handy URLs that are so common with government sites.

The New Hampshire Employment Security's Economic and labor Market information Bureau's site has a breakdown useful information about each town/city in the state.

NH Community Profiles

I found this link in the weekly free newspaper, the Merrimack News Connection.

listening to podcasts on a less than optimal mp3 player

Today some of the kids have a 5 hour fencing competition and I wanted to get caught up listening to some podcasts. The problem is the cheap little RCA Lyra 1080B has a couple problems with listening to long mp3s. When you pause playback for more than a few minutes, the device turns off, but on restart it resets to the beginning of the mp3. Also there is no way forward ahead within an mp3.

So looked around google for a way to split mp3s into smaller chunks and found
mp3splt.

This is how I load up the mp3 player with podcasts now:

Copy those 'casts I want to a tmp directory and then:

mp3splt -f -a -t 5.0 *.mp3

Which splits all the mp3s in the current directory into 5 minute chunks.

Then copy those chunks to the player mounted on /mnt:


find . -name "*00.mp3" -printf 'cp -v "%p" /mnt n' | sh


Off to the competition!

[update: Griffin got 3rd and Trevor 6th in novice Epee 12 and under while
Spencer came in 4th for 13 and older]

Be nice to me today

I gave blood at work.



Some kind of personal best -- from signing in to heading back to the office -- a total of 1:15m.

And I got a free t-shirt out of the deal.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I voted

Around 10am in Merrimack, it took perhaps all of 15 minutes to vote. I've put some photos over on http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn

Wendy, doing GOTV (Get Out The Vote) for Kerry/Edwards, has been on the road since 5:30am getting signs out to folks, voter rolls to the poll watchers, names and maps to canvasser.

Busy, busy, busy.

Bunch of photos from yesterday's John Kerry Rally in Manchester's City Hall Plaza

I uploaded a bunch of new photos from yesterday's event:

John Kerry Rally, Manchester NH (31-Oct-2004)

Photos include:

* Granny D Haddock
* Red Sox management ( Red Sox co-owner John Henry, who was joined by partner Tom Werner and general manager Theo Epstein)
* Lou D'Alessandro
* Bunch of photos of John Kerry (natch)
* Couple of photos of Senator George Mitchell (here you go Juri of Harvard)
* Spencer in a clown suit with a sign "No more clowns in the White House"
* All the kids in halloween costume
* A photographer (from JK campaign?) taking pictures of the kids after the event (Who are you and where can I get copies?)
* Snipers on the Manchester City Hall Plaza clocktown and building (which Trevor thinks is such a cool job)