RSS integrated

As in: Blogistry

So I've added my "at home" feed from netflix to my sidebar there (check down at the bottom). It only shows the "at home" link for my personal queue -- Jenny and I each have our own and share one too. You'll probably be ashamed to see that it's almost all horror, sf, and war movies. :D Any netflix subscibers out there, let me know and I'll add you to my friends list.

Alas, the easiest way I could figure out to do this was to use an externally hosted php script. Ugh. Is there a better way? This is an MT blog, btw.

Spam crazy

As in: Blogistry

I've had a recent spamstorm of dozens each day, so I've temporarily disabled comments. I hope to bring them back soon, but we'll see.

Back! OR How Attending Two Conferences in a Single Month Killed my Blogging

As in: Blogistry

So it turns out that when I get swamped, I tend to ignore my faithful readers out there. Fear not, Digital Sextant fans, I am back. Expect the next few days to include various comics-related posts and other nincompoopery.

In the meantime, some notes from the last few weeks.

1. Old Friends and New at CCCC It was fun to see and meet all my old friends and new. I didn't do enough of the conference proper, but I've discovered that hometown conferences are harder to attend faithfully than ones you have to travel to.
2. More conference fun at PCA/ACA I saw more old friends and new at PCA/ACA in Atlanta.
3. I saw today as the acme of busy-ness for the semester. It's all teaching from here on out, except for my presentation at Intersections on May 2.
4. More to come.

Layout back (mostly)

As in: Blogistry

My friend Matt (who happens to be the Columbia webmaster) recovered most of my templates, but I had to build my links list again from memory. If your blog was on there before and I've excised it, please email me and I'll put it back up. The removal was due to my terrible memory rather than any personal dislike.

Metapost: funky layout

As in: Blogistry

In a recent hardware upgrade at columbia, the blogs got moved to a different machine and somewhere in the background something broke. We're working on it, but for now you'll have to read an antiseptically clean Digital Sextant.

That was predictable

As in: Blogistry , Memes

I am Ash, from the "Evil Dead" trilogy.
I'm the guy with the...chainsaw.

Which Random Cult Movie Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

(via CultureCat)

Traveling

As in: Blogistry

I'll be traveling a bit during the next couple weeks. so expect The Digital Sextant to be silent until mid-August. When I return I hope to get back to (almost) daily posts.

Until then, check out Hermes.

Like a Lemming off a cliff

As in: Blogistry

New Design

As in: Blogistry

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm implementing a new design this week (everybody's doing it). I'll be adding bits and pieces over the next week or two, but any errors/advice you have is greatly appreciated.

Blogmic?

As in: Blogistry , ComicBlog

Jenny and Jeff were right. Comics are the future of blogs!

Or, at least they're fun.

Spamstorm

As in: Blogistry

Like Jenny, I'm seeing the start of a spamstorm, so I'm disabling comments for a while. I'll post a note here when I've re-enabled them.

Update: Comments are back up.

The Battle of the Zombies

As in: Blogistry

Yesterday was a particularly bad spam day, for me anyhow. No ~2000 spams like Clancy. On the other hand, I delete them all by hand, so there's that. If y'all know how to delete bunches of comments at once in MT, let me know.

Unlike many, I still keep a "banned IP" list and add every spam address to it. Of course, this won't stop the tide, but I figure that many of these spams are coming from zombie computers which probably record where they were able to spam, so they can return and spam again. Thus, I feel like I'm fighting the battle when I record their IP address.

What I'd really like is a comment-destroyer screen that gives me a list of all the comments posted since a given date, with a display of the subject, the email, and the first few words of their comment. Then there would be a little check box that allowed me to select the comment. Then the button at the bottom would be "Deleted selected comments and add IPs to Ban List." Oh, if only I had time and administrator access to my MT.

Doug commented that he thinks it's somewhat appropriate to imagine me on the net, fighting zombies.

Blog-sanity

As in: Blogistry

My morning spam deleting session:

1. delete all the spam entries; save the IP addresses in a separate email.
2. open the IP banning window. ALT-TAB to email. Cut. ALT-TAB to blog. paste. click "add". Repeat ten times.

As I drudged my way through step two this morning, Chris Cornell wailed out of my stereo: "I can tell you why people go insane. I can show you how you can do the same."

I already know, Chris.

Spam-alot

As in: Blogistry

I'm not sure what's going on out there in the web, but in the last six hours I've gotten approximately 30 spam postings on my blog. That far exceeds my average of ten or so a day. When I got up this morning I deleted about 20. Dang.

I've disabled commenting for a bit—I'm going to see if I can figure out how to stem the tide. I feel a bit like Casper Van Dien and Jake Busey looking out over the approaching swarm of 'bugs.' HOLD THE LINE! (Current banned IP total: 339)

<< Addendum > > After twenty minutes, I've re-enabled the comments. Using a few of the suggestions I found here, I may have made some progress. We'll see how it goes.

Dang kids!

As in: Blogistry , Hypertext , Reading

Quoted in Avatars of the Word by James O'Donnell:

They have chopped up the text into so many small parts, an brought forth so many concordant passages to suit their own purposes that to some degree they confuse both the mind and memory of the reader and distract it from understanding the literal meaning of the text.

That's Nicholas of Lyre, lamenting the proliferation of manuscripts in the fourteenth century. This passage struck me as hilariously apt (as it obviously did O'Donnel). More later.

A decisive blow to spambots

As in: Blogistry

Well, maybe not. But I'm up over 200 now...

Comments fixed

As in: Blogistry

If you've tried to enter comments in the last ten days or so, you've probably been DENIED. Turns out that I accidentally entered a banned IP address with no number in the address box. Apparently doing so bans everyone.

It's fixed now. Oddly enough, I discovered the problem because I wasn't having to ban any spam-IPs any more. Funny, huh?

Spam postings

As in: Blogistry

Why do [name deleted to avoid spam] websites keep posting to my blog? I've left a few comments in the original post (which is where they keep turning up), but I'm stymied. The original post wasn't so confusing, I guess, since they were just links to [words deleted to avoid spam] sites. I guess the spambot thinks Google will love 'em if Brendan links there. Then they started posting content, not just links. Jokes, poems (claiming to be from Stanislaw Lem), and such. Weird. I'm going to delete any new ones from now on, but I'm amused.

Collages are more Blog-ish

As in: Blogistry , Composition

In my Composition I course ( Mapping the Self), students are in the late stages of their third paper, a textual collage documenting a memory of an Entertainment text. (The students use collage techniques from Elbow's Being a Writer to conduct an experiment loosely based on Chapter 5 of Ulmer's Internet Invention.) The other day, we had a discussion about the characteristics and techniques used to create collages as opposed to essays or other more traditional writing forms. One of my more technologically savvy students commented that "collages are more blog-ish."

I'm intrigued by a couple things there:
1. That my student is so familiar with blogs that they become a descriptive form--he conceives collages as a sort-of remediated blog. Of course, the characteristics of the network culture that blogs propegate don't work so well on ink-and-paper assignments, but the same rhetorical moves occur. Nonetheless, my electracytometer (measures how strongly electracy appears in a context) buzzed high. I like that he sees the digital as the primary mode for this kind of work.
2. That many others in the class had no idea what he was talking about. I had to explain what blogs are, and where they might have seen them. Does this constitute another kind of "digital divide"? One based less in access (most of these students have the same opportunities for access) and more in education and appetite?

Hello world!

As in: Blogistry

What else could I put for my first entry? Does anything have more nerd cred than "Hello world"? I think not.