The BBC was made to apologize for editing a promo in a way that seemed to imply that the Queen had walked out of a photo session. Maybe the English are just very sensitive to editing (the article I’m referring to is the 12 April entry), and what Queen couldn’t get from Fox, The Queen could from the BBC.
Author Archives: Craig
I hadn't realized it was such a big deal
Having walked past the Nintendo Fan Network booth several times this year, I hadn’t imagined it was so new and exciting.
Maybe it's just a British phenomenon?
The stress of working with the public is seldom appreciated.
I'm from the FBI, really, just send me your password
Even if the FBI isn’t contacting bot-owners by email, brace for a flood of phishing spam pretending to be from the FBI (and sent, of course, via botnets).
Mmskuramoto, another weird spam destination
In the grand tradition of johnsmithsvt, we’ve started seeing spam for mmskuramoto. None of it has been allowed into the system, since it’s coming from a blacklisted IP, so I don’t know what flavor the spam is, but the attempts were surprisingly well-behaved: most spammers treat the 451 we return to blacklisted IPs the same as a 5xx error (they retry maybe once, maybe fifty times, right away, then give up); the mmskuramoto sender backed off the retries very nicely. So nicely, in fact, that I got the originating IP whitelisted and the alias added, just so I could see what the spam was. Unfortunately (or not, probably), they gave up after 14 tries, just a couple hours before they would have gotten through.
For those who care, the blacklisting setup has been modified somewhat since the johnsmithsvt post referred to above: all country-based blocking is done with zz.countries.nerd.dk, but most of the blocking ends up happening because of a bunch of Class A and B size blocks (virtually anything in apnic or south america). We still use zen.spamhaus.org, combined.njabl.org, bl.spamcop.net, dnsbl.sorbs.net, and dnsbl.jammconsulting.com, and they contribute (especially zen), but it’s mostly the huge swaths of net that are blacklisted.
They hate the feet, though
I don’t know whether to be reassured that everybody’s kids want to eat nothing but chicken fingers, or driven to a firmer resolve to encourage more gustatory diversity.
Maybe hold off worrying about the bees for a bit
The bee problem (known officially as Colony Collapse Disorder) may not be as bad (yet) as I had imagined: The symptoms have happened before; even if all European honeybees die, they’re responsible for only 30% of global agriculture’s pollinating; and in their absence, other pollinators will usually fill the niche. Almonds seem to be especially affected, with a large proportion of the available mobile honeybee hives trucked in for the bloom in January.
The Rules for Hearts Review
The Rules for Hearts: a Family Drama, Ryan. Yes. While this book did not irritate me in any of the myriad ways possible, I did not find it especially moving. Maybe “family drama” is less moving than first love, maybe a whole bunch of things. The writing is solid; the story did nothing for me.
Why thricewise?
Partly because we could, and partly because it’s a cool word. My best guess as to what it means in context (and yes, I’m a very bad fanboy; I read issue one only because it was convenient, and have not yet read any subsequent issues) is that it’s being used as a peculiar synonym for Jotun (Mimir, the thrice-wise, was one). They were giants, Dawn got all big, that’s how the math appears to me today to work. There’s no clear indication, as far as my librarian and I can tell, that it means anything other than “really wise” in the original, but the Eddas are full of threes, so three wisdoms that we’re overlooking wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
No more Drive
Well, that was quick. A thing many posters at Whedonesque don’t seem to get is that Tim has a development deal with Fox (the studio, not the network), so they’re paying him whether the series works or not. Yeah, there won’t be another episode order, but it’s not like he would have gotten kickbacks on the ad sales, anyway. He’ll be back.