In an effort to reduce comment spam into my blog, I installed the Bad Behavior anti-spam plug-in yesterday. It did do a decent job initially, but looking through the logs I found two false negatives out of about 100 requests or so. A 2% false negative rate doesn’t sound like much, but it is too high for me so I disabled it. I’d much rather deal with having to manually sort through a few false positives than have any false negatives.

My apologies to Kewl Nitrox and to “Stephan” (I think a first time visitor) who tried posting comments and weren’t able. I found the content of your attempted post and manually put it back in so all is well.

EDIT: After receiving a comment from the author himself, I’ve decided to give Bad Behavior (this time, 2.0 beta 1 instead of 1.2.4) another try. If any of you have any problems posting comments, please do let me know so can report back! Thanks!

Ooooh. The spammers were out in full force last night. I usually only get a small handful of comment spam a day, but yesterday I had over 50! Thank God for the Spam Karma plugin for Wordpress. It successfully trapped everything so I didn’t have to manually clean any of it out. (That totally sounds like some kind of infomercial :P)

I’m using SK2 with the Akismet plugin. While Wordpress 2 comes with its own standalone version of a plugin that uses Akismet to check for spam, I like the control that SK2 gives you; it’s nice to know that some checks are handled locally as opposed to my comments going off someplace I don’t control to have its fate determined. To be fair, I had no problems or false positives or anything when trying the standalone Akismet for several days. It seemed to work just fine.

In other geeky news, I’ve been looking for an different web based RSS aggregator than my trusty feed on feeds one that I’ve been using for the past year or so. I really have no problems with it, but it’s pretty ugly. :P I’ve tried a bunch and Gregarius seems to be the front runner. I’ve had some issues with it, but hopefully those were isolated to the fact that I was running a beta version and not the current release. At least it’s still being developed whereas feed on feeds hasn’t been updated in ages now.

And that’s my tech dump of the morning. Hey… my technology category needs love every once in a while. :)

Since when do computers start needing this ATX12V connector for things to work correctly? I’ve been having issues with my motherboard recently dying a slow death. So I stopped at the computer store yesterday and picked up a replacement. I get home, plug everything in, and get no video. I figured I had something loose or connected wrong, so I start unplugging various things to see if that’s causing the problem. About an hour later, I’m down to just the power supply, video card, and RAM and it still won’t boot. So I haul my butt back to the computer store and explain, using my vast computer knowledge, why I believe they gave me a faulty motherboard. Pretty much the first thing the guy says to me is “You did use this plug, yes?” pointing to the plug above. “Ummm, no.” Both of the guys behind the counter give me a look as if to say are you sure you’ve done this before/are you on drugs? I had never seen that plug on any of my other boards before. Maybe it’s not “new” but I haven’t built a computer from scratch in years, so it’s new to me. I asked him to hook it up to their test system there to make sure that the board isn’t faulty and sure enough it works. I drive home feeling like an idiot.

I’ll hopefully be back on-line soon, folks. I’m am experiencing technical difficulties. My main computer’s power supply is dying a slow death. First it had trouble cold booting and now it just makes my computer lock up. At least I think it’s the power supply. I’m going to replace it today and hopefully that cures my problems.

As a quick update, training is still going OK. My last long run (which I’ve been meaning to post about for a laugh) and my last long ride are done! Now, I get to really taper (it’s hard to call something a taper when you’re still doing two hour runs and five hour workouts, but those are done now!).

I went to the Minnesota state fair yesterday. Lets see… I ate cheese curds, a papa pup (a foot long corn dog, basically), a three foot beef stick, a pork chop on a stick, some french fries, a cheeseburger wanton thingie, a deep fried turkey sandwich, an egg roll, a turtle brownie, a large cup of ice cream, and a Corona. And despite my attempt to kill myself with deep fried saturated fat goodness, I also got my cholesterol checked! I don’t think I’ve ever had that done before, and with at least some heart disease in my family as well as some folks with high cholesterol, I was a little bit worried about the results. But it turned out to be for nothing - my numbers were good! My overall cholesterol was 192, my HDL was 54, and my cholesterol ratio was 3.6. The lady who spent time explaining the results to me basically said I was good to go in all three categories.

“I have nothing to lecture you on. Just eat well - lots of fruits and vegetables. And make sure you exercise.”

State Fair Cholesterol Checking Lady

Lady, you have no idea… :)

First they change from Motorola to Intel chips. Now a mouse with more than one button? The end of the world must be near…

The cool link of the day award goes to Phil for finding the Gmaps Pedometer.

What is this?
This is a little hack that uses Google’s superb mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout.

Works fine for cycling too. Below is the map of my normal out and back long ride. The mileage was pretty much spot on. What’ll they think of next?

By suggestion of my good friend Biberfan, I’m going to start cleaning up my website. I’ll be trying to ensure that my pages are valid XHTML as well as cleaning up my CSS files to make them more readable and taking out a bunch of junk that shouldn’t be there. It’s his belief that the fix that I introduced yesterday to fix the problems folks were having while browsing with Safari was only coincidental and didn’t cure the heart of the problem. Hopefully, this cleanup will do that now (as well as satisfy my OCD). So things may get a whole lot uglier here before they get better. Please excuse the mess.

Also, some of you may have already noticed that my site now exists just as http://www.chivalry.net. The trailing “wordpress,” while still functional (for now), is no longer needed. It’s certainly not a pressing issue, but please update your bookmarks when you get a chance (and sorry to those folks that just did this exercise a few months ago when I changed domains back to this one).

Thanks to Wil for triggering my OCD and letting me know that my site was all messed up looking in Safari. ;) I spent the last couple of days trying to figure out what the heck was going on and why my site looked ok in Firefox, IE, and Opera, but was all messed up in Safari. This is especially hard when you don’t have access to a Mac and can’t see in realtime if your changes have any affect.

In any case, I think the problem is solved. Turns out, I needed the following in my CSS file:

ul.post-meta {list-style: none;}
ul.post-meta span.post-meta-key {font-weight: bold;}

If you view my pages source code, I don’t see any reason why any of the above would be triggered or necessary. But the above is indeed essential for the page to look right in Safari. Any CSS gurus know why this is the case?

That time shift thing that happened on my server really screwed a bunch of things up. The posting times on your comments was just the scratch of the surface. Deeper in my blogging engine there were other timestamps that also got set that I had to manually go in and change (I think this may have prevented some of you from posting comments, but is hopefully fixed now). I run a forum for some friends of mine that still have timestamps in the future that I can’t figure out where to correct. So they’ll likely be “new” threads until I figure that out or until 2/2025 - whichever comes first. :P Some applications just spontaneously shutdown after seeing my server jump in time all over the place. For something seemingly trivial, it is turning out to be a real pain in the arse.

So if things are broken, I’m sorry for the mess. Hold tight. I’m still trying to get it all fixed.

I don’t know what happened to my server last night, but all of the sudden it thought it was February 13th, 2025? This caused the weird time stamps on some of your posted comments as Wil pointed out along with various other server problems that probably nobody would care to read about. In any case, thanks for letting me know! The problem has been fixed.

Yesterday’s ride went pretty well. I only ride about 85 miles or so. I thought about doing another loop through our local park reserve to get that closer to 100, but I negotiated with myself and got a three mile transition run instead. All parties were happy. :) The winds on the way out were really brutal. I just turned my bike computer to stopwatch mode and went purely on HR and RPE. My average pace for the ride ended up being pretty close to what I’d have expected had there been no wind, so I guess I did a pretty good job of pacing.

I think I’m going to take today completely off! I loooovvve my rest days!! I have MinneMan tomorrow and I’ll probably do another workout on Sunday to kill the legs before my recovery week. All of Mike’s posts about his recovery week have me really looking forward to mine.