Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Technorati! Seriously! A site based on tracking and organizing blogs ought to have people who understand how to send mass-emails to its userbase without enabling them to mass-reply to everyone who got the first message!

:: facepalm ::

They sent me (a link to) a survey, and before I even thought about whether or not to participate, I had two more emails. One of them is an automated “I don’t use this email, use this other one” message, and the other is in Spanish, apparently reminding Technorati that not everyone on the web speaks English, and if they want him to understand what they’re talking about, could they please offer a Spanish version?

:: sigh ::

Given how big Technorati’s userbase is, I think I need to set up a separate filter for this. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

After my last post, I was bombarded with trackback spam for almost a month before I was able to get rid of the spammer. The admin of the first messageboard I contacted responded with dismay; his board had been hacked and significant content had been deleted. The violation of his website (and the loss of so much content) had him so discouraged, he wasn’t sure he was going to try to restore the board at all. The next few didn’t respond, but the spammer moved from one to the next as I alerted them, so I guess they took action when I notified them of the hacking. Then he moved on to Harvard, of all places, putting trackback spam pages in one of their subdomains. At this point, I was fed up. Six or seven spam messages every day for a month is too much. (I know, the popular blogs probably get hundreds or thousands a day, but I’m not making a living from mine yet.) I did notify the webmaster at Harvard, but I also checked the spammer’s IP address and tracked it back to his ISP. After that, the bombardment finally stopped.

I mention this because it’s up to us, the haters-of-spam, to take action to stop spam. We have to work together to take away any benefit they could get from it and block them wherever possible, whether they’re barging into our email inbox or sending messages through instant messengers or using the comment/messaging systems of your favorite social networking site. I freely acknowledge that I’m not the be-all and end-all of internet wisdom, but I’ve been around for a while, so I’ve got some advice on the subject.

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I’ve been less-than-pleased with WP2.5 so far, but this weekend I’ve found solutions to some of the worst problems.

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I decided to go ahead and do one last system recovery on this stupid VAIO (no, I have no idea how many that makes) and just replace the DVD-R drive after that, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the hardware configuration preventing the recovery.

So much for that. The recovery went through just fine; runs right, says it’s reconfiguring everything right and all, reboots - and dies. I didn’t change the BIOS (the recovery would’ve balked at that) and I haven’t changed the hardware since the *last* time I reinstalled the opsys. I have no idea what’s wrong this time.

Right. Goodbye Sony. Mom’s old VAIO works much better since I overwrote the whole thing with Debian (well, except the part where I broke it trying to install a printer driver, but reinstallation is easier with Linux - no arbitrary anti-piracy measures). It’s time to shop for new hardware and a cheap copy of Elements (already bought a standalone copy of XP Pro, just in case) and build a whole new machine. How much is a membership at Costco again?

Why oh why do I keep trying to get useful information out of Sony’s tech support? I should know better. I do know better. And this time, I found a link that let me copy the transcript, despite the fact that their Java-based chat disallows copy-paste (a right nuisance, that). Removed his name out of pity. Formatting’s wonky enough that I can’t intersperse comments without making it look really strange, or take forever reformatting it by hand; stupid Java chats. Yeah, ended up with “take forever reformatting.” Bleah. Read the rest of this entry »