Got a weird one in the comments

On a post from about a year ago in which I was sharing a photograph of my home built submersible ROV with someone on the phone (I now can’t remember who…) I received the strangest comment:

Прежде чем жениться обязательно посмотрите на поведение вашей избранницы вне себя это совсем другой человек
!!!

Bing translator translates that from Russian as follows:

Before you marry must see the behavior of your chosen one out yourself is a completely different person
!!!

The odd thing is that here were no links.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Question Mark!

Wicked Useful Sh … stuff

I just added a new section to the right sidebar: Wicked Useful Sh … stuff.  That’s where I plan to post wicked useful links to wicked useful resources around the web.

The first one on the list is GasBuddy.  In particular; the GasBuddy Heat Map.  This is a zoomable map that shows by color what the average gas prices are running on a county by county basis all across the country.  By zooming in you can see what individual gas stations have been charging within the last 48 hours.  (Or at least what the price was the last time a GasBuddy ‘field operative’ went by the station.)  If you sign up you can contribute to the site by reporting the gas prices you see as you go about your daily travels.

If you have suggestions for other sites that are Wicked Useful let me know in the comments.  If they make the cut I’ll add it to the list.

Videos?

Internet Exploder here at my Just Over Broke showed another blank embedded video at the top of this post.  That wasn't visible at home using Firefox.  I am beginning to suspect there may be something in all of the formatting garbage MS Word includes when you copy/past directly from Word.  I like having a spell checker, but I may change my SOP to writing in Word then copy/past into Notepad then copy/paste into the Blogger window.  That seems to strip the text of all the ‘bonus material’ Word hides behind the scenes.

Harrumph!

BTW: If you should notice one of these blank videos in one of my posts, I wouldn’t click on it.  I didn’t put it there.  Also, I would greatly appreciate it if you would let me know it’s there in the comments so I can remove the thing.  I can’t see them myself on my home computer.

Thanks.

I’m sooo confused!

I’ve had a couple of comments lately that just don’t sound right to my ear.  Blogger has shunted them into the spam folder.  But I’m not sure.  I don’t see any of the embedded links that are normally present in most of the spam I see.  They sound as if they were written by a non-native English speaker or maybe machine translated.  Most are complimentary in general terms – but seem to have nothing to do with the post on which they were made.

Have you, my loyal reader (note the singular), seen anything like this?  What’s your take on it?

And so it goes.

A while back Blogger came out with a new interface.  The suckage was intense.  I looked and looked and finally found where they had stashed the old interface.  I switched back immediately.  Well, it looks like Blogger has finally caught up with me and taken away the interface I was familiar with.  The one that worked - at least most of the time.  Let's hoe they have actually, you know, fixed this one.  It would be a royal PITA to have to move again...

Update’n the ol’ Blogroll

Not that I don’t already have too much to read…

Still here

12:30 AM Monday morning.  The Doomsday Virus deadline has passed.  If you are reading this I was able to post it and thus probably still have internet connectivity.  And so do you.  Yawn.  I'm going to bed.

UPDATE:  Written shortly after noon here at my Just Over Broke.  I checked the PC at home this AM and found it to be functioning normally and having no more problems than usual with internet connectivity.  Likewise things seem about the same as always here as well.  Perhaps I should have titled this post Welcome to Y2K all over again!

More Blogy Stuff

When I logged in to remove the unwanted blank video I just mentioned I was greeted by a note from the Blogger Staff across the top of my old school blogger interface.  They want me to update to the new and unproved blogger interface because the old interface will be going away “in the next few months.”

But the new interface (how shall I put it?) HOOVERS!  It draws a vacuum!  It inhales so sharply as to create a vortex down which the entire blogger community rides on its way to the great leach field of the intertubes!  On a good day the new interface most closely resembles an over promised but under delivered junior high project that was abandoned after receiving a disappointing grade from the shop teacher.

I am not at all impressed with the lack of robustness in the functionality of the new user interface.  It is so bad I actually went on a quest in search of the old interface!  While it lacks most of the bells and whistles of the new interface, at least IT WORKS!

As I have stated previously: If the functionality of the new user interface is not significantly improved, and I'll now add if the old interface is taken away in favor of the abortion that was created to replace it, I will jump ship from Blogger just as I already have from LiveJournal.  And I suspect that I am not alone in this.

And while we’re at it, apparently LJ found my post about not posting over there and linking to the New Dragonfly over here and removed it.  Ain’t that sweet?  I’ll have to go over there and put it back.  I have the text archived around here somewhere.  Or maybe I’ll just write something new about them taking away the old link.  Whatever.

Blogy Stuff

As I mentioned in an update to a post a couple down from this one, I just removed a blank video link from the top of the post.  I have no idea where it came from.  I did not put it there and it doesn't show up in Firefox on my home computer.  Using Winders Exploder here at the office is the only place I can see those videos when they do show up.  Have any of my loyal reader (not the singular…) encountered this before other than here at the Dragonfly?  Any idea what might be causing them to appear?  Any tricks for making sure they don’t?  All help will be greatly appreciated!

Blogger Interface

I just discovered that you CAN go back in time! At least as far as which Blogger Interface you use. When you first log in you should find yourself on a page listing your various blogs and a reader thingy that I never use. At the top right of your blog list is an icon with a picture of a gear. Click that. A menu will appear that will have as one of its options Old Interface. Click that. Voila! Time travel!

You are welcome! * bows *

Moderation, not Reasoned Discourse™

The Eclectic Dragonfly has just switched to Moderated Comments because the Word Verification widget “hoovers” so badly. It used to work. Then they fixed it…

What does this change mean?

You will no longer have your visual acuity challenged by having to retype some ridiculously screwed up jumble of text to prove you are a human. It also means I will have to wade through a pile intellectually challenged of spambot crap to sort out the real comments from the dross. More pain for me – hopefully less of same for you. Also, it may take a while for me to get around to approving your comments. Please be patient! I will get to it – eventually…

My comment policies are very libertarian – like my politics. I’ll approve pretty much anything you want to say provided there is no personally identifiable information about thee, me or any third party. I will not allow threats of violence, slander or liable. The occasional cuss word doesn’t bother me. Just keep in mind that anybody can read what you write and it may come back to you at the most embarrassing of moments. In general, as long as you keep it legal within the intent of the Framers of our Constitution and suitable for polite conversation among friends, we should get along fine.

Really?

It amazes me the things I find in my sitemeter listings: "Search Words: bathroom powered by blogspot" I wonder what they were actually looking for! On second thought maybe I don’t want to know… OK, so why is this not formatting the way it should?

Well, it's about time...

I finally found the right gizmo to rap with my hammer to fix the time stamp.

Well, ain’t that interesting?

In my recent post about my technique for dealing with a cold I mentioned the Dayquil/Nyquil combination of over the counter cold remedies.  Checking my logs this morning I see that I was paid a visit by “The Procter and Gamble Company” of Cincinnati, Ohio.  Welcome aboard, guys.  Have a look around.  All are welcome here at the Dragonfly.

BTW: I only know it was them because they have their own ISP that puts their name in the logs.  Google does the same thing.  (Hi –j @ work!)  [Odd that I’m not seeing visits from the other search engines.  Then again, they do own Blogspot…]  So unless you are running your own ISP with your name on it, there is no personally identifiable information logged beyond your IP Address.  And that’s just your computers address assigned by your ISP.  There’s no way of knowing exactly who is sitting at your computer at any given time.  That’s not to say that the spooks down around the Beltway aren’t monitoring you through the web cam you have so conveniently provided…

I didn’t realize that…

I was just poking around in the archive listings over there on the right sidebar.  This is the hundredth post this year here at The New Eclectic Dragonfly.  (I spent much of the middle of the year either posting over at The Guilded Cage or not posting at all.)

The other thing I noticed is that today is The New Dragonfly’s first Blogversery!  The original Dragonfly was started back on the Ninth of November in 2006.  That was over at LiveJournal (before they sucked…)  So in its entirety The Eclectic Dragonfly is a little over five years old and this iteration is one year old today.

Should I say “Woohoo!” or “Who knew?”

By way of explanation…

Last night I was chatting with someone on the phone.  Actually it was a ‘coach’ from Laurel Langemeier’s organization who was trying to convince me that I need to sign up for a three day workshop.  I’d love to, but funds won’t allow that right at the moment.

So anywho, I wanted to share that photo with him so he could see that I wasn’t just blowing smoke about the Submersible ROV I designed and built some twenty years ago now.  (Hard to believe it’s been that long!)

So that’s what that was all about.

Update: Comments now seem to be working

Apparently the comments system here at the Dragonfly are 10-79 at the moment.  Hopefully I can breath new life into it before too awfully long.  I have not blocked the comments or instituted moderation.  Things are not being dumped into the spam-trap either.  The system is simply busted.  And that with an Uncle Launch earlier this week.  The timing is spectacular!

UPDATE:  I've just switched over to the popup style comment window and that seems to have solved the problem.  I suspect the old embedded version's not having the word verification gadget may have been the root cause.

Busy busy busy...

Archiving the (original) Eclectic Dragonfly. 

I haven't found an elegant, simple or automatic method of backing up all of my posts from the old neighborhood.  So I'm using the brute force method.  If you know of a better way than - going to each post in a browser, highlighting all, copying and then pasting into word and then hit save as - I would be most appreciative if you could share it with me.

Thanks in advance!

Playing with the Side Bars

I thought I’d try a few things with the side bars this evening to see what they look like.  For instance, that slide show of some of the graphics I’m trying to make a buck on at CafePress.  I’m not 100% convinced that I should keep that particular element.  What do you think?

More blog stuff & a question...

Back in the olden days of the Dragonfly over at LJ I used to run a feature called HerrBGone's Toy Box..  These were posts showing off various airguns from my collection.  On the evening of November 4, 2008, after it became apparent that a former Joyce Foundation board member had sweet-talked his way into the White House, I pulled all but one of those posts down.  With that, the Dragonfly lost much of its purpose.

After seeing for the past three years just how ineffective The Light Bringer has been at imposing his bosses anti-gun agenda on the country I am left with this question:

Should I bring back the Toy Box and start posting some of my goodies herebouts, or is even the outside chance of a second term (perish the thought!) enough to not provide the .gov a de facto registration of many of my 'toys'?

Let me know what you think by way of the comments.  Thanks!

UPDATE:  I just dug out my Healthways Western Plainsman that I discuss in that post from the old Dragonfly and tried it for the first time. I'd been afraid to load it with modern BB's. It works fine as a single shot muzzle-loader but it won't feed from the inline magazine. :-( Oh well.

And I'd completely forgotten about the nice western holster I had it in. I need to go into the old pistol cabinet more often...