Roblog

I was really looking forward to the girls' involvement in Halloween this year. I figured at 2.75 years old, they would be old enough to enjoy dressing up in their costumes and really enjoy getting all that candy. Donna made them some princess costumes, which they tried on beforehand.

I imagined they would excitedly get on their princess costumes and immediately start playing in them (running around and twirling). We would then announce it was trick-or-treat time. They would dash to the door, and we'd lead them from house to house, where they'd knock, look cute, and get candy. We'd all come home and put away most the the candy, while they ate some gleefully.

Amanda: camera, no tirck-or treating
Elena: two houses

We completed our annual Cookie Baking Party yesterday. We ended up with 781 cookies, which is quite a bit more than we had aimed for. Although we had just one family stop by to help, it was a fun but tiring day.

The girls wanted to help bake the cookies and help eat the cookies. They actually did save some time during one part of the process, when they were able to unwrap Hersey kisses by themselves. I discovered, though, that they could not do this unsupervised if I wanted the kisses to stay uneaten.

Our focus was on the Mounds Bar cookies this year, since that tends to be the most-requested. We ended up with an even 200 of those, which is plenty to be able to distribute them liberally among our friends and coworkers. We also made Snickerdoodles, Molasses Crinkles, Chocolate Dipped Orange Melts, Spritz cookies, and a new recipe: Buttermint Sugar cookies. We were finished at about 11:15 last night.

Meetings at work are an important way to share information with a group of people all at once. They can also be rather intrusive if you have other things to accomplish.

Today was by biggest meeting day of my professional career. 10 (almost) straight hours of 9 different meetings left me wondering how I am going to make up for all my regular work I didn't get a chance to do.

6:00 - 7:00 - bi-weekly teleconference status call
7:00 - 8:00 - weekly teleconference status call
8:00 - 9:00 - server maintenance (canceled)
9:00 - 10:00 - client meeting
10:00 - 11:30 - weekly client status meeting
11:30 - 12:00 - HR meeting
12:00 - 1:00 - unit goal setting
1:00 - 2:00 - enhancement specification discussions
2:00 - 3:00 - enhancement specification discussions
3:00 - 4:00 - client meeting

I was able to get some other work done before I went home at 6:00. No status meetings at home!

It actually snowed in Houston. On Christmas Eve, a few times during the day I could see sleet falling from the sky. With the temperature never getting above the mid-30's, the ground was too warm for the sleet to stick, but the little balls of snow did manage to survive on plastic and metal items in our yard: patio chairs and a child's slide.

This was the first time I had ever seen anything other than rain fall from the Houston skies.

That evening, though, it started actually snowing steadily. The snow managed to stick on the grass and plants; the roads were just wet, although some overpasses did manage to ice over and were closed. By the time we returned home from the church service, our car had about half an inch on it, and the yard was lightly dusted with snow. The girls had a fun time among the snowflakes, having almost as much fun as I did.

The snow stopped that evening, and mostly melted overnight, although small puddles of snow could be seen in shady areas of roofs into much of the day. It was still a remarkable experience.

I finally had to do something about the comment spam invading my weblog, since it was now affecting my wife's blog. She told me recently "I hate the computer," meaning that the increasing tide of comment spam was rendering her blog unusable, as well as cluttering up her inbox with continual reminders of that fact.

Movable Type has a facility whereby you can block specific IP addresses from placing comments on your blog, but this requires each and every IP address to be logged manually into the system. That's what I had been doing for this blog, but I was up to 103 IP adresses with no noticeable change in amount of comment spam.

So I did some research. The best option appeared to be the MT-Blacklist plug-in. This free add-on for Movable Type checks a master list of URLs that spammers include in their comments. Whenever a comment is added to a blog entry that references one of those URLs, it is prevented from being saved. It has regular expression pattern matching, so that it doesn't have to be updated for every variation of a website selling "cialis". You can try it, if you want. Try adding a comment with a URL that has "vioxx" in it. You'll get an error message saying the comments couldn't be saved.

This appears to be working well. Not only will this help Donna continue to use her blog, but it will make our presentation in Boston about using weblogs go much better. I would hate for her to have to say "I hate my computer" several times during her talk.