As promised, more pictures of Emma have been put online.  I added a few new pictures to the “Autumn 2008” album, starting with this photo.  There is also a Christmas 2008 photo album, with subalbums for each of the times we celebrated Christmas.

FYI:  We got some new games for Christmas, and here are the friend codes for those games:

Animal Crossing City Folk:  5112-7902-0335
Guitar Hero World Tour:  0302-3894-4530

Also, lots of Christmas pictures are coming soon.  Stay tuned.

So I mentioned in a post over two years ago that I was going to start reading The Chronicles Of Narnia.  Well I just finished them over Thanksgiving break, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, it didn’t take me two years to read them, I just read a lot of other stuff in between.  Especially after I finished The Silver Chair, I think it was over a year before I went back to the series.  I can easily say that it was my least favorite book in the series.

As Jonah mentioned in a comment on that post, the books were not written in the order in which the story takes place.  The Horse And His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew were written after The Silver Chair, but before The Last Battle, although the stories take place much earlier in the Narnia timeline.  I think The Magician’s Nephew needs to be read next-to-last to be properly appreciated.  There’s just too much in the story that you wouldn’t understand or appreciate if it was the first Narnia book you read.  Of people I’ve talked to who have read the series, they either didn’t like The Magician’s Nephew at all, or they liked it but only when they read the series for a second time.  I thought it was great, which is probably because I read it next-to-last.  Reading The Horse And His Boy where it is presented chronologically, however, is probably not going to detract from the story.

I will avoid spoilers even for this fifty-year-old book series (although, really, isn’t there a statute of limitations on spoilers?), but I have to say I was disappointed with the treatment of one character in particular.  Seriously, I think this character must have been named for a person who C.S. Lewis really liked when he started writing the books, but while he was writing the last book this person must have run over his dog, repeatedly.  The ultimate treatment of this character was just unnecessary.  In a way it reminded me of the gratuitous demise of Chef on South Park.  If you’ve read the books I’m sure you know who I’m referring to.

(Actually, I’m avoiding spoilers because Stephanie is reading the books now, so don’t leave any spoilers in the comments please!)

I just watched a TV show (Chuck) which featured a sepia-toned flashback to the summer of 1990.  Although I was only eight years old at the time, I distinctly remember the world consisting of more colors than brown.

I recently discovered Pandora.com.  Basically, it’s internet radio.  You put in some bands or songs that you like as seeds to your “stations”, then it plays stuff it thinks you’ll like based on those seeds.  As it plays songs, you can give them a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to let it know further what your tastes are.  And it’s all free and legal and the only ads are on-screen ads (i.e. no audio ads that you have to listen to).

I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been using it for a while and I’ve been surprised at the number of times it has presented me with a song from a band I’ve never heard of but which I actually liked.  For someone who hasn’t purchased a CD (or acquired new music in any form, really) in something like three years, this is a pretty great way to find something new to listen to.  And it’s much better than real radio.

(I’m going to start ranting now.)

I really don’t understand why radio stations insist on playing the same twenty or thirty songs over and over again.  With the internet being around, music distribution is so much different than it was even ten years ago.  The industry can support so many more bands, because music can be recorded, produced, and distributed digitally at a fraction of what it used to cost.  It seems like a radio station could easily fill a 5-hour rotation with only music recorded in the last year that is decent that fits the station’s genre, without repeating any songs.  Not that I have anything against music that is more than a year old; I’m just saying there is lots of music being made all the time which is at least decent, so I don’t see why I have to hear crappy Nickelback or Papa Roach songs every time I turn on the radio in my car.

Seriously, who really wants to listen to Chad Kroeger sing about his sex life?

Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday here are a few more videos of Emma for everyone to enjoy.  On November 13, exactly two weeks before Thanksgiving, we had started to notice how close Emma was to being able to crawl.  She had learned to get on hands and knees, and she could kind of rock forward and backward.  I predicted that she would be fully mobile by Thanksgiving.  Prediction confirmed.  You can see the progress she made in just eight days in the video below.

And second, we have a rather long video of Emma and yours truly “playing football.”  Which causes her to giggle uncontrollably.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

This is awesome.

That is all.

I experimented with using Feedburner to manage the feeds for this site, but I haven’t been pleased with the statistics they provide.  They seem to be inaccurate, and I think the problem is that Feedburner is geared towards sites much larger than mine.  So I’ve decided to revert to hosting my own feeds.

So.  If you subscribed to a feed from this site in the last three months, you may need to resubscribe sometime next week in order to keep getting updates.  If you’re not sure which feed you’re subscribed to, you should start getting notifications sometime next week that the feed is dead (if you’re subscribed to the Feedburner feed).  If you don’t get any notifications, and you keep getting my blog posts, then you don’t need to do anything.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about then none of this applies to you.

It’s been a while since I implemented a spammer’s honeypot here on Vacant Nebula.  It has been extremely effective, so much so that I disabled the captcha.  All I do is put a hidden form before any blog posts are displayed.  Humans never see it, but spambots all see it, and apparently they are configured to submit spam to the first form on the page.  In fact the only spam that has gotten through in the last year has been spam that submitted to all forms on the page, not just the first one.  (I think this just happened once though.)

Fast-forward to a few days ago, I noticed that the excerpt of a page that Google shows displays the hidden comment submission form.  This doesn’t particularly matter, but I’d prefer it not be there.  So I added a check on useragent, and if it appears to be a search engine bot the honeypot is not displayed.  Well apparently spammers use a two-step process.  First they scan for blogs with forms while pretending to be googlebot.  Then they submit to those forms pretending to be a normal user’s browser (usually IE 5.5).

I know this because I got about fifty spam comments in the last two days.  If they were scanning the page with user agent reported as IE 5.5, they would have still seen the honeypot.  But the comments were submitted with user agent of IE 5.5.  Anyway, I’ve gone back to printing the honeypot for everyone, but only for the homepage.  Any permalink pages will not have the honeypot.  I’m pretty sure spammers don’t bother to go to the permalink pages, and search bots should only be indexing the permalinks.  Hopefully, both problems are solved.  If not, I’ll have to go back to a more fragile solution (something requiring Javascript, something requiring cookies, or even reinstating captchas).

Or maybe the spammers were just trying to wish me a happy twenty-seventh birthday by flooding my site with links to porn.

Yesterday’s xkcd cartoon discussed the terminology “The West” and “The East”, and how it was confusing to an American:

His map isn’t exactly in line with what I’ve inferred the meanings of these terms to be, so I modified his map a bit to reflect my (also confusing) understanding of these terms:

Generally, “The West” and “The Western Hemisphere” have a meaning roughly equivalent to “First-World Nations”, with the exceptions of Japan and (maybe?) South Korea.  Which is to say, something similar to “developed democracies which were aligned with the United States in the Cold War.”  This generally includes Australia and New Zealand, which makes the map pretty nonsensical.  Sometimes “The West” includes Mexico and Central and South America, but I didn’t mark the map this way because that’s not usually how I hear the term used.

Oddly, “The East” does not mean “Not ‘The West.’”  It is more synonymous with “The Far East”, which is to say, “places where Asian people live.”  That includes Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Southeast Asia.  I suppose that if the “Middle East” is really the middle of the east, then “The East” must include all of Asia and Africa.  But I think “Middle East” is a whole other discussion.  You could also debate whether India, Indonesia, and New Guinea belong in “The East.”  I just drew it based on what I’ve inferred.

In either map, I think it is clear that the terms are ambiguous and only loosely correlated to their geographic meaning.