Now that 2007 is then rather than now, it’s time to look at some of the things that happened then.

The year began with a review of 2006.  Much like the one you are reading now!  By the way, I apparently write like a girl.  I got a chance to eat lunch with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss.  I may have miscounted the number of bosses but it’s something like that.  I named a new medical condition, frigidamanus supermus.  Doctors and scientists are still trying to catch up.  My niece—only 6.5 months old at the time—learned to play the ukulele, with yours truly as an instructor.  Around Easter, Stephanie took a shortcut to the bottom of a staircase.  She saved some time but broke her foot in the process.  I made some observations last summer, and now everyone thinks I’m a racist.  Oops.  We bought a house, and just five months later got around to posting some photos of said dwelling.  I theorized a bit on human eyes, and soon reported additional evidence in a follow-up post.  My right eye dominates both of yours.

Then of course there was the big news.  Stephanie has a parasite living in her abdomen, which we found out lacks sufficient organs needed to be called a he.  So when she joins us in March, hopefully her father will be up to the task of raising her.

Some other things happened last year too.  The sixth anniversary of 9/11 occurred, and I posted my account of that fateful day for all to read.  I also visited the top-left corner of the lower forty-eight, where I worked with some aeroplanists.  Shortly after that I got a year older, something which unfortunately happens every year.  Hopefully scientists get around to inventing immortality pills soon.

Aside from that, I made several posts about things that I spend time with.  These included some video game reviews, as well as some other video-game-related posts.  I also geeked out on Lost for a couple posts.  Who or what is Jacob!?  I think he’s Superman, and Lost Island is his new Fortress of Solitude.  That’s gotta be it.  Let’s see, what else...  I made several posts regarding software development, and a couple posts to make the internets better.  I also posted some comments on pop culture in what I am calling the “OMG dju hear” series.  Expect to see more in that series from time to time.

If you like to look at other people’s photos, three photo albums were posted this year.  Feel free to check those out.

Lastly, I have to mention the series of five posts where I dug up my old drawings from middle school.  I was apparently pretty demented.

Enjoy 2008.

American Gladiators is back on TV.  (Or would proper grammar be “American Gladiators are back on TV?”)  In any case, Stephanie and I caught the show last night.  It’s kind of like you remember it, except with less stuff happening and more people talking.  In other words, just what you’d expect in today’s post-Survivor reality TV format.  I guess they want you to care about the contestants so they spend time talking about them?  I don’t—I just want to see people get jousted so hard their fingers come off.  And some of the gladiators are clearly trying to make names for themselves (ahem, Wolf, yeah it’s really cute how you howl whenever the camera points at you, but you look like an idiot).

Maybe I’m remembering American Gladiators through the rose-colored lens of memory.  In fact, I know I am.  I was, after all, twelve years old at the height of the show’s popularity.  Still, the new show isn’t entirely without its good points.  For one, the lady gladiators aren’t quite as scary (i.e. manly) as they used to be.  Another improvement is the updated Eliminator, which is now incredibly grueling.  Somehow moving the uphill conveyor belt to the end of the competition makes it a hundred times more difficult.  When the contestants finish, they are barely able to move.  I don’t think it will be long before someone finishing the Eliminator just throws up right on Hulk Hogan’s legs.  That would be hilarious.

I’ll probably keep watching, at least for a little while, although I’m not sure if I would be doing so if there were other shows on TV.

Recently Penny Arcade made a very funny comic about gifts they receive from PR firms, a topic which Joel Spolsky discussed about a year ago.  This seems like a good time to publicly state my gifts policy here at vacant-nebula.  I’ll now shift to the editorial “we” so that I we sound more important.

We, at vacant-nebula.com, like stuff.  Especially free stuff.  We will accept any gift, be it money or merchandise.  We particularly like high technical devices, such as anything that could be found in Best Buy.

Unlike many other blogs, we do not consider ourselves journalists, and as such we are not bound by any code of journalistic ethics.  In particular, this means that we do feel an obligation to disclose the source of any gifts, or even the fact that a gift was given.  We are even willing to praise products that we don’t really like, as long as this means we might get free stuff we do like in the future.

In short, we are preemptively selling out, even though no one is buying yet.  So send us stuff we want and we’ll tell people it’s great.  We won’t write any holier-than-thou blog posts about how we’re too good to accept free stuff.  If you would like to send us gifts, but you are unsure what products we would like, just drop us an e-mail and we’ll be glad to work something out.

PS- if anyone knows a Microsoft PR rep who has an Xbox 360 they are just dying to bribe a blogger with, send them here.

Preventing spam comments is one of the most annoying things about having a blog.  In the past I’ve tried a few different methods to control spam.  My first attempt involved flagging messages as potentially spam if they had a bad referrer, came from certain IP ranges, contained certain keywords, or contained too many links.  The flagged messages wouldn’t be displayed until I approved them.  This method worked some of the time, but overall it wasn’t very effective and created a lot of work for me.

My next attempt was to implement a captcha system.  This has worked out pretty well, and I was surprised to find that it has been fifteen months since I started this policy.  Basically, any comment containing anything that looks like a link (“http”, “://”, “www.”, “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “@”, “href”, and some others I can’t remember off the top of my head) would be sent to the captcha page.  This allows real humans to post comments with links, but stops most of the spam.  However, there was an occasional spam comment that had no links.  I’m not sure why the spammers would do this, unless they are trying to game systems where an IP is deemed “safe” after a non-spam comment is made.  In any case, I grew annoyed with cleaning up these comments, and I didn’t like that cookies are required if you get to the captcha page.

Over the break, I decided I would implement a type of honeypot.  I noticed that spam comments were always in response to my most recent post, even when comments were still open for other posts.  So I guessed that the spambots are looking for the first form in the HTML.  So I just stuck a comment form at the top of my page, and wrapped it in a hidden div.  No humans see it, but spambots do.

To judge the effectiveness, I logged any comments submitted to the honeypot.  Since I don’t value the privacy of spammers, I’ll let you view the log if you wish.  As of right now, 212 spam comments were submitted in 10 days.  Where it says “honeypot” means that the message was submitted to the honeypot form.  If it were submitted from a valid form but contained links (and hence, was given a captcha), you’d see “contains_links.”  But there aren’t any of those.

So now I have a system that is so far 100% effective, without requiring cookies and without breaking under tabbed browsing.  If this continues to be effective I’ll probably disable the captchas altogether.  Of course, the spammers could pretty easily overcome this obstacle if they tried.

I found this today and thought it was kind of neat.  Many northeastern Indian tribes had names for each of the full moons every year.  Here is a list of the named moons for 2008.  First up is the Full Wolf Moon, next Tuesday.

Maybe everyone else has heard about this, but I never had so I thought I’d share.  It also seems like a great idea for an elementary school teacher to have a little party for the class for each of the moons, while teaching the kids about Indian culture.

Some astute individual has probably told you at some point that Eskimos have dozens of words for “snow,” whereas English-speaking individuals only have one.

They lie! (Warning: link goes to a PDF file.)

Also on Wikipedia.

Remember when Dane Cook was funny?  That’s what Stephanie and I were thinking when we watched his new special on Comedy Central the other day.  Maybe it’s harder to write funny material when you’re not stealing it.