Mostly Harmless

can you hear me now?

So, I got Vonage, like a month ago. My old phone number is moved over to the Vonage line and the phone line is disconnected. I still have one land-line and a cell phone so I’m not too concerned about losing phone service during a power outage.

Not that I answer the phone anymore anyway, which is a good reason to dump my $45 a month service in favor of $16.94 a month service from Vonage. I’ve got the 500-minute plan, which is plenty. That’s either local or long distance. I could spend hours talking on the phone long distance and my bill won’t go up a cent. I’ve also got all the usual things, like Caller ID, Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, and voicemail — that I can check on a freakin’ web page or have e-mailed to me.

I set up a rule in my home e-mail program to forward my voicemail to my work address; this afternoon my voicemail came to me in the form of an audio attachment, which was sweet. It was a phone solicitation, but still…

Call quality is peachy. There will be some lag if I’m doing an FTP upload during a call, so I don’t do that. The Motorola V1000 phone doohickey will automatically throttle the outbound FTP connection but there’s still a 1 to 2-second lag in the conversation. Without outbound network activity there is no discernible lag or loss of quality.

And it’s about $30 cheaper every month, as previously mentioned. That’s enough cash saved every year to pay for a spiffy new iPod. Woot!

Spammers prepare for the SmackDown.

Update: It is ON… and You Have Been Served

Comment queuing is in effect. (Comments will not be visible until I release them… I’ll update the templates Real Soon.)

Update #2: Perhaps the spammers weren’t paying attention. They Have Been Served! The new comment spam blocker just caught a couple dozen attempted spams. Suck On That.

Thanks to: scriptygoddess, David Raynes, and IDblog

FYI - The typical Movable Type method of dealing with comment spam involves manually deleting each entry and then rebuilding the website, which is a pain in the ass if some yahoo dumped 26 messages into random blog entries. There are a few more steps I can take, like modifying the “send-comment” script, but the comment queue has removed the pain from dealing with comment spam.

Rock on.

Update #3 (day #3): Another 36 attempts blocked, this time from someone not spoofing his IP address or randomizing his e-mail address. Sucka.

Update #4 (day #10): 78 attempts blocked today. Same joker as last time. I’ve gotta rename my comment cgi script…