Mostly Harmless

Some people might call it a “spree”

I ain’t got time to Blog…

Stuff I’ve purchased in the last few months, sorted by overall cost of the category and by price within the category, more or less.

• portable audio
  • PocketDock w/line-out
  • iSkin eVo2
  • Etymotic ER-6 earphones
  • 20-gig iPod (4th generation)
• misc doodads
  • Rubik's Professor Cube (5×5x5)
  • JB spy camera
  • Hoist Prime 8 home gym
• computer upgrades
  • (another) 120-gig hard drive
  • Pioneer DVR107D 8x DVD burner
  • ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, Mac edition
  • Formac Studio TVR digital video encoder & TV tuner
  • Gigadesigns dual 1.33 GHz G4 accelerator
• vehicle
  • fluorescent work light
  • random orbital polisher/waxer
  • lots of cleaning products
  • auto fire extinguisher
  • cargo net
  • subwoofer
  • auto-dimming mirror/compass
  • security system upgrade
  • 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX

A couple of those haven’t even shipped yet, namely the iSkin iPod protector and the dual 1.33 ghz accelerator.

I just installed the Radeon 9000 on Friday night. I only did one QuakeIII time demo with the old GeForce2 mx beforehand. Got 77 fps. With the 9000 I got… 77 fps. Then I removed my maxfps cap and got… 77 fps. Then I upped the resolution from 640×480 to 1024×768 and got… 77 fps. 1152×870… 77 fps.

So that was fun.

Apparently my max fps is bound by the CPU or the AGP bus. I’m thinking it’s the CPU ‘cuz no matter how much detail I turn on I get the same results. The improvement over the GeForce is that now I can turn on all the eye-candy and run at high-res without losing any speed. The GeForce was pretty much tapped out at resolutions over 640×480, IIRC, so that would have been a bottleneck when the CPU upgrade finally gets here.

The power orbital waxer is merely the latest stage in my descent towards total auto detailing obsession. The car is almost always insanely clean, which is a shame because I got the car at the “paint damaged/overspray/acid rain” sale. The paint problems aren’t generally noticeable in daylight — and the car ain’t just white, it’s WHITE!, so it will burn the retinas from your head if you look directly at it — but in the dim fluorescent light of my garage I notice the bad spot on the door just about every day. After it rains I’ll go over the car with the car duster (the next morning when it’s dry) or dry the car off with The Absorber, if it’s actively raining during the drive home. If it’s too dirty for the car duster and not wet enough for the Absorber I can use the Armor All car wash wipes — which are pre-moistened towelettes big enough to wipe down the entire car (and they actually work very well). On Thursday after it rained I dried the car, wiped it down, cleaned the wheels, and hit the tires with some tire black stuff.

Nice -n- shiny. Ahhhh.

So, what’s my credit card balance after all of this?

$0.

That comment queue hack, is “TEH Shit.”

Total comments blocked so far: 183. Go peddle your online casinos elsewhere.
Total comments blocked so far: 187. (yes, they tried 4 while I was adding up the last batch)

Since I haven’t implemented a blacklist or all the other spam reduction methods (yet) I still get comment spam attempts that I have to deal with in the comment queue. When they dump 20-30 messages at a time it becomes tedious to deny each of those individually — the fancier SQL version may have a nice way to deal with that sort of thing but the Perl hack doesn’t didn’t.

My version of the comment queue hack has an extra subroutine to delete all the pending comments. That lets me “allow” the one legitimate comment, for instance, and then “deny” all the rest with just one click of the spiffy new button:

I’m only posting my changes, instead of the whole file, because this is a hack of a hack and I’ve only got a vague understanding of the script, so you should only muck with this if you know your way around Perl and MT.
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