lonelyfridge

I was reading recently about a Geep (a goat-sheep cross).

This inspired a late conversation between P. and I, coming up with interesting new crosses. I believe I’ve hit upon one that will revolutionize the fur industry. Stop raising foxes and minxes in boxes and instead cross a ferret and a weasel: the werret. Just imagine, werret-coats and the dialog that will surely emanate from Fashion TV’s otherwise vapid broadcasts:

“Why, what kind of coat is that?”
“Why, it’s a werret coat!”
“Funny, most coats are for wearing.”

It’s brilliant, I tell you.

So, I’m the new admin of an established web forum (2300 or so members). The first order of business is stopping the spam bots.

Of course, there’s a captcha, but, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work.

Some would say to use a stronger captcha, but I hate captcha, so we’re going to do riddles, which might seem familiar to people who comment on this blog: “What colour is an orange?” (They’re not particularly hard riddles).

This blog uses a plug-in for WordPress called WP-Gatekeeper, developed by CSS virtuoso, Eric Meyer.

We’re going to take this idea, and merge it with our forum software so that all would-be members have to get a stupid riddle or other question correct, or they don’t get a membership.

I’m thinking topical trivia would be good as well, stuff that’s easily found via Google or Wikipedia.

If anyone has any question suggestions, toss them up here. They shouldn’t be formulaic (ie, no math, unless it’s a trick question: “I have one apple and Jane gives me three apples. How many legs do I have?”), or too esoteric.

Fresh from my purchases at Radio Shack (excuse me, “The Source”), I opened my Les Paul up for surgery tonight, determined to figure out this soldering business. I cut a whole in the middle of an old shirt to let me carry out the operation without dripping any solder on the precious polyurethane finish (sorry, no pictures, no cameras in the OR (née kitchen)).

I got my new Sprague Orange Drops (225P - .022µF polyester capacitor) in pretty easily, though they take up a lot more room than the old ceramic discs. Somehow I created a bulge that sticks into the backplate that wasn’t there before, but I’m not sure how that happened.

The results (click to enlarge, click again to excuse them):

FYI: Learning to solder is stinky. This burnt ozone smell has given me a sore throat.

Yesterday evening was quality time spent with my Stratocaster:

Angrily hitting caps-lock doesn’t tab through form fields any faster than gently hitting caps-lock.

New 24″ display arrived today.

I get to play with it (all of) tomorrow as I’m working on a major ad that’s due on Thursday. No idea what it’s about yet (nor does anyone else). It’s going to be a fun day.

Update: Halo screen grab:

Scientific LCD guide @ xbitlabs.com

Two more things off my list, one left:

10. Make my navigation menu.
11. Make the image cache that the gallery generates use a directory structure.
12. Make a WP-plugin to let me browse my uploaded photos using AJAX.

1. Delete old blog and gallery software
2. Install WordPress 2.0 & WP-Plugin for gallery fun
3. Make gallery plugin work with Unix …
4. Marvel at both the functionality (great) and code style (totally alien)
5. Configure WordPress to work with my more static content with sane URLs.
6. Create a Wordpress theme
7. Clean up XHTML output of gallery plugin to be, you know, XHTML
8. Remove nasty JavaScript “feature” that prevents selecting text
9. Make gallery plugin only work with <img> tags with a certain class attribute.
10. Make my navigation menu.
11. Make the image cache that the gallery generates use a directory structure.
12. Make a WP-plugin to let me browse my uploaded photos using AJAX.