New posts over at the SDC site: a review of Pinthouse Pizza (updates to come) and a post about America’s favorite British chef and the latest episode of his TV show. (Can you say, “batshit crazy”, boys and girls?)
On a semi-unrelated note, I have an App.net account now. I will try to start sending out notifications of new and updated posts here and on the SDC site.
Al Neuharth, creator of USA Today. USA Today obit.
Headline:
This is not a repeat from two weeks ago.
Today is my birthday. I’m going to be out of pocket most of the day: going to the gun shop, then over to the capitol to take pictures, then on a tour of the UT Tower, and then to dinner. In my absence, consider this an open thread to talk about things you want to talk about: Boston, West, Michael Morton and Ken Anderson, the Astros, the vertical integration of the broiler industry, etc.
(As always, if this is your first time posting, I have to approve your comment. Once you’ve been approved, additional comments should go through without requiring moderation. Comment approval is one blog function I can do fairly easily from my phone, so you should not have to wait too long. Unless I’m driving.)
The Houston Astros won their opener…and have lost five straight games since.
(There are no MLB teams that have gone winless in this first week of the season. Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and San Diego are all 1-5. Also, the blog widget I was using to display MLB standings hasn’t been updated in two years, and doesn’t seem to work with the current version of WordPress.)
Perhaps because nobody pays attention to the rapidly dying W.N.B.A.? This entire NYT article strikes me as condescending: Brittney Griner can make her own decisions about where she plays, and who she plays against. She doesn’t need the NYT telling her what to do.
(Seriously, I don’t understand why people are paying so much attention to Mark Cuban’s comments. He didn’t say anything that every other owner in the NBA hasn’t thought. If Fred Phelps could hit the 3-point shot and sell tickets, Cuban would be waving bundles of cash under his nose. So would every other NBA owner.)
Magnus Carlsen is the top-ranked chess player in the world, and “the first world No. 1 from a Western country since Bobby Fischer“.
More:
I’m waiting for him to show up in a commercial for Citizen Eco-Drive watches, myself.
Some folks may have noticed that I haven’t been doing as much bread blogging recently. That’s because I haven’t been baking as much bread; I’ve been a little tied up with some family things. Nothing serious, nothing health related, and things are winding down. But it has distracted me a little from the bread machine. I’m going to try to do another one of Laurence Simon’s recipes this week, but I’m not sure which one.
In other news, I’m trying to get back on my bike. I have a Trek 7500 that I bought several years ago, and which sat idle pretty much the entire time I was going to St. Ed’s. I took it in last week and had it cleaned, lubed, and tuned; now I just have a series of petty annoyances I’m working my way through. (I couldn’t find my water bottles, so I bought replacements. You can’t have too many water bottles, anyway. Then I couldn’t find my bike shoes: I can ride the Trek in my normal sort of half-boot half-sneaker shoes, but it isn’t as efficient. REI had some Shimano SH-MT33L
(Side note: I bought my bike at Freewheeling Bicycles. Why? Lawrence bought his there. I’m happy I followed his lead. The total bill to get my bike out of hock last week was about $104. That price included $8 for a rear tube, and another $45 for a rear bike rack. I want to start making grocery store trips on the bike, rather than the car, so I bought the rack and plan to sling some panniers over it at some point. Since I bought the bike there, Freewheeling gave me a 25% discount on labor, so the whole thing ended up being much more reasonable than I expected. Consider this an endorsement of Freewheeling.)
(Side note 2: F–k Sun and Ski Sports, the horse they rode in on, and any horse that looks anything like the horse they rode in on.)
As a geek, one of the things I’ve always wanted to when I was riding was to log and track my rides. I have a cheap-ass bike computer with basic functionality: current and average speed, distance on current ride, odometer, and clock. But I’ve always wanted to be able to overlay my ride log onto a map and see where I’ve ridden, as well as getting elevation data. My feeling is that being able to do that gives me a tangible sense of progress, which gives me more motivation to ride. But those capabilities require GPS.
I’m still looking for work so I can’t (and don’t want to) spend $330 on a Garmin Edge 510
Here’s the thing: I’m smart. S-M-R-T. Smart. And not only am I smart, but! I have a smartphone! That has a GPS built in! And that runs apps! And, yes, there are cycling apps available! The big ones on Android seem to be MapMyRide and Strava, but I’ve also seen people say that MyTracks works quite well for cycling applications. And I already have MyTracks installed. And I already take my cellphone with me when I ride anyway, in case of emergency. Now all I have to do is get it properly rigged and I should have almost everything I need. (The last remaining piece is some cycling shorts with pockets. I’ve blown out the waistband on the one pair I have; whenever I put them on, they slide off my ass. This is not good for cycling purposes, or for staying off the sex offender registry purposes.)
(I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about Android/iPhone cycling apps. My friend’s position is that the dedicated cycling computers like the Garmin Edge line are preferable to using your phone for this purpose. His feeling is that running the GPS on the phone and logging data eats battery power, and your phone may run out of juice before you finish the ride. My feeling is: I’m not a high-speed low-drag road biker. I’m usually not out for more than an hour or two. If I start out with a fully charged battery, I feel like I should be able to run MyTracks for at least two hours without worry. We’ll test this theory once I get everything rigged for silent running. If I was doing the kind of thing he talks about doing, such as riding the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route 12 hours a day for ten weeks, I’d reconsider my position.)
Thinking about this some more, I wonder what the market for higher-end bike and running computers like the Garmins is today. Let’s see: I can pay $330 for the Edge 500. Or I can pay $196 for a HTC EVO V 4G
If any of my readers have experience with cycling apps like the ones I’ve mentioned (or others: I’m still running an Android phone, but iPhone users are welcome too) please feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email if you’d prefer. Contact information is in the place where it says “Contact”.
Looking back, I find it has been a little more than a month since I installed WP-Ban.
In that time, it has blocked 30,257 spam attempts. That’s 30,257 spam comments I haven’t had to delete.
Where are these coming from? I thought it might be interesting to post a Top Twenty list of IP addresses.
| IPs | Attempts | % | Country | ISP |
| 94.23.60.124 | 2,214 | 7.32% | France | OVH Systems |
| 200.220.196.23 | 1,862 | 6.15% | Brazil | Nelson Quintas Telecom |
| 192.74.228.193 | 1,083 | 3.58% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 192.74.228.145 | 770 | 2.54% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 192.74.248.161 | 650 | 2.15% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 96.47.225.66 | 551 | 1.82% | United States | IPTelligent LLC |
| 96.47.225.82 | 550 | 1.82% | United States | IPTelligent LLC |
| 142.4.116.58 | 548 | 1.81% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 96.47.225.74 | 548 | 1.81% | United States | IPTelligent LLC |
| 192.74.236.165 | 546 | 1.80% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 142.4.98.226 | 513 | 1.70% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 117.21.226.205 | 503 | 1.66% | China | Chinanet Jiangxi |
| 142.0.133.89 | 496 | 1.64% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 117.21.225.25 | 381 | 1.26% | China | Chinanet Jiangxi |
| 117.21.225.42 | 374 | 1.24% | China | Chinanet Jiangxi |
| 142.4.119.170 | 356 | 1.18% | United States | Chinanet Jiangxi |
| 142.4.98.210 | 354 | 1.17% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 5.9.7.208 | 351 | 1.16% | Germany | Hetzner Online |
| 192.74.230.69 | 339 | 1.12% | United States | Peg Tech |
| 117.21.227.47 | 330 | 1.09% | China | Chinanet Jiangxi |
| 44.02% |
The percentage figures are based on the number of spam attempts coming from each IP address, as a percentage of the total spam attempts. So, for example, a little over 7% of the total spam attempts to my blog came from one IP address, 94.23.60.124, which is located in a block of IP addresses assigned to France (according to the Country IP Block database).
What conclusions can we draw from this? Blocking certain IP address ranges can be a big win if you don’t want to spend time mucking out Akismet. Specifically:
I am a little surprised at the number of spam attempts coming from IP addresses in the United States. My impression before I started using WP-Ban was that most of my spam was coming from China and countries in Latin America. My reading of the stats indicates that I do get a lot of spam from those sources, but larger percentages come from the United States and various countries in Europe (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, etc.)
For the record, I have yet to get any email from anyone in an IP range I’ve blocked requesting that I make an exception. I am happy to do so for any legitimate readers of my blog who are blocked: my email address is displayed on the page informing users they are banned.
Edited to add: Mike the Musicologist asked an interesting question: had I tried to associate the spam IP addresses with specific providers? The answer: no. I’ve gone back and attempted to add provider information based on what I’m finding at CQCounter.com.
However, I’m finding some issues between CIPB and CQCounter. For example, CIPB shows 142.0.133.89 as a United States IP block: CQCounter shows it as a Chinese block with Peg Tech as the ISP. I’d like to do some more work on this; if anyone has any suggestions, or especially if anyone has any information on Peg Tech, please feel free to leave it in the comments.
It looks like we’re still on for the blogmeet at Mangia’s on Mesa this coming Saturday (the 23rd) at 6 PM.
Lawrence says he’s heard from five or six of his readers. I haven’t heard from any of you. Perhaps you all read Lawrence’s blogs as well as mine, and just decided to reply to him directly. Perhaps all of my readers hate me (well, okay, with one exception, and she has small children to deal with). Perhaps you all hate pizza. Perhaps Ken White promised you a pony if you didn’t show up.
That’s okay. I’ll just sit in the corner nursing a soda and a massive grudge against humanity in general.
Lawrence and I are discussing doing an Austin area blog meetup on Saturday, March 23rd. We’ve tentatively discussed meeting at 6 PM at the Mangia Pizza on Mesa Drive. (I can provide directions if anyone needs them.) I think we’d both be open to other venues; however, we do want to stay away from downtown Austin due to SXSW, so we are kind of thinking either somewhat north or somewhat south.
Does this date work for folks? Is there general interest in doing a blog meetup and dinner? Let me know by email (stainles [at] gmail.com works well) or in the comments here.
In the approximately 24 hours I’ve had WP-Ban in place:
The volume of spam comments has gotten out of control again; there were more than 600 waiting to be cleaned out this morning. Akismet does a fine job of stopping the spam from being posted (and I can count the number of false positives since I started this blog on the fingers of one hand), but I still have to go through the queue and empty it at least once a day.
In an attempt to mitigate this problem, I have installed the WP-Ban plugin and will be configuring it to block IP addresses, or IP address ranges, that are a source of spam. I feel slightly bad about doing this, but in the 30 minutes I’ve had WP-Ban installed, it has blocked 15 spam attempts.
If anybody runs into problems with this, please let me know. I’ve added my contact email address to the WP-Ban page as well. We’ll see if the Beats by Dr. Dre scumbags, or any of the other spammers, try to contact me.
I think Calvin has the right idea.
But I was puttering around in the kitchen yesterday, putting together a loaf of sourdough beer bread, and a couple of thoughts occurred to me.
that I haven’t been using as much as I should. I need to step that up, and I’ve already started working in that direction.
, though I want to try adapting some of the ones from Breads from the La Brea Bakery
to bread machine use. Laurence Simon has some recipes on his site that I’d like to try as well.So I’m going to start keeping a bread journal of what I bake, where it came from, what changes/improvisations I’ve made, and how it came out.
I’m just using a simple notebook for this right now. But I’m thinking about posting these as regular entries (maybe once a week; as a single guy, a loaf a week is about what I go through) on a blog. Probably here; I thought about doing this on the SDC blog, but that’s more restaurant targeted than food in general. I don’t see that fitting in with the shared vision Lawrence and I have for that blog.
Would folks be interested in this? I don’t think there’s any danger of me turning into a foodie d’bag: TJIC would probably…well, maybe not sneer, but at least say something to me for using a bread machine rather than mixing and kneading by hand, for starters.
I’d also like to get some feedback on what I might be doing wrong. The sourdough beer bread tastes pretty good and has just about the right texture for my taste, but the top crust came out cracked and uneven. (The basic white bread+ I made came out distorted: one end rose to a normal level, but the other end just barely rose at all. I blame that on the salt problem. It was also pretty dense, but again, the salt problem, plus I kind of expect cheese breads to be dense.)
How about it, folks? Feel free to leave comments.
(I haven’t said this in a while, so let me drop this in here: if you buy stuff from Amazon using the links above or the search box to the side, I get a small kickback which I could use right now. Just saying; no obligation to buy.)
(Oh, and speaking of magic/science, I’ve started reading Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking
(Note to self: look for good kitchen scale when out thrift-shopping again.)
(Note to self 2: they’re really not that much on Amazon
I’d like to say “may 2013 be better than 2012″, but that’s less of an expression of hope and more of a statement of fact. I find it hard to imagine this new year being much worse than the last one.
I’d also like to thank the following folks:
Those sites were the top referrers of hits here in 2012.
I don’t get the loony search terms that Ken and Patrick do. You guys need to work on that in 2013. My test and evaluation of the Nerf EBF-25 continues to be an evergreen post, and a lot of folks apparently came here looking for information on Azaria and Lindy Chamberlain, oddly enough. You’d figure that people looking for information on the case would go to a more mainstream site…
Enough administrative indulgence. Good luck this year, everyone.
Lawrence and I have been making efforts (around the other things we have going on) to reboot the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy in blog format. As I’ve mentioned previously, mac.com hosting went away, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen with Real/Time hosting.
We have a first version of it here, or at least one I don’t mind sharing with people.
One of the big problems I’ve been running into is the need for a header image. I found one that sort of “works”, for some value of works, but I’d really like to find a distinctive header image (or a set of images) that I won’t mind looking at for the next twenty years or so. The recommended image is 940 pixels wide by 198 pixels high.
If anyone wants to take a cut at doing a header image, I’m willing to put something on the table; either cash (in the double digits) or dinner at an SDC if you’re in the area.
Contact me at the usual addresses if you’re interested in talking specifics.