Illegal Piercings, Spam Comments, Hard Drive Treasures, Cliches

by Mike Shea on 25 March 2004

If you're a woman, your body is no longer your own. While the topic may range from comical to disturbing, the president being set here is that women cannot do things to their own body because people like Republican, Bill Heath, doesn't think it is "an appropriate thing to be doing." The further to the right we go, the more control a bunch of old bureaucrats and their twisted visions of right and wrong decide what the rest of us can do with our own lives.

MikesShea.Net doesn't get a lot of hits. It gets even fewer comments. Until MovableType is able to prevent comment spamming, I am disabling comments on all posts. Every week I have to remove twenty to fifty spam comments. Its crudding up my site. Its crudding up Google. Its crudding up Blogdex. Its time to stop. I hate removing a feature like comments, but it really wasn't being used anyway. When MovableTYpe 3.0 is released, I may turn comments back on.

Simson Garfinkel wrote an interesting article on what people leave on their junked hard drives. It made me want to order up a few dozen on ebay just to see what was left on them. For the paranoids, it's a flashlight on the junk others may be reading about you.

Cliches are evil. This Reuters article has a good article on the worst cliches we see in every-day life. I've started keeping a list of cliches I find at work. They are little pearls of stupidity that I will record for future ages. Read your Orwell. Read your Strunk and White. Don't be an idiot. Avoid cliches.

Congress has a bill called H. R. 3687 that itself is so vulgar it would be illegal to read it allowed. My goal is to get a video of a congresswoman saying the "C" word on CSPAN.

The fat suit-wearing bureaucrats prove they are more interested in coming up with a witty acronym than actually coming up with good laws when they brought The PIRATE act to the table. Lower burden of proof, higher fines, jail sentences for single file sharing, its a witch burning of the nerds.

The Passivator is technology used to detect bad writing. If you are using a Mozilla based browser such as the king of great browsers, Firebird you can drag a link up to your bookmark toolbar and when you suspect a page to be badly written, click this bookmarklet and it will show you both adverbs and passive voices.