This weekend we went and visited some friends who have a house on Cape Cod. Other than dealing with a couple special issues, I was offline for most of the weekend. Because of that, when I got home I found around 1300 unread emails in my main inbox. I’ve whittled it down to a little less than 900, but I have a lot of reading to go. I also haven’t visited any of the blogs I normally visit, with one exception, so I feel like I’m out of touch with what my friends are up to.

The one exception is Mommy’s Busy ... Take a Number!. On Friday, her daughter was supposed to go into surgery and I asked everyone to pray for Faith as well as for her whole family. Well, the surgery has been postponed until Tuesday, so please keep up your prayers.

What I did do is spend time reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as I looked out at the waves. Lots of blog post ideas have percolated through my brain and I hope to get a chance to write up some of these soon.

Back home, I caught the tail end of the Democratic Presidential debate and added a few comments here and there on various blogs. I spent a bit of time cleaning up the never ending battle of spam. The latest annoyance is that various spambots go out and create userids so they can post ‘authenticated’ comments. This gets around many of the spam filters out there. So, I’ve been busy deleting comments as well as newly created userids. I’ve been adding filters to my user creation rules. If you have a userid that begins with ‘regbot’ or ‘registrator’ or you are coming from certain mail servers in Russia or Latvia, you’ll need to use a different email address. In addition, if you are a webpage scraper looking for people to spam, don’t send emails to addresses like regbot_18@1net.gr.
regbot_n13@rbcmail.ru,
registrator22@Safe-mail.net,
registrator_n20@axigenmail.com,
registrator3005@toughguy.net or blogger4@sdial.biz. You’ll just be spamming one of your own.