I receive a lot of spam, most of which are caught by filters. Spammers try different tactics - sometimes posting comments advertising a product, sometimes commenting about the subject matter in a vague manner, and sometimes posting random sentences which don't make sense. Recently, I noticed a strange and intriguing trend - I've been receiving comments that are motivational quotes or philosophical proverbs (which have nothing to do with the topic). One of them even included attribution (to Steve Martin)! I decided to save some of them and post them here:

Colon Cleansing Website
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
Success is the maximum utilisation of the ability that you have.

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Spam comments take an interesting turn… proverbs?

I'm beginning to realize that I might not be able to do both What I Ate and Photo of the Day. I'm not sure which you guys (my readers) would like to see more - pictures and descriptions of the food that I'm eating or a photo that I like picked out from my library. Last year, I did about 90 to 100 entries of each of these (What I Ate at the beginning of the year; Photo of the Day at the end of the year) and I don't know which you'd like to see going forward. Leave a comment so I know which you'd like for me to keep going.

I find it difficult to be enthusiastic about posting or even know what people like to see (I found out months later that people actually liked the What I Ate series even though I didn't receive any comments on three months worth of posts), so starting October 2008 I'll try something new: I'll Paypal $10 to the commenter of my choice (probably random unless that month there is a comment or series of comments that I like the best). The following rules apply:

• Spammers won't get any money
• Remember to leave your email address when you post (either make an account or leave it in the form - it's not posted to the site, so don't worry) so I can contact you if you win

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I'll pay you for your comments…

Well, I just got slashdotted. That's one for each of my websites. It took Cooking For Engineers about 3 months to get slashdotted and basically put me on the Internet map. I owe much of the success of Cooking For Engineers to that particular post on slashdot. (I had nothing to do with the potentially sexist comments.) Imagine my surprise when this time around, it took 3 weeks. Granted I wrote a brief article on how I solved a mysql migration issue which is a more relevant topic to slashdotters than food and cooking. Of course, this time there isn't the sexism controversy, so I'm not sure what load of traffic will be hitting the server. (Although, I expect there will be the controversy over whether or not my mysql tip is more harmful than useful since I'm not a mysql expert in any way and my advice could be poorly written and ill conceived.) In any case, I have a general idea what the load is going to be like, so don't hate me, but I'm turning on my adsense for the next couple days. Leave a comment if you agree or disagree with this action.

Oh, and if anyone knows how to get wp-cache working with Wordpress 2.1.3, please let me know. I've had some issues.

I've been trying to get wp-cache working with WordPress 2.1.3 and it just doesn't seem to be doing anything right. I uploaded the wp-cache plugin (version 2.1.1) to my plugins directory and activated it. The first time I enabled it under Options-WP_CACHE, it did nothing. It made the cache directory and properly set the symbolic link as well as the permissions, but none of my pages were being cached and none of the pages had any info added to the HTML source as expected. The second time I tried installing it, I ended up with a blank page and had to go into my wp_config.php to remove the define('WP_CACHE', true); statement. Anyone else have issues with wp-cache on wordpress 2.1.3?

Well, I've been writing Cooking For Engineers for a couple years and the website has evolved in such a way (and with such a demanding audience) that I've found myself not comfortable writing about my personal thoughts. I felt a craving for a simpler, easier outlet that didn't require vigorous fact checking and making sure every detail in a recipe was properly specified before I posted an article. So, here I am, starting a blog - a real one this time - with no focus, just an outlet for what I'm thinking. For those of you familiar with Cooking For Engineers, many of the articles that I would have posted there in Off Topic, will be posted here instead (reducing the clutter on that site). I'll probably talk a fair amount about Cooking For Engineers, Fanpop, and the web in general since a lot of my life revolves around these topics - but you'll probably hear more about random topics of discussion or thoughts that come up in my life in general. I hope people will find this blog (as if the world needed another blog that didn't have an area of focus) entertaining, interesting, and, perhaps, occassionally, enlightening.