Announcements

There’s now a list of this blog’s recent contributors, including the mysterious In-Cog-Nito, in the right sidebar. Click on a contributor’s name to display his posts.

(And let me know if you would prefer not to be listed.)

While this may not be a personal blog, events like this are nice to share.   Here is my son-in-law’s e-mail:

 To his utter astonishment your grandson was born on August 19 at 4:16 p.m. He weighed in at 7 lb 4 oz and passed the Apgar test with flying colors, reaping the benefits of more than nine months of assiduous preparation. He is already happy to demonstrate his command of German umlauts by regularly reciting “rabäh, rabäh,” a perennial infant favorite the world over. Mother and child are exhausted but resting happily at home.

Besides, of course, being born to a beautiful and loving mother, he is also lucky to have a father who captures that look upon his son’s face – the “utter astonishment” at entering this loud, bright, and exciting world.

I’ve activated it. If it works, spam comments will be blocked while comments flagged as possible spam will require commenters to perform a “copy the image” action to prove they aren’t spambots. This should be an improvement over the current system, which puts all suspicious-but-legitimate comments into the general spam queue where they are almost impossible for me to find. Please email me at the support address if you have problems. I need your feedback to determine if this system works as advertised, so please try to leave comments on this post and let me know if your comment either disappears or you get prompted to copy an image before your comment posts. Thanks.

It’s still not perfect. If your comment disappears, please email me ASAP so that I can restore it. I won’t know there is a problem unless you contact me.

(To provide some sense of what’s going on, there are currently 7242 spam comments in the filter queue, and additional spam comments accumulate at a rate of approximately 500/day. At this rate there are bound to be some false positives. If your comment gets trapped, and you let me know, I can easily retrieve it by searching the spam queue for your name. But I will only know to do this if you let me know.)