Move over, Cupcake in Bloom. Qwest has annoyed me more.

Repetition plays a role in my annoyance with advertising. In downtown Minneapolis right now there’s a new set of Qwest ads that are almost as ubiquitous as the previously-ranted-about Cupcake in Bloom from 1-800-Flowers.

There are a pair of these, both annoying, but the dude in this one is just begging to be punched in the face. I would be happy to oblige.

Qwest ad: Punch me in the face. Please!

So this is what it’s like when a president actually cares

I am in utter disbelief at the audacious lies of Sen. Lindsay Graham, who dared the other day to claim President Obama has been “AWOL” on the matter of the economic stimulus plan. He’s been all over trying to make this thing happen, and now he’s using the Internet (finally, a president who gets it) to help make his case:

Yes, our new president is using YouTube to get his message out. Power to the people!

RegisTrap seems to be losing its effectiveness

I suspected this might happen once I released RegisTrap to the public. I had four new spam user registrations on my site when I checked it today (having last checked it maybe two or three days ago). Previously I’d only see about one a week with RegisTrap running.

It was bound to happen. The rules RegisTrap employs are fairly simple, and the “bots” are constantly being modified. I have no idea how many registrations RegisTrap has blocked in the time it’s been running — perhaps my next step in developing it is to add a logging feature. If there were only four (or even maybe a dozen or so) spam attempts on my site during this time period, then RegisTrap seems pretty ineffectual. But if it actually blocked a ton (metaphorically speaking) of spam registrations, then four sneaking through doesn’t seem so bad.

If anyone out there is using RegisTrap and cares to comment on ways I could improve it, let me know! Meanwhile, as time allows I am going to pursue the logging functionality, if only for my own edification. As valuable as the logging feature would be, it goes against the spirit of simplicity inherent in the plugin. I really don’t want to write anything to the database or filesystem.

Cover art revised

I liked the look of my Anagrammatic Pseudonyms cover art, but I realized it just didn’t look that much like a real publication. The map design was cool, but you’d never get a publication that just had the map like that, with the map part itself full-bleed on the page and no micro-text at the bottom. So this revised design is an attempt to remedy that. I also changed the creases to make it look like a tri-fold. See if you can spot all of the changes from the original!

Anagrammatic Pseudonyms cover (revised)