asleepawake

Sunday night of what was one of the shortest weekends I can remember.

Maybe my post last week about locking spamferres out of my blog stats database pissed someone off, because on Sunday alone I got nearly 300 spam comments. Right now, as I write, they are coming in at an average rate of one every two minutes. It’s frustrating… not because they actually make it through to the main pages (Kitten’s plugin stops that), but because they are getting recorded in my database and just taking up space. I’ve managed to create a rough hack script that takes the blocked IPs from spam comments and deletes matching rows from the visitor stats database. Deleting comment spambot IPs resulted in over a thousand rows deleted from the stats table… the only thing is that they’re coming in faster than I can get rid of them. Spam bastards.

One night last week I had a dream that I cheated on my wife with some unnamed dream-girl. You know how you can wake up from a dream feeling the consequences of what happened as if it were completely real? I woke up feeling pitiful, shamed, and guilty. For a split-second, I couldn’t believe I’d thrown so much away in a single instance of indiscretion. Almost instantly I realized it was just a dream, and that I was still as faithful as ever. But the feelings I felt in those first cobwebby waking moments were totally real. As I drove to work that morning, the Arcade Fire was in the player (I’ve been listening to that album lately as if it just came out, it’s even better rediscovered as it was discovered). And because I think the rest of this story qualifies as a separate thought, I’ll make a new paragraph now.

Anyway, the memory of my REM-tryst and faux-guilt still fresh in my mind actually served to enhance my listening pleasure. The Fire have a cut on Funeral that is perfectly suited for the guilty lover. “Crown of Love” is kinda hard to figure out. It could be a heartfelt plea to recover a lost love (as it sounded to me that morning), or maybe even some twisted tale of an adolescent stalker’s obsession. Regardless, the raw emotion the Fire manage to communicate in the words and music are incredible. There’s pain here, a deep longing, a last clutch at a hope that things can be worked out. My dream mood made the song sound better than it ever had before… almost made me wanna hook up with some hussy just so I could create something equally as honest and plaintive. Are any hussies out there willing to be my muse?

And, as I often like to do, here’s a really cool link I stumbled across one time or another. BugMeNot.com is a site that lets generates logins for webpages that make you register to read content. The NY Times site comes to mind, but there are plenty other news/media sites that require “free” registration to enter. Use this portal and register no-more. And, one more before I go – cockeyed.com’s new feature on mysterious “Levitra couches” had me laughing, and also had me amazed (make sure you read all the updates). I’m gonna keep my eyes peeled, maybe I can help solve the mystery.

Lately, I’ve been using the “random entry” feature I added to the sidebar to hop onto old posts and spot-check them for WordPress conversion errors (a lot of my commas and semicolons mysteriously turned into question marks when I went through the complicated process of switching over from my old blogging software). The conversion process was extremely manual: extracting database entries from the old software’s crazy format, using word to clean them up, hand-populating the WP MySQL database with custom INSERT statements, ugh… don’t remind me. I’m just glad I got it all transferred, hopefully I’ll eventually clean up all the artifacts too – and it will be perfect.

Goodnight.

Also written on this day...

• i'm being serious - 2024
• i run from a bee - 2011
• it's tuesday night and - 2007
• who is mike jones?! - 2006