The mighty Ken Jennings struck out.

Today was the day, as reported everywhere. 74 time champ of Jeopardy, was defeated. That’s not all that bad as he broke zillions of records and won 2.5 million dollars. Ken is a software designer and he seems to be a hell of a nice guy. He’s now hero to trivia geeks everywhere. Sarah and I have really been enjoying watching him win game after game.

Part of the story that really amuses me is that he was felled by Nancy Zerg. Not that I know Nancy, but technically, I work for her. Zerg is a REALTOR^® from Los Angeles.

I can’t wait for this seasons Tournament of Champions and the return of Ken!

I’ve been being hit with comment spam on my blog for a bit. At first it was just one or two comments a week and I’d go in and nuke them from the database. Then it got to be 15 at one time from a dozen IPs. At this point I turned on moderation for all comments. This wasn’t great, but it was workable since I don’t get all that many comments, spam or otherwise. However, it got unmanageable yesterday when the I had about 60 comment spam posts to moderate. This morning I decided to look into what else I could do about it.

Browsing the WordPress site I found the following wiki article: How to combat comment spam with WordPress. It talks about the stuff that is built into wordpress, which is what I had been using. It then talked about renaming certain files to get around the bots, which seems like an unmaintainable idea in the long run.

Finally, at the bottom of the page was a link to something I thought was workable. Gudlyf has posted a plugin he wrote for WordPress called AuthImage. It does a simple captcha test as a reader posts their comments. I figure I’d give this one a try. It puts a slightly added burden on the random comment poster, but it allows me to turn off moderation and still avoid getting the spam messages.

I got to take a geeky trip down memory lane last Sunday morning.

I was over at my parents and they were cleaning out the storage room in the basement. One of the things to go was one of those VHS wall storage units. We had moved it to the basement long ago and it became a storage unit of whatever we could think to cram in there. Somewhere along the way, it started to get all my computer stuff. Basically, anything that I had for my Commodore 128 in terms of manuals and software was stuffed in there.

Emptying it out to take it up, I came across Ahoy! and Compute! magazines with reviews, articles, and code listings that were pages long. I remember typing in the source for hours to play the cheesy games or play with the silly utility. Some of them were in Commodore BASIC for 128, but some was for the Commodore 64 which the 128 could emulate. A majority of them seemed to be hex listings, again for both platforms, that were pages and pages long. I remember the hex listings being an evil, evil bitch.

I also found about 50 5 1/4-inch floppies. This was the real source of nostalgia for me. Many of the had the writable notch for the other side of the disk put in by hand/scissor, while some actually came that way, and then there was the ones that were done with a tool just for the job. There were notes to myself and my parents on the sleeves about how to launch the games and applications, even the labels about what games and applications are on the disks. The list is too long, but to name a few that jumped out at me: GEOS, Summer Games I and II, Winter Games, Jumpman Jr., H.E.R.O. and Pitfall II.

Finally, I found one of the most useful things in my whole Commodore arsenal: the Epyx FastLoad cartridge. This sped of loading of data from the floppy drive on the Commodore 64 about 5 times. From what I remember, it would basically replaced the firmware of the floppy drive (in its operating memory) and gave it much, much more efficient loading routines. It also provides some common command shortcuts to load games. I forget the key combo, but I think it was commodore-control and it would execute LOAD ":*",8,1 and then type RUN<enter> when the READY. prompt was displayed. FastLoad didn’t work with all games, but it made a shit load of difference on the games it worked with. The weird thing is that I just googled for a page all about FastLoad and I couldn’t find one, I thought for sure someone would be out there singing the praises of it. Unfortunately, I’m not knowledgeable enough to write one.

Anyway, after my walk down memory lane ended at the garbage can where I trashed all this stuff. I haven’t touched it in at least 12 years, anything I would have needed form them I’ve transfered over to a PC long ago. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up with a single reason to keep any of that crap. Thus is the coda of one chapter of my geeky life….