Now that’s a bloody big rock.

I just heard on the radio that Detective Lenny Briscoe won’t be returning home after his last shift. Jerry Orbach, who played Briscoe on my favorite tv show (Law & Order) died yesterday of prostate cancer. I just found out that he has prostate cancer last week, and now he’s gone. He was 69. I really hate that. MSNBC has the story.

Saturday night we went to the New London Theater‘s production of “An Evening With Edgar Allen Poe.” It was a very enjoyable evening with several Poe classics (and two I’d never heard of) woven together into a single show. It’s community theater, so there were no Tony-worthy performances, but we did have a great time, and the cast should be proud of their work.

The show weaves together these works

• The Fall of the House of Usher
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether
• The Raven
• The Cask of Amontillado
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
• The Masque of the Red Death

all within the context of the House of Usher. The narrator, here as “Edgar,” goes to see his despondent friend, Roderick Usher, who has written to him. Over the course of his stay, he regales Usher, and his sister Madeleine, with the other stories listed. He begins a tale, the house lights go down, the stage hands reset the stage, and then we see the story unfold. At the end of each story, the action goes back to Usher and Edgar. It was a clever way to combine several disjointed stories into a single evening, while still maintaining a thread of continuity.

I’d never heard of “Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether,” which is a very funny story about inmates running the asylum. After checking in my Poe Reader, I discovered that I have this story, so I’ll have to read it sometime. I’d also never heard of “M. Valdemar,” which is a story about Mesmerism and its consequences. “Amontillado” and the “Tell-Tale Heart” are among my favorites, so it was nice to see them worked in. I thought “Red Death,” which was the last story told, should have either been given more stage time, or taken out altogether. It was a very short segment and just didn’t work that well. But one not-so-great and six really-goods, is not a bad record.

Altogether an enjoyable evening. We’ll definitely be going to more productions by this group in the future.

I want to personally thank all you worthless pieces of human filth that keep vandalizing my website with your childish “ads” for prescription drugs, pr0n and gambling. Because of this pathetic, sophomoric shits-and-giggles-fest of yours, I’ve had to take down my comment system again! Because you have nothing better to do than deface other people’s property, attempting to raise your Google page rank, I have to change MY website. I hope you worthless little shit-pigs eventually get to spend several years in some sleazy Southern county jail being the bitch for some really pissed-off biker dude named “Doris”… Even that is too good for you. Bastards.

I’ve grown extremely tired of these ass-hat comment spammers who have nothing better to do than deface websites with ads for their ridiculous ‘products’ and pr0n sites. I took the entire comments system down a while back as a stopgap, but I didn’t like not having it. So I re-enabled comments and wrote a couple of Ruby scripts to help me manage them. I have one script that finds all the comment files and sorts them so I can see if any have changed. If any have, I run another script that lets me edit/delete any comment files. This works, but requires me to diligently check for new crap, so it’s sub-optimal.

Tired of fighting, but still wanting my comment system enabled, I put my Perl hat back on and hacked in a moderation system to the comments. Essentially, no comment will actually show up on the site until I bless it, and I’ve changed the ‘thanks’ page when someone adds a comment alerting them to the change. So comments may be delayed, but they probably won’t be. I’m pretty good about checking, but now I don’t have to check constantly to make sure I’m not involuntarily pimping for some pr0n site. I think this will work nicely.

Well, thanks to the handywork of a bunch of miscreants, I’ve had to turn off the comments (writeback) system. The latest fad in spam is to unleash a robot that understands the comment systems of various blog publishing frameworks that will then post ‘comments’ for everything from pr0n to online casinos to prescription drug sellers. I’m tired of it. I just deleted a comment announcing vicodin but linking to some casino. So because of a few punks I’ve had to take the system offline until I can get a filter in place.

And to the little punks out there, thanks guys, thanks a lot….

I finished reading The Island of Dr. Moreau last night. That was one twisted book, especially since it was written in 1896. Twisted is really the only word to describe it. It was a good read but somewhat disturbing.

After finishing the text, I read the pages at the very back of the book and found something very interesting. My copy was printed and published in 1968, and the last two pages were an ad for the publisher listing other titles that they have. Here’s what it looks like

Notice the top paragraph on how to get these titles if your dealer doesn’t carry them: send the price of the book you want plus 10 cents for postage. Then notice the prices of the books. Most of them are 95 cents! (Well, all of them in this image are 95 cents, but there were others on the page for $1.25.) I know that money today and money in 1968 had vastly different values, but it’s just kind of funny to see books this cheap. To get this same book from Amazon.com today would cost $4.95, just for the book. Tack on 3 to 4 dollars for shipping and we’re up to 9 or 10 dollars at that point. Pretty sharp difference in price, eh?

After newly a full week of no DSL I’m back online. Last Friday night we had some pretty severe storms in the area, and apparently my DSL bridge got cooked. The Sync light was flashing green/amber/green/amber/etc which it had never done before, and I had no connection. After 30 minutes with EarthLink tech support, they agreed that it sounded like the bridge had been cooked. The tech said they would send me a new one and it should take three to five days. Today was (business) day 5, and it arrived.

As I took it from the box, I noticed that it was not the BroadMax like I had before, but a DQ-something-or-other. There was no documentation in the box, so I was a bit unsure if things were going to work or not. I hooked it up, turned it on, and within 60 seconds sync had been achieved, my router had done the PPPoE shuffle, and I was live again. Ooh yah! I’m so happy…

I said yesterday how I had been hosed by FeaturePrice.com so I’ve been trying to find a decent hosting solution. I signed up with EarthLink yesterday for hosting, and 10 minutes ago I cancelled that account. Why? My blog is powerd by Blosxom which is a beautifully simple Perl script that needs a relatively modern version of Perl. The latest version of Perl is 5.8. Earthlink’s version is 5.004, which is about six years old! I asked if there was any chance of updating it, but they said “no.” Alas… I’m just going to host the stupid thing at home for a while. Not great since that’s a DSL line and won’t be as snappy.

My office-mate suggested we get two other guys and go in on a box at RackSpace or ServerBeach, which would be a pretty good deal. We’re looking in to it.

In the meantime, can anyone suggest a decent hosting company? With a modern version of Perl?

Those bastards at FeaturePrice.com have f@&ked every one of their web hosting customers today! About a month ago they sold the company to Atlantic.net in supposed “good faith.” I was prepared to wait and see if Atlantic.net was any good before I went with another host so I wouldn’t have to move everything. Well, today my website, mail server, ftp server, etc quit responding. When I got home and checked again, I was redirected to a page saying this:

Feature Price service currently interrupted.

[…]

Atlantic.Net has been working with the former entity of Feature Price to transition Feature Price customers safely to Atlantic.Net. However, today the former entity of Feature Price denied Atlantic.Net employees access to Feature Price’ equipment. Shortly after this occurred, all service to Feature Price customers ceased due to unknown factors at this time.

Now I am scrambling to not lose email and visitors to my blog. Fortunately I have joeygibson.net which is hosted at home on a DSL line (where you’re reading this right now…), so I’ve set web traffic to route there, and email to route to my ISP account… This will hopefully give me a bit of time to find a decent hosting company… I have looked into a couple of others before Atlantic.net came in to the picture because I wanted to 86 featureprice… but I wasn’t happy with either of them. One was Nureal.com and the other was FidelityHosting.com. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. If anyone can recommend a decent hosting company, that you personally have experience with, please do so. I have been paying about $35/month for my “service”, which gives me up to 5 domains and all the email addys I want. I have two other domains that I hosted on this same account that are just SOL right now.

Plus, I’ve got to reconstitute my blog from two different sources; my home machine and my office machine, because they weren’t in total sync… What you are seeing right now is just what I had at home, not the latest stuff that I’ve posted from my office… This should be fun. Not.

I do know that I hope the f@&kers at featureprice.com who pulled this shit die slow, bloody, painful deaths… Well, maybe not that bad, but I do hope, at a minimum, that financial calamity will be visited upon them all and they live the rest of their days as bums begging for money on the street corner…