Beau Jackson

I’ve been spammed!  I feel so violated.

Some spamming JERK (well, bot most likely) posted a comment that advertised credit cards.  I suppose I should be glad that it wasn’t something worse.

Consequently, I’ve enabled the little wordpress option that requires a poster to have one approved comment before it displays automatically.  Hopefully that will remedy the situation.  If not, I’ll have to moderate all comments (which I really don’t want to do).

Hopefully, I won’t get innundated with spam on my blog.  I don’t know what I’ll do at that point, but it’ll really tick me off.

Am I a copy cat?  I don’t think so, but maybe.  I had played around a bit with Gallery, but wasn’t happy with the results.  Today Richard told me about fGallery.  It’s got some bugs still, but over all I’m much more pleased – primarily because it automatically picks up the theme of the rest of my site.  I’m going to have to tweak the files a bit to make it play nice with my style sheet, but that’s known territory at least.  Got a few pictures of the kids and the animals up tonight.  I’ll be adding more soon.

At Mike’s suggestion, I installed Gallery tonight.

I’ve only got a couple of pics in there so far – just kicking the tires as it were. I’m going to have to fiddle with it extensively so that I can get it to match my theme at least a little bit. I recognize some of the functionality – I’ve seen the random picture thing on Richards site, and I’m guessing it’s from a Gallery installation. Fun stuff.

As an asside, Fantastico is great. So far, everything I’ve wanted to install has been available as part of Fantastico, and Gallery was no exception. It sure makes life a LOT easier when the stuff you want is already waiting for you on your web hosts machines, and all ya gotta do is click a couple of links and it’s up and running.

Tomorrow (the 7th) is our son’s b-day – he’ll be turning 13. We got him a robot kit for his birthday and let him have it early – it’s called a BOE-Bot and I gotta say, I’m a little jealous. BOE is a pun of sorts, and stands for “Board of Education”. It’s basically a little circuit board with a little bitty processor on it, and I/O ports for various doo-dads, all mounted on a little metal chasis with a couple of servos and some wheels.

It comes with a programming environment for the PC and uses a variant of the BASIC programming language called P-BASIC. It also has a serial port, so it plugs right in to the computer for easy downloading of your programs.

Dominic (my son) has come to me a couple of times to help him debug a program (dang typo’s will get you ever times) or to help him figure some other thing out. It’s all I can do to let him learn and explore it on his own. It makes my geeky-father’s-heart swell with pride to see him programming his own robot that he built and wired up all on his own. ;)

I may have to get one of these for myself…hehe. If you’re interested in your own bot, you can get refurbs on e-bay for a LOT less than a new one costs.

I don’t stay as technically informed as I used to (nor as much as I’d like to), so I may be a bit behind the times on this one.

I found this today: XGL/Compiz

Which is just about the coolest desktop functionality I have ever seen. Sadly, it’s on Linux only, and I run Windows for work (gotta make a living) and at home because there just isn’t that much kids software for Linux. Someday I’ll have a machine that is my “toy” and I can run whatever I like.