The World of Stuff .com

A play

Yesterday I went to see my friend Reid star in a production of The Pirates of Penzance. I’d been to that particular theater before to see him in West Side Story. The venue was really small, so it didn’t matter that I sat all the way in the back. I could see and hear just fine.

Before it started, I looked through the program to see which part Reid played, and I was surprised to see a few other familiar names. Alexandra, a classmate from my AP European History class last year, had a bit part. (We had chatted online and she had told me that she was interested in theater.) Reid’s mom also had a role. It turned out that their annual summer production includes not only teenage-types, but also adults and small children. Yes, there were tiny kids in pirate costumes and Victorian dresses. How cute. Yeah, whatever.

Anyway, the play was a rollicking good time. It was funny, and the songs were good. After the show, we saw Reid, who has gotten even taller since I last saw him. I felt really short next to him, and I’m fairly tall myself. I hope I can go and see him in his next play, whatever it may be. And hopefully it’ll be a musical like this one. After all, he’s got talent.

The new chapter in the War on Trackback Spam is filled with hope. Last time, if you’ll recall, I downloaded a plugin that was supposed to limit access to wp-trackback.php, thereby stopping trackback spam before it starts. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work. So recently I tried out the Rice University Computer Security Lab’s Trackback Validator plugin. The concept behind it is simple; so simple, in fact, that I’ll just copy what the site says.

There’s only one problem with this plugin. If a trackback manages to get past WordPress’s blacklist, you will get a notification saying it has been posted successfully, even if it has been marked as spam by Trackback Validator. So you can’t rely on the notification e-mail to determine whether a trackback has been flagged as spam; you actually have to go to your site and check. Since this can get really annoying, especially if you don’t have a very comprehensive blacklist, I downloaded a plugin that automatically puts trackbacks not marked as spam into the moderation queue. That way, even if a spam trackback gets past the blacklist and Trackback Validator, it’ll still be subject to my own personal approval. This leaves me one step ahead of the spammers.

Atoms are crazy things. Though it’s hard to imagine, they’re mostly empty space. And since everything is made up of atoms, then most of everything is empty space. Here’s a scale model of a hydrogen atom. When the electron is the size of a pixel, the distance between it and the nucleus is 50 million pixels. (IE 6 doesn’t render the distance between them properly, but Firefox does.)

There are always a lot of movies being made, and for various reasons, some of them never get finished. Read about the Top 10 Unfinished Movies of All Time.

One year ago: “Come on, who hasn’t done that?”
Two years ago: “Well, I finally figured out how to do them, like, two days ago.”