(Spam) Milestone II

Akismet has caught 50,598 spam for you since you first installed it.

That’s quite a lot of spam, considering that moi Blog contains about 650 posts which have received a little over 2200 legit comments! Of course, I keep deleting oh-so-many seemingly-legit-but-inane-nevertheless comments but even then this is an extremely high number of junk! Thanks Akismet! This place would have been a dumpster if it weren’t for you (or else I’d have become a madman trying to manually delete all those spam comments!)

P.S: I harked back to the Archives and guess what! A little under an year ago (Feb 25th) the legit comments count stood at 1000 whilst spam count had touched 10000. And a year down the line, comments have doubled whereas spam has multiplied five times!!! 👿

Home….Alone

Nice to be back at home!!! Itz not been that great a hiatus so nothing’s seemingly changed much but just on the surface! Who knows what lurks around the corners….

Anyways, throwing a spanner in the works is the fact that most friends have chosen not to come here during their Winter vacations and its compounded by the awkward academic schedules of the Family’s kids n bright-heads! Their examinations (what are they supposed to be 😀 ) will end only on the last day of the year so no rollicking visits till then!

So its main aur meri television for the time being now! The English Premiere League has been hogging much of the view-space and was followed by yet another Trilogy – an oft-viewed one that too – but this time on the satellite tv!

Milestone II

Milestone I was achieved on May 26th, 2007 and less than 7 months later (2 more days to go ) the second milestone has been achieved. My Wierd Wired World‘s visitor count has doubled in the short span of seven months:

I presume that the popular radio posts as well as a multitude of reviews have played a major hand in bringing in the eyeballs. In fact, the blog recorded its best-day-ever (stats-wise) yesterday itself! The Taare Zameen Par review is to be thanked for. And of course, it wouldn’t have been possible but for the encouragement and motivation from Friends, Colleagues, Family Members and Visitors alike. A big Thank You to you all!!!

On a sidenote: Lazybug’s catching up!

Freedom at (Mid)Night

Nope! This post ain’t about the book of the similar name. But instead refers to moi state of mind at nights. I’ve discontinued my ISP subscription for the time being – in view of the upcoming holidays and the subsequent journeys & trips – and will be without nighttime-connectivity for at least a month…or maybe even more. While I can easily claim it was an easy decision for me, skeptics (read friends and roommates) argue to the contrary. Why would anyone want to sever one’s ties with the online world is their question and I simply answer them with a shrug of the shoulders

Its a been there done that kinda scenario for me. After all, I was connectivity-free till the OOD arrived and even for sometime after that. I honestly think that a month’s sabbatical (if one can call that!) would do a whole lot of good for me. I haven’t indulged in any of my fav pursuits ever since the advent of the ood – 4 books, 8 journals, 3 audio cd’s, 1 rubik’s cube, 1 tangram box (new one) and other miscellany are awaiting my attention. Time to turn attention onto them.

Sunday Musings

Sunday’s the most awaited day of the week and as it crawls to an end, the sceptre of the coming Monday makes one cringe in agony! It feels as if the weekend has flitted by so quickly that it might have never existed. Well, it would’ve registered some sorta impact if there were some partying or going-outs or general merriment. Alas, sleeping till high-noon doesn’t help matters…just makes the day look so short!

A good part of the last hour or so was whiled in away in choosing a successor to the much-used digg theme on this blog. After Unsleepable, this was my most-used theme and it should be followed up by something just as good. Not that there was any necessity for a theme change, but few of my friends were complaining about how slowly the entire site loaded or how ungainly the three-columned-page looked  on smaller monitors! So a two-column theme had to be chosen….journalist was too simple and the regulars like k-2 & regulus were very ubiquitous! Anyways, ’twas left to the flip of the coin and hence we see the pool theme upon this blog. The header image had come pre-packaged with moi Vista.

Sat/Sun  is also the time for some EPL action and it was heartening to see Chelsea and Manchester United keep up their winning ways. The blues beat Sunderland 2-0 whilst the reds handed bottom-placed Derby a 4-1 dressing down. Liverpool meanwhile lost their away match to Reading 3-1. Arsenal are still at the top of the leaderboard with a game in hand.

There’s a new Biryani place in  town called something like Central Biryani Paradise. I was appraised about it by Smack from the FreeHyderabad Forums and he had high praises for it. Haven’t been able to take out time for that even though its pretty nearby! This procrastination will someday beat the cr*p outta me!!!

I have downloaded & installed the newly-released Yahoo Messenger for Vista – preview version i.e. a pre-beta release and at first sight, it looks very shiny and nifty with its color schemes, transparent aero-esque borders and stylish menus and views. It hogs up quite a bit of memory though! And it repeatedly disregards my preference for invisible sign-in! Will write down in-detail someday else.

Something else that I have been doing when I am getting bored is browsing through Wikipedia! Over the past few days, I have reading all sorta stuff – Sher Shah Suri, Tippu Sultan, Kansas Highways, Port, Bridge (the game), Holocaust, Napoleon, Termites, Crustaceans and a whole other bunch of stuff that I don’t even remember now! But I must be beware: a little knowledge is dangerous!

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Now playing on RealPlayer: Piya Basanti – Piya Basanti
via FoxyTunes

Thanks for the Vacations

Day two of an extended 4-day-weekend and am already feelin’ bored! It’s Thanksgiving Week in the US and courtesy some generous ppl. out there, we’ve managed to garner an err..ummm….vacation this Thursday and Friday. Hence the 4-day weekend, including Sat & Sun. A big thanks to the people behind it!

Other than getting bored, I’ve seemed to accomplish little…notwithstanding the NFSU exploits and commenting on anti-communist posts 😛 but there are a few productive tasks in the pipeline [*procrastination*] – a visit to Princeton Review ; a Marriage to attend; decide whether to appear or not to appear for this; and a few other mundane tasks. Sigh! Have to get started now……

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Now playing on Winamp: Chahaton Ka Silsila
via FoxyTunes

Two Years of WordPress-ing

• 4th November, 2005 – I download and install Flock & get a free WordPress invite alongwith it.
• 5th November 2005 – I sign-up for a Blog @ WordPress.com. Decide that I’ll put in my own name in the Blog’s URI rather than any fancy or namby-pamby nickname!
• 6th November 2005 – I mull all-day about what to call my blog? Which title to choose? Dunno how it came by but My Wierd Wired World was chosen at last! To this day people keep telling me that Wierd is spelt incorrectly! Well, thatz part of the Wierdness!
• 7th November 2005 – Penned my first posts – this and this. Well, to be frank, edited the first Hello world post and penned the latter one just after that.

And why all this stats-penning? Coz My Wierd Wired World just turned two!!!

Happy Birthday to it!

Workaround for Windows Live Writer on Windows 2003 Server

Yesterday I was lamenting about my WLW Woes with Windows 2003 Server but later on I realized that I’d overlooked one crucial factor! An old adage goes that look before you leap. The modern-day equivalent of that could easily be search before you speak!!! Coz after I’d posted that, I did a bit of Googling that ultimately presented me with a work-able solution.

Thanks to Thomas and J.Lai, I came to know that the reason behind WLW not installing on Windows 2003 server was not an issue with the editor itself or MS’ purported move-over to Vista-only software but was because of a truant installer package! One can safely (and more importantly, successfully) install the WLW Beta 3 by running the MSI package [available here]. I did that and voila! here I am typing out this post in WLW Beta 3

But not before sending out a feedback from the WLW Spaces Blog and even contacting the Cust. support. And I got not one, but two replies – the first letting me know that I had an “isolated and unique” inquiry and promising to forward it to the “product specialists” and the second (probably from the hitherto mentioned specialist) informing me that “Windows 2003 Server and Vista x64 are currently not supported” and assuring me that it would be submitted as a “product feature request”. Yeah all Right!!! Tx. but No Tx. 🙄

P.S: Again…too many W’s