I made an egregious factual error in a previous post that I'm finally getting around to correcting.

I haven't been active here in a while, mostly because work has been consuming my available time at the computer, including more than a few post-midnight sessions.  The stacks of unpaid bills and related personal papers next to me is further evidence of this and will continue to limit my time here.

I've been trying to come up with a new blog category to categorize my postings on automobiles, which up to how have been shoehorned into "Mental M10n" or "Petty Bourgeois."  I haven't quite found one that fits the spirit of my other custom categories.  I've tried to get inspired by song lyrics from various sources, including Woody Guthrie ("Take Me Ridin'"), Johnny Rivers ("Hot Rod Lincoln") and Bruce Springstreen ("Long and Dark, Shiny and Black"), but nothing has captured it yet.

I just decided to switch to one of the other built-in themes.  It's not my favorite, but it's far better from a color contrast standpoint.  If nothng else the hyperlinks are now identifiable.

So sayeth Homer.

Been buried at work and home with little time to blog.  I did check the visitor log tonight and discovered that my blog is still getting a steady stream of visits due to being the top search result on Google for "Netflix sucks", courtesy of this entry.  I've even had a comment left behind on it by the apparent king of Netflix bashers.

[Title courtesy of The Straight Dope Archive.]

My previous blog entry was originally rejected by MSN Spaces because:

This entry contains language that is prohibited. Please delete the prohibited language from the entry.

Unfortunately there was no indication of which language was prohibited or how to fix it.  Since I work with the folks who build and operate this site, I was able to go directly to them for help.  I won't be explicit about the cause of the error, except to say that the original title was "How to increase your blog's hit count" and changing to its current title fixed the problem.

Offensive language filters that work based on substring matches are laughably easy to defeat, as any Leet speaker knows.  Worse, they generate many false positives.  Don't try to post a blog entry with a title referencing a recipe for shittake mushrooms or the parent company of Panasonic.  Perhaps in the future there will be a computationally efficient way to reliably detect a culturally-appropriate set of offensive words, but until that time it's better not to bother trying.  Let users self-police the space.

Have one of your blog entries referenced in a celebrigeek blog.

I discovered another workaround for the MSN Spaces list text color bug that because of my space's color scheme makes list text unreadable.  The text color appears properly if you view the blog entry via its permalink. 

So if you can't read the list text, click on the word "Permalink" immediately below it, then click on the URL (http://spaces.msn.com/...) that appears below the word "Permalink".

I've added this note to the blog entries in which I've used lists.

Updated 12-31:  Rather inserting text directing readers to follow the above steps, it's easier to add a "Click here..." link to the top of each of these entries which goes to the entries' respective permalinks.  Changes made.

Alas, without the ability to backdate entries, it's not worth trying to migrate the old blog here.  So I'll keep it as an archive for now until I can migrate the entries properly.

Congratulations to the team!  Great work!

Now I have to decide if I want to do the work to migrate my existing blog here.  Unfortunately there are no tools to automate this so I'll have to do it manually.