Spam is a never-ending blight on the internet. I understand what motivates spammers to plant spam in blog comments and guestbooks. It’s simple, they want to earn some Google-juice for their site.  (Of course, they go about this in the most unethical and slimy way possible instead of just creating sites that someone might actually want to read, but I digress…)

What truly baffles me is that they waste a lot of time posting spam comments and guestbook entries on a site like mine. NOTHING that anyone adds to my site in any way goes directly to the site. It all comes to me for moderation first. This means that they are simply wasting their time. This doesn’t stop them however, so I’ve been working on ways to slow the flow of crap. Some of the changes are behind the scenes, but you’ll be seeing CAPTCHA syle verification fields appearing on my forms and an AKISMET counter on my blog showng how many comments the software has caught.

Any all all suggestions are welcome. Before you say it, I’ve already thought of rounding up these weasels and setting them on fire, but apparently that’s not legal. Go figure. Maybe someday our politicians will help out out with this problem. I’m not holding ym breath, though.

I just posted some of the photos I took last weekend at the Fire and Ice Festival in Mount Holly, NJ. This chili cook-off and ice carving competition was a fun a unique event. I got there after the chili cook-off was over, but I did make it to the carving portion and the dog sled demonstration.

Check out the photos here.

There’s a lot of video out there, but who wants to sit in front of their computer and watch it. If you have a video iPod, you can convert almost any video to an iPod compatible format.

After wasting a lot of time on this in the past, I found an easy and simple way to do it. iSquint converts the video It has some options for more advanced users, but you can also just drag, drop and convert! It runs pretty quick on my Intel 2GHz MacBook.

Believe it or not even some podcasts aren’t in iPod format!!! This saves me from them. Download it at iSquint.com.