Talking about spammers is more difficult than talking about any other internet group, with the possible exception of child pornographers, for one big reason: you can’t provide links to the things you’re writing about. Well, I suppose that technically you COULD, but then you’d be doing the little weasels a favor, since all their annoying garbage is for the sole purpose of getting their link out anyway.

My site doesn’t get much traffic when compared to big blogs out there. I get probably a 10th or less of the traffic of even medium-well known blogs, but wow do I get spam. Comment spam, mainly. We’re talking 5-10 per day. If you’re reading this and saying to yourself “Pfft, 10 per day? That’s bush league. I get 10 before breakfast,” then I offer you my sincerest condolences, and humbly request a 20 or 30 pixel tall link right up under your header.

The only thing that has kept comment spam from taking over here is a Movable Type plugin called MT-Blacklist. It has been my savior since the first day my site went public. It is a Great White Shark amongst the schools of cod which are spammers. It leaves a thick, lingering trail of scumbag entrails in its wake. It smites would-be comment spammers with a battle axe. And so on.

It also allows me to block spammers from ever commenting in the first place with an amazing black list of spammer domains, constantly updated, and allows me to destroy a spam comment before it ever gets published on my site, even if it isn’t already listed in the blacklist. It uses a divine mixture of my brain and its artificial brain to ensure that not a single spam ever sees the light of day on ianmassey.com, and I cannot invent a word, phrase or sentence which praises it highly enough. If you use movable type, go get it immediately. You will soon delight in slaying hordes of spambots with just a click or two of the mouse, just as I do.

It’s time once again to review the winners of the annual Stella Awards.

The Stellas are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck, who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s. That case inspired the Stella awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States.

Here are this year’s winners:
5th Place (tie):

Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little Toddler was Ms. Robertson’s son.

5th Place (tie):

19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car while he was trying to steal his neighbor’s hubcaps.

5th Place (tie):

Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn’t re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner’s insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.

4th Place:

Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the rear end by his next door neighbor’s beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner’s fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams, who had climbed over the fence into the yard and was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3rd Place:

A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

2nd Place:

Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge.. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.

1st Place:

This year’s runaway winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Overland Park, KS. Mrs. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home on her first trip home (from a KU basketball game), having driven onto the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back & make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not explaining in the owner’s manual that cruise control isn’t automatic pilot. The jury awarded her $1,750,000 plus a new motor home.

A lot of you are already using Firefox. You will probably read this post even though you know everything I will mention in it, because the average Firefox user is gung-ho about the browser. Not only does it “just work” like all software should..it works so damned well that it ends up making you take it for granted, and some of you have already experienced this..but using someone else’s computer with IE becomes a real drag.

Firefox is a lean, fast, extremely advanced web browser designed by the Mozilla Foundation. It is standards-compliant, which means that it displays web pages the way the designers meant them to be seen. It is cross-platform, which means that whether you run Windows, Linux, Unix, MacOS, or what have you…there’s a Firefox for you. It is built with security in mind, which means that it keeps your files and information more secure than the competition, by eliminating ActiveX and by having sensible default settings. It blocks popups by default, it has a built-in RSS/ATOM feed reader, it uses tabbed browsing, it has a small resource footprint, it rarely (if ever) crashes, and it’s customizable to an extent never before seen in a web browser. If you’re a geek or a tinkerer, you can literally tear this browser apart and rebuild it to your liking. It is modular times infinity.

It is small and fast by itself, and with it’s extensions system, YOU decide what features you want and which you don’t want. No compulsory bulk that reduces speed, wastes space, and annoys the shit out of you.

Firefox is an amazing little piece of software, and I am confident that if you try it you will switch to it for good. It makes web browsing convenient and hassle-free again, if you use IE chances are it’s been a while since you experienced that. It had been for me!

Give it a shot, and post a comment here if you need help with something and can’t find the answer. Make sure you check out extensions and themes too!

It’s that time again. Gmail invites up for grabs for the tiny ass number of people who still don’t have accounts. Post a comment and I’ll send one your way. Please note that due to a movable type upgrade glitch my comments aren’t showing up until I approve them, even though I have it set to auto-approve, so don’t worry if you refresh and the comment you posted isn’t there. It’s in my email box, and it will be there shortly. Don’t forget to include your email address so I can send them out, and if you have a webpage please include it too, I like to visit other sites.

AMCGLTD has a link to an extremely bizarre and creepy photo-story type hoaxish-thing which no words I can come up with quite do justice to. Very worth checking out, read the comments too. Direct link to it is here. (edit) Turns out these pics and the story were hijacked from a thread on SomethingAwful. Original post is here. (/edit)

Also here is the link to the Ted the Caver chronicle, which is also a strange and creepy tale, well worth reading.