But I’m having a hectic week. I went from the conference in Dallas on Sunday to Missouri for a family barbecue, then spent another three days there while also working. I flew back to Florida last night, but we had flight delays due to severe weather in Dallas, and didn’t get in until about 1 AM. Then, after about three hours sleep, I got up and drove back to the airport and got on a plane to DC, where I am now, having worked all day on a client presentation for tomorrow. Probably won’t come up for air until the weekend.

But I’m having a hectic week. I went from the conference in Dallas on Sunday to Missouri for a family barbecue, then spent another three days there while also working. I flew back to Florida last night, but we had flight delays due to severe weather in Dallas, and didn’t get in until about 1 AM. Then, after about three hours sleep, I got up and drove back to the airport and got on a plane to DC, where I am now, having worked all day on a client presentation for tomorrow. Probably won’t come up for air until the weekend.

But I’m having a hectic week. I went from the conference in Dallas on Sunday to Missouri for a family barbecue, then spent another three days there while also working. I flew back to Florida last night, but we had flight delays due to severe weather in Dallas, and didn’t get in until about 1 AM. Then, after about three hours sleep, I got up and drove back to the airport and got on a plane to DC, where I am now, having worked all day on a client presentation for tomorrow. Probably won’t come up for air until the weekend.

Blogging will be light. I’m going to the ISDC in Dallas, where I’ll be participating in a space blogger summit on Saturday afternoon. I’m not leaving for there until tomorrow morning (and I’ll be leaving the conference Sunday morning), but I have a lot of billable work to do before I leave.

I’ve had enough. More than half the comments on this post were from Oler, and they were generally nonsense, and generated a lot more unnecessary posts to respond to him. When I compared it to this post, in which he didn’t participate, and there was a reasoned and intelligent discussion, I just wondered, “why”? I can’t help but think that the correlation is meaningful.

The signal/noise ratio from him being zero, to first order, I’ve banned him from this blog. I, and my readers just have better things to do with our lives than to respond to his fantasies.

I just discovered that Sitemeter has been putting tracking cookies for realmedia.com on my visitors’ machines. There may be some others as well.

I went in, cleared cookies, refreshed Transterrestrial, and the Realmedia cookies showed up again. I’m going to quit using Sitemeter, but I need to do a little research and figure out what to switch to for stats checking. In the meantime, you might want to block cookies from realmedia.com (and the others mentioned in the link, such as specificclick.net) if you don’t want them selling your browsing habits without your permission.

The latest loony missive from Robert G. Oler:

I should add. I think that about 1/3 of the GOP is batshit (grin) insane…nuts actually. Vince Foster, wmd [sic] smuggled to Syria, Bush is a moral man…etc etc.

They are dumber then [sic] dirt in terms of their ideology. So is the far left and I enjoy pointing out their flaws as well.

It is fascinating to watch, because it illustrates how nations can go off track. It is almost like investigating an airplane (or any kind really) of accident caused completly [sic] by human error not technology failure [sic–missing comma]. It is great post mortum [sic] to watch the “walls come tumbling down” in the decision making [sic–missing hyphen] process.

Speaking of the Rev [sic–no period] Jerry [sic–presumably Falwell–Robert is into his own nicknames for his imaginary enemies, so one can never know for sure to whom he’s referring]. I watch his act on TV some just to see how the “cover the bust of lady Justice because she has a bust” wing of the gOP [sic] operate (dont [sic] worry I watch nuts like Casey Sheehan as well [sic–his missing comma]…wasnt [sic] it a hoot when they saw all their money get bonked [sic])…

A month before the 06 election he was promising the faithful that “God wont [sic] let the GOP lose control of Congress”. Suckers [sic]

All laping [sic] it up. Just like the jet fuel folks on teh [sic] far left.

OK, I’ve had enough, but I want this to be fair. Open comments section.

Do Mr. Oler’s pompous, ungrammatical, and unjustifiably arrogant contributions add signal, or noise, to this web site? The results will tell whether or not he continues to pollute the comments section here. He is welcome to make his own case, but based on history, he will only continue to keep digging…

[Update a few minutes later]

As can be seen from the first comment, he’s decided to get a sharper spade, and attempt to find a deeper bottom…

I’m not in the general habit of banning commenters, but having already established the precedent with Anonymous Moron, I guess I need to do a better job of policing. I am going to henceforth ban anyone who uses the acronym “LOL” in response to something that they themselves wrote.

Why? Because it is juvenile, and stupid. Anyone who does it apparently never learned the old wisdom that one doesn’t laugh at one’s own jokes. It looks particularly stupid when they’re not funny. In fact, it looks stupid to the max when they are never funny. But then, folks who do it are generally not the type of people who are able to realize how stupid they look.

In addition, most people (at least in this comments section, but I’ve noticed it in other fora as well) who do so also tend to add zero signal, and a lot of noise.

For that matter, I also want to add some tips for people who want to quote other people, to avoid confusion and ugly comments. There is a simple HTML tag, that looks like this: <em>quoted text</em>. Please use it. Also, please put your name in the “Name” field, unless you’re determined to remain anonymous. I have no interest in seeing a name in a comment.

Just in case there was any confusion, like Glenn, I link to things that I find interesting, and/or think that my readers might find interesting. A link doesn’t mean that I agree with everything found at the link, or even anything found at the link. A link does not constitute an endorsement, unless I…errrrr…endorse it. If I have useful thoughts on it, positive or negative, I will express them.

[Update mid morning]

Jonah Goldberg has related thoughts. Also a follow up here.

It took the fortieth commenter in this post to tell me that the first link was broken. As I note there, it simply confirms my long-standing observation that many commenters here respond only to what I write or excerpt, without troubling themselves to go read what I’m basing my comments on. For instance, Bill White didn’t respond at all, instead using the opportunity to grab my bandwidth and disk space, and my readers’ eyeballs, to post and link to blather from Barack Obama.

Often, of course, people who do this make fools of themselves, when I link to a satirical piece, because they don’t have any idea what I linked to, instead just responding to the opposite of my point.

Here’s a suggestion for everyone. Read more, and comment less, until you actually know what you’re commenting about, and have had time to give it a little thought.