I came home on a red eye last night, slept in, and awoke to a lovely thunderstorm about noon.

More later.

…and in pain. I’ve been having problems with my neck and shoulder for about a week now, and it didn’t clear up for the weekend, so it marred our trip up the coast. I’m going to see an orthopedic sports specialist about it this morning, but blogging will likely be light until I get it under control.

In the meantime, go read Rick Tumlinson’s latest rant about NASA dropping methane from its CEV requirements. I find little with which to disagree.

[Update in the afternoon, after a trip to the doctor’s office]

They X-rayed my head, and found nothing. But that’s not important now.

The key thing is, when they X-rayed my neck, it revealed a slightly compressed disk, but the sawbones recommended a course of oral cortisone, and expected that to clear it up in a few days.

We’re heading up to the California central coast for a couple days to celebrate (or mourn) the most recent anniversary of the date of my birth. I’ll take my laptop, but I don’t know if the place we’re staying will have internet (though it’s getting more and more rare to find a place that doesn’t these days), so I don’t know if I’ll be posting. But I’m supposed to be relaxing and hiking and enjoying the scenery (and what a change in scenery and climate it is from anywhere in Florida), so maybe I should chase the blogging monkey off my back for the weekend, anyway.

Hey, I can quit any time I want…

[Update on Saturday night]

Hotel in Cambria does in fact have wireless. But I’m going to try to minimize time on the computer anyway.

This was a memorably disastrous business trip. I flew into Seattle last night, and had my connecting flight to Edmonton cancelled for weather, with no other flights scheduled until this morning. Of course, after standing in a long line, there were no seats left on it. There was no point in my getting a later flight, because the meeting was today, and the next flight wouldn’t get me up there until about 6 PM (and my return flight was scheduled for 6:30 tomorrow morning). So I got put on the standby list in the hope that I could still attend the afternoon part of the meeting.

Since it was an act of God, the airline didn’t pay for my room in Seattle, but they did get me a discount at the Ramada. Unfortunately, when I got there, along with many other stranded Edmontonians, the computer at the check-in desk was down, so there was another long line there.

I finally got a room, about 11 PM (my original flight to Edmonton had been scheduled to leave at about 9), with a lottery ticket for a flight at 9:50 AM this morning. When I got to the gate, I was greeted by a sign asking for volunteers to give up their seats–the flight had checked in overbooked, and I was about fifth in line on standby. To add to the fun, there was a weather advisory on the flight, meaning that there was fog in Edmonton, and that there was a good chance that it would be diverted to Calgary. If this happened, I’d still end up not getting to Edmonton until this evening, just in time to find out what happened at the meeting and fly back to LA in the morning.

At this point, this trip was so snake bit that I was getting to be quite confident that if I did manage somehow to get on the flight, it would not only get diverted to Calgary, but the bus that was supposed to get me to Edmonton would break down on the road, and then the weather would move in with a vengeance, preventing me from getting back to California on Saturday, where I was scheduled to celebrate my birthday with Patricia, who is flying in here from Florida tonight, with a hotel room reserved up in Cambria for Saturday and Sunday nights.

So I decided to just cut my losses.

Fortunately, the people on Horizon Air (who operated the Dash 7 flight that I was supposed to take to Canada) were willing to simply refund my total ticket, and get me on the next Alaska flight back south. Unfortunately, they were having trouble finding the forms they needed to fill out in order to make it all happen. Eventually, though, they did get a credit on my credit card bill, and a return ticket to LA.

Of course, when I got to LA, the people at the place where I’d valeted my rental car couldn’t take my money, because there was a problem with their receipt printer, on which one of the women was performing surgery with a pair of scissors (a servicing tool that I’m sure is not approved by the factory at which the device was manufactured). But finally, they accepted payment, issued the key to the valet, and I got my car. I just got back to my room with a sigh of relief. I’m not going anywhere for a couple hours.

Which is better than sleepless, I guess, but I’m not supposed to be in Seattle. I’m supposed to be in Edmonton, AB, but my connecting flight was cancelled for weather. Say what you want about Florida, but they never cancel airplane flights for freezing fog. Whether I eventually get there depends on whether I can go standby in the morning. Otherwise, the trip is pointless, and it’s back to LA.

Oh, well…

I’ve moved out of the Homestead Suites, and into the TownePlace Suites in Manhattan Beach. Ten bucks more a night, twice the room size, twice the number of burners on the stove, a dishwasher (the other place had a dishwasher, too–me). It also has fast ethernet. Last night, when I was futilely struggling to transmit packets on the net on the wireless at the Homestead room, I noticed that I had a signal/noise ratio of one: -79 dB signal, -79 dB noise. No wonder that it was dropping packets.

But this connection flies. I just used it to download Firefox 1.5 (I hadn’t upgraded this laptop yet), and it grabbed the few megs in less than a minute. So, now the only thing to keep me from blogging is all the other things that I need to do.

I’m working in California, and I’m swamped during the day, with a lousy internet connection in my hotel (when I say lousy, I mean that it’s wireless narrowband–I could move the data faster by tapping out Morse code by hand, and I don’t know Morse code).

I’ve had to ban blogspot from comments and pings, because I was starting to get a lot of spam with that in the URL. Apparently I wasn’t alone.

About 39,000 fake blogs have been created on the web in the past two weeks, according to an analysis by Technorati, or about 4.6 percent of the 805,000 new weblogs created in that period. FightSplog, which has been monitoring new blogs at Blogspot, recently documented 2,763 porn splogs created by a single “splogger.” Blogspot-based spam blogs recently began featuring names of prominent bloggers in posts, boosting the splogs’ visibility in searches at web-based RSS aggregators like Feedster, PubSub and Bloglines.

It would be nice if Google would share the wealth a little:

But Google itself seems to have closed that hole, according to Jeff Jarvis, who noted that searches on Google are free from the splog listings found in identical searches on PubSub and IceRocket, among others. “Google needs to both fix Blogspot and share its secrets for ignoring blogspam,” Jarvis writes.

Here’s one possible solution, to at least keep it down to a dull roar by no longer allowing automated blog setups:

Suggestion, Google? As bold as this might sound, you should institute an authentication system – a captcha of sorts – for every single post that gets sent through your Blogger service. This means that there’s no more easy rides for the idiots out there who are killing your baby and the blogosphere. The user logs in, enters their post, then has to jump through a captcha hoop – much like commenters have to do on Blogger.com these days. It’s a simple suggestion, and one that you really, really, really, REALLY oughta consider. You were willing to go the ref=”nofollow” route, why stop there?

That was a couple months ago, but I’ve still seen a lot of this crap when I open up the filters.

Anyway, until they wise up, friends don’t let friends blog on Blogspot. Get a real domain, folks.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, here’s the story at Wikipedia, with some more links.

If an author has forgotten their password, and doesn’t have anything filled out for the birthplace, is there any way for an administrator to find, or change it? I sure can’t find one in version 2.661.

It has now been two days since I’ve been able to access the Bellsouth’s NNTP server, at newsgroups.bellsouth.net. It’s been flaky ever since I started using it over a year ago, when I got my Bellsouth DSL connection, but now it doesn’t work at all. When I try to log in to it, I get a message box from Agent saying that there is an “error reported by server: 502 authentication failed.” It’s done this periodically in the past, but never for this long.

So, have I talked to Bellsouth about it?

I have. I called them three times yesterday, two of which resulted in contact with human beings, and talked to numerous people, both in India and stateside, none of whom knew what to do about it, and most of whom wanted me to reboot my computer (that’s their first-resort solution to everything, even when it clearly has absolutely nothing to do with my computer–for instance, I was trying to reconnect my router to my modem the other day, and the nice woman in Bangalore told me to reboot my computer).

The first person I talked to in the morning said that they would have to try resetting the server, and that it would probably take about twelve hours to take effect. I was dubious. In fact, I’ll go beyond that and say that he was probably lying (or to be more generous, misinformed), but figured that I’d wait and see if anything happened.

I should add that all of these phone calls were preceded by attempts to find some solution on the Bellsouth web site, one of which was a help form that I started to fill out. It demanded the number I was calling from, and the number that I was dialing up on (I have a DSL connection, remember), and refused to accept the form until I would tell it. In addition, it demanded the time and date of occurrence, but the pulldown menu for “year” contained only the years 2002, and 2003, so apparently the folks at Bellsouth aren’t interested in any technical issues that have developed within the past two years.

Also, there are often long delays and sometimes timeouts when attempting to get to the various web pages in the technical support area. But hey, that’s to be expected from one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country, right? I mean, it’s not like they have a lot of bandwidth, or money for servers, when they’re only charging me a paltry hundred bucks a month. After all, that quality tech support over in the jewel of the Empire doesn’t come cheap. Of course, I should mention that my confidence in tech support at Bell South (at least when it comes to solving, or even comprehending, problems more complex than those that can be fixed by rebooting your computer), hasn’t been high since the DNS incident a year ago.

So I called, and got passed from one person who didn’t know what was going on, to another (having to give my phone number to each one, of course, except once, I caught them, and determined that they already knew it–it was all just part of the fun ritual hazing that all Bellsouth customers go through). At one point, I was told that I was going to finally be transferred to a specialist in this area. The moron who picked up the phone started by asking me to fire up Outlook express, so we could determine what was wrong with my email (I guess that I should have been grateful that he didn’t ask me to reboot my computer). Ignoring the fact that I don’t now, never have, and never will use a Microsoft email client, I didn’t have an email problem. I told him this, and told him that I thought he was going to help me with the problem with the NNTP server. He had never heard those four letters in that particular combination before.

I finally managed to get him to pass me on to a tech who actually had heard of NNTP, and explained the issue, once again. It was not authenticating my username and password. It had done so for months, with intermittent failures, but that it had not done so since the previous morning. The culmination of this consversation, and the hours of others that I’d had throughout the day (combined with more time perusing a cryptic and slow tech support web site) was that I finally managed to get him to admit that there was nothing that he could do, that in fact Bellsouth didn’t actually have an NNTP server. What they had was a contractor who ran their news server, and they just forwarded the bellsouth.net domain on it. They had no administrative control over it. His recommendation was to send an email to newshelp@bellsouth.com, and report the problem to them.

I did that last night. I have not yet received so much as an acknowledgement of its receipt–it seems to have simply disappeared into the black hole that is tech support at whatever second-tier rackhouse they’ve hired to provide their customers with Usenet news.

Am I an unhappy Bellsouth customer? You guess.