A quick correction to yesterday’s posting: That would be, level 30. Thanks to some help from the supergroup I’m in, mind you.

Pics of the new costume to follow… eventually.

Sometimes, the best way to spend a Friday night is pounding the hell out of the minions of evil. Tonight, for instance, with very capable and generous help, my lead City of Heroes character made it to level 28. This earned him a spiffy new attack power which I look forward to exercising over the weekend.

I think of it as a cheaper form of therapy than the traditional kind…

Friday, 6pm, Backspace… Portland Bloggers.

There’s been no substantial discussion on other meeting times or locations, so we’ll stick with what we’ve got for now. See you there, then, I hope!

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Today, I received a complaint that someone out there has been spamming one of the dotcomments installations on our server. “Oh, joy,” I thought. “Now what do I do?” As it turns out, I didn’t have to do much. The spammers were hitting the script, sure, but they were doing so in such a way that even someone with as poor of coding skills as I could block it fairly easily. I’ve now implemented the fix on all four appropriate comment systems.

Heaven help us, of course, if the spammers get more clever. It is remarkably non-trivial to excise individual comments from the files, and if that becomes a real problem I’m going to have to look at another comment system… thus abandoning all of the thousands of existing comments to date. May that day be a long one in coming, eh?

The webserver that this (and other, far more important and interesting) sites resides upon was taken down today, the hard drive removed and placed into a nearly identical chassis… that just happens to contain a much faster processor. And the entire process took less than half an hour from shutdown to fully resumed operations. How’s that for slick?

Now all I need to do is find out why Perl can bring a 2.4 GHz processor to its knees just by running a log-processing script and I’ll be able to rest a bit easier. Ugh…

In case anyone’s wondering: No, I’m not going to see that new Star Wars movie yet. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not this weekend. Hell, it may be June before I see it.

I want to take in the pretty special effects on the big screen, but I’m not braving the insane lines or participating in the opening-weekend hype machine. Forget it. Not this little grey duck. I’m sure it’ll be fun to look at but as ultimately meaningless as the last two. So what?

I’ll probably end up seeing the Fantastic Four movie when it comes out, too, and it has just as much chance of being pretty-but-stupid. (I leave it to folks more keenly perceptive than I to figure out why I’ll watch movies that are pretty but stupid, but won’t date women who are the same way. Hmm.)