Too Tired to be Merry

I spent 9 hours dealing with a shorthanded staff and a lot of short-tempered customers today. It’s not the first Xmas Eve I’ve worked but it was definitely the toughest. The line was practially out the door all day and holiday spirit was in very short supply.

I’m home now and looking forward to a day off. Then I wade back into the breech on Dec 26th. At least I have a fat paycheck coming my way for all the extra hours I’m putting in this pay period.

I’m way too tired to be merry. And even though this is not my holiday, I miss my family. I miss snow (not that NYC had a white Xmas all that often but at least there was a chance). And I miss New York.

On the bright side, I have Scott & the kitties all happy to have me home, and tomorrow we’re going to cook up some kickass food with some friends. Should be fun.

Comments Closed

Against my inclinations, I’ve had to close comments down for all but the most recent posts here at Fiat Lux.

Overnight, my installation of MT-Blacklist stopped working. According to this thread over at Jay Allen’s site, the error I’m getting is caused when a web host upgrades perl without rebuilding the Storable perl module. I have a support ticket open at my web host to try to get this fixed, but in the meantime I’m closing down comments to prevent being drowned in crappy comment spam.

Thanks to MT-Close2 for helping to automate the comment closing process!

WTF?

QUESTION: Mr. President, on that point, there is already a lot of opposition to the idea of personal accounts, some of it fairly entrenched among the Democrats. I wonder what your strategy is to try to convince them to your view.

And specifically, they say that personal accounts would destroy Social Security. You argue they would help save the system. Can you explain how?

BUSH: If Saddam Hussein refuses to disarm, we will form a coalition of the willing and we will disarm Saddam Hussein. Next question?

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The “about the author” bit at the end of this column describes Burt Prelutsky as a humorist, so it’s possible this is intended to be funny. Frankly, it left me feeling more than a little queasy:

Although it seems a long time ago, it really wasn’t, that people who came here from other places made every attempt to fit in. [snip]

That has changed, you may have noticed. And I blame my fellow Jews. When it comes to pushing the multicultural, anti-Christian agenda, you find Jewish judges, Jewish journalists, and the American Civil Liberties Union, at the forefront.

My queasiness is not eased by the fact that the man writing this identifies as a Jew. As the old saying goes, with friends like these, who needs enemies?

Hat tip – No More Mr Nice Blog for the link.

Comment Spam Woes

Even with MT-Blacklist, the amount of time I have had to spend dealing with comment spam has been annoying lately, and apparently I am not the only one who’s having issues.

I am trying to decide how to manage the problem. SixApart says they are working on a solution but apparently it will involve upgrading my installation of MT and of MT-Blacklist. That’s a fair chunk of work on my part because moving off 2.x will entail not only the upgrade but a bunch of hours tweaking templates to put my customizations back in, and I am a little pressed for time these days.

I may try to implement the system Pandagon uses for its comments section, which is a patch that generates a random 6 digit number and requires users to type it in before a comment will be posted.

I can, of course, just turn off commenting entirely, but I really don’t want to do that.