Tag Archives: rant

General

These darn spammers…

I’m sure that everyone with a blog, or other system allowing users to post comments, has received them at some point, the comments that look legit but basically are spam. The spammers sometimes manage to post something that makes some sense to the topic in the blog post, others are as far off as can be.

Common for all these is that the comments in themselves is not the purpose, the linkback put in the field for website on the comment form is. Though occasionally you come across someone that posts an interesting, or otherwise useful link, most of them lead to pages of no interest at all (I for one is definitely not interested in where on the internet I can by certain meds).

To the inexperienced it looks just like any other comment, with an author linking to their website. After a while it becomes rather clear that the posts are essentially spam though, the exact same comment starts showing up with different sites linked.

This is a comment from one of my other blogs:

I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.

That looks like a rather legit comment, right? Taken out of context it certainly does seem so, but put in context with the subject of the post it was commenting, it is very far off.

That particular comment was found in a blog post containing a recipe for a Sandwich layer cake, on my Wine and Dine blog. I seriously doubt that helped the poster in any way regarding starting a blog…

Luckily there’s tools to help combat the spam, for me the tool of choice is the Akismet plugin for WordPress, which is also shipped with the WordPress installation package.

General

Where did the time fly?

I remember I felt it was plenty time until Christmas not long ago, today is St Lucia’s day, which means we’re 11 nights from Christmas. The 11 nights is something that I remember singing when I was a kid in school around Lucia’s day, that part is also basically all I remember; “Lusse lelle, elva nätter före jul….” (hard to translate as “lusse lelle” is slang, but it would be similar to “Little Lucia, eleven nights before Christmas…”). Honestly I’m not even sure it is a real song, it could be something we just sang out as well as kids.

There’s now less then two weeks to get it all together. As of yet there’s no panic, I have gotten myself started, done away some of the “must do’s”, but there’s a few left.

I have put the ham in brine (water, salt and sugar), in which it should lay roughly a week longer. This is the traditional way to prepare Swedish “Christmas ham”, once it has been salted, you can either boil it or cook it in the oven. I usually go for the oven, that gives me the stove free for other things, like cooking up a whole lot of meatballs.

I have pickled the herring (well, I make a compromise here, I buy ready to go herring that I only need to pickle, rather then doing the whole salting it process as well). Past experience says I should not read the label, which says it’s done on 3-4 days, so this year I did it in good time.

I have gingerbread cookies in a jar, although I suspect there’ll be far less left when we reach middle of next week, which is why I saved some of the dough to go for a new round of baking them. I have done the saffron bread traditionally eaten on Lucia’s day (Lucia bun) and also a variant filled with “almond mass”; similar to marzipan but less sweet and a bit more grainy in consistency.

I have not gotten all decorations up, but those I traditionally take out a little at a time all the way until the day before Christmas eve, at which point all I have not yet done has to be done, so it is all ready when we wake up on the morning of Christmas eve, this usually means the house looks like chaos until around 2 am when I exhausted sorts the last bits and head to bed 🙂