I was going to write up my (extensive, and probably redundant) analysis of the final episode/season of LOST, but it just got the better of me. Frankly, it was just kind of a shit ending that didn’t make much sense and really answered none of the questions at the heart of the series, or that they introduced in the final season. They wrapped it all up with some sleight-of-hand distraction over the "sideways world" being in fact some future spirit purgatory designed to give cheap emotional resonance instead of actual closure.

Instead, we’re left to speculate how they screwed up the series what the island and its mysteries really were, and here’s the only answer that really works: it’s an alien spaceship, crashed or stranded (or "lost" ha-ha) on Earth, with sufficiently advanced technology as to be indistinguishable from magic.

And that’s all I’ll say about that.

It’s been a crazy, busy two weeks with two separate trips following a Memorial Day trip to Lincoln City: my wife and daughter during the first week for three days, myself this past week for two. I went to Seattle with my boss to attend SMX Advanced: a Search Engine Optimization/Marketing show. I know, I know: outside of the industry SEO is usually seen as a bunch of do-what-it-takes-to-rank, snake oil shuckstering at best, and linkbaiting spamfarms at worst.

But it turns out they’re not that bad. Or, you know, the "white hat" ones anyway.

And it’s interesting to attend one of these things and watch all the industry "celebrities" that everyone wants to know and talks about: frankly, I’ve only learned who a relative handful of them are since I’ve been working at Smart Solutions for a year and a half, so while conference-goers are going, "Wow! How’d they get So-and-So to speak/attend/etc.?" I’m thinking, "Who are these people?"

Even in the computer/internet industry, SEO seems more insular than most. At least, that’s my perspective.

The weeks and weekend coming up are booked up in some way, as well: so while the weekday schedule has slowed back down for us (except for school getting out this week), we’ve got things to do for the next four or five weekends, at least.

Isn’t summer supposed to be relaxing? Oh well.

We enjoyed a pleasant visit to the Oregon Coast (Lincoln City again) for the Memorial Day weekend, even with occasionally drizzly weather. Sunday we drove up to Pacific City for the afternoon and had a great time on the beach before lunch at the Pelican Pub and discovering one of the greatest wine tasting rooms, well, ever.

More on that later. I mostly just wanted to mark the passing of May (a chilly and wet one this year).

I suppose this idea would benefit any news program and not just our local NewsChannel 21 broadcast, but I think the cutaway to every new story should be accompanied by the Law & Order "chung chung" sound. And the end of the show should cut to the yellow digital "24" clock.

Yes, I’ve been a bad blogger this month here. I’m this close to switching this site over to WordPress though, and I think that will help my creative output. I just moved Hack Bend to WordPress and that went alright (so far).

There’s not much to report for April, actually, it’s just been a busy month that seemed to slip away quickly, as they seem to do these days. I am glad that the current TV season is winding down, as that’s a major timesink and you all know how I resent it around this time of year.

Fortunately, with both "24" and "Lost" ending this year, that at least frees up two hours a week. Plus they won’t aggravate me like they are now. ("24" is less aggravating than "Lost" but it’s still a weak season. As was last year’s.)

I entered a beer in the Central Oregon Homebrewers Organization‘s annual "Spring Fling" competition, which was held last weekend on the 17th. I didn’t win anything, but after something like 15 years of homebrewing it was time to finally do something "official" (though I did enter beers in a couple of the Deschutes County Fairs some years ago, and got ribbons for those—so this wasn’t the first competition I’ve entered). It was fun, and enlightening. I really need to become an official member of the homebrew club.

Recently I wondered aloud if it would make a viable murder plot for someone to tamper with a Toyota to use the "sudden acceleration" problem as a cover for a killing. Almost immediately after that I wondered instead when just such a plot would show up on either one of the Law & Order or CSI TV shows.

For some reason I’m pretty sure it would appear on one or the other (or both) of CSI: Miami and plain-vanilla Law & Order. It just strikes me as something that really requires an opening one-liner.

I know that you’ve looked at "2012" in the headline and are assuming that I’m talking about creating a beer to drink at the end of the world, or some sort of similar nonsense. And in a way I guess you’re sort of right: 2012 is the year I’ll be celebrating one of those "grand" birthdays: 40. And I’ve been giving some thought lately to brewing up a super-big, super-special beer to crack open on my 40th birthday.

This might ordinarily be more of a post for my Brew Site blog, but I’m writing about it here because it’s still something of an unformed idea. I’ve got some general "goals" in mind for it:

• It will be high alcohol, likely 12% by volume or higher;
• It will age for almost 3 years (depending on when I get around to brewing it);
• It will have lots of hops (probably) but won’t be a hop bomb—hops don’t age well as a rule, and even a hugely hoppy beer will mellow the hops quite a lot in that time;
• I’ll use some smoked malts in the recipe;
• It will (probably) age for a bit of time on wood—wood chips, that is (since I don’t have a five gallon barrel), which may or may not be soaked in bourbon or similar ahead of time.

I will also very likely bottle it all in 22-ounce bottles and wax-dip them. I haven’t fully decided if I want to make five gallons or perhaps 2.5 gallons (or even one?); some of the crazier experimental stuff that’s been bouncing around in my head would certainly be easier (and more cost-effective) to restrict to a smaller batch size, but we’ll see.

Anyway, I’ll document the process here. The beer will either be called "40" or "2012," I haven’t decided which yet. But it should be epic.

Like many blogs out there, I have spam-checking service Akismet set up to filter out the comment spam. It’s built-in on my Brew Site WordPress blog, but on chuggnutt and Hack Bend it’s using a PHP class that I coded myself.

Up until a few days ago, it’s been working beautifully on my two non-WordPress blogs. But all of a sudden, every spam comment to the two blogs started coming through approved (not marked as spam). Every single one.

Tonight I started poking around my code and the Akismet API to see if anything had changed. According to their API documentation, Akismet should only return two possible values for the spam check: "true" or "false".

I poked around with some cURL tests but that was inconclusive; appropriate testing strings ("viagra-test-123" will always return true) were performing as specified. But when I entered that test string as a comment on my site, it was not flagged as spam. Clearly, something had changed with the API, since the code has been running along just fine since, what, 2006?

So I set my PHP code to give me the raw response from the Akismet server(s), and these are the two results—this is the exact code and return values Akismet is returning:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:39:52 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-akismet-server: 192.168.7.4

4
true
0


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:40:45 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-akismet-server: 192.168.6.46

5
false
0

Do you see? Akismet has changed their return values. They are no longer simply "true" and "false", they are pre- and appended with digits on separate lines.

Of course, more fool me for coding my PHP to look explicitly for "true" and "false" only—once I saw this, I was able to fix the problem quickly. (Changing the comparison from "string equality" to "string contains".) Spam checking fixed.

The weird thing is, I can’t seem to find anything about this online (other than a comment on another blog so far), and I can’t figure why this is what’s being returned to my PHP while cURL reported only "true" and "false". Perhaps something to do with UTF encoding? Multi-byte strings? I don’t know.

And why now? There have been no server or PHP changes on my end and like I said, it’s been working fine for years. Literally.

Anyway, I posted this here to help out other people potentially having troubles with their Akismet code.

So the first trailer for this year’s A-Team movie hit the net yesterday, and if you follow me on Twitter you know that the first link to it I posted was taken down ("infringing"). But of course you can just search YouTube and find it again if you want to watch it.

…I’ve watched it a bunch of times now. I can’t help it: it looks friggin’ awesome, and damn if that isn’t a good movie trailer. Now I can’t wait for the movie to come out.

Well, yes, I am that geeky.

Two totally random things today that I found on the internets:

The Oatmeal ASCII art: I have no other commentary other than go to that site and view the HTML source.

Well, I have some commentary. It makes me want to drop ASCII art in the web pages I work on…

Nic Cage as Everyone: Funny and odd. Whomever thought this one up has too much time on their hands… of course. That being said, there are some really good image editing jobs on some of those pictures.

The new year is upon us, and we finished off our old year and started up this new one in San Diego. We left a week ago, on Sunday, two days after Christmas, with a mad plan to get up really early and make the drive in one day.

For background, last June when we left San Diego (yes, you counted correctly, that’s two SoCal trips in the same year), we left about 7:30 in the morning and managed to get home about 10pm that night—roughly 14.5 hours is the number that sticks in our head.

This time, traveling south—we rolled out at 6:10am and arrived right around 11pm—it took roughly 17 hours. Two things worked against us: snowy roads on southern Highway 97 in Oregon and all the holiday traffic returning to Southern California the same day.

It was grueling.

We spent New Year’s Eve at my brother’s house, playing Balderdash and Left 4 Dead 2 and drinking beers and ringing in the New Year. We had tired kids, so we retired to our hotel just after midnight.

So far my 2010 has consisted of seeing Up in the Air (my brother and sister-in-law watched the kids for us), drinking more beer, and driving home. We left San Diego around 9am yesterday and made it to Redding around 8pm last night—we wisely decided to split the drive home into two days.

The 11-hour drive to Redding isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds; we made really good time most of the way—through Los Angeles especially!—and we stopped for maybe an hour at the Olive Pit in Corning for dinner and, well, to shop for olives.

We made it the rest of the way home by mid-afternoon today, and I’m pleased to report none of the snow and ice we encountered a week ago is there. The roads were perfectly clear and except for some weird inversion-layer fog we hit just out of Weed—and up through Klamath Falls—driving conditions were great.

So, in a nutshell, that’s how my 2010 is going so far. How’s yours?