Feature of the Week
The new availability of this week’s feature illustrates the principle of the silver lining, that challenging times can produce positive side-effects. The challenge is as I described in an earlier entry – the completion of an intensive program to prepare for a major professional certification exam, now scheduled for mid-November. On top of that I’ve been bringing home a nifty new facility at work. This last week has been particularly intense, such that I’ve been driving most of the way into The City in order to recapture about 45 minutes on both the commute in and out. Unfortunately, these were the minutes I customarily use to work in this journal. So where’s the silver lining? Last night, with Bill Maher on in the background, and needing something mindless to do to decompress from a very intense two weeks, I started going through old journal entries that I had closed because their “visitor comment” facilities had been abused by advertisers for online casinos. It was discovering this situation in a block of entries from August-November of last year that forced me to discontinue this useful feedback vehicle for all comments, an unfortunate development indeed. Also unfortunate has been how onerous it has been to delete the polluting comments on closed journal entries. Each had to be individually deleted, and deletions were slow, sometimes taking almost a minute each. When a single journal entry could contain dozens of casino ads, deleting them was adding up to serious time! We all need to do mindless things from time to time, and deleting low-life postings has served well for this purpose over the last several quarters. A breakthrough came last night. When I went to start deleting “Texas Hold’ems,” response time was virtually instantaneous! The reason is obvious – I’ve been doing so little journaling that readers no longer have recent links to take them to the site’s blog tool. Apparently this tool doesn’t deal well with updates when there are many simultaneous accesses. So that’s the silver lining – because there’s no traffic on the blog portion of the site, I was able to purge the remaining vestiges of comment abuse shortly after Bill finished with his New Rules for the week. This week’s feature is thus the new availability of every one of this site’s 600 journal entries, now fully accessible by pressing the “end” key and clicking on Archives. I suggest paging down past the boring date ranges to the section showing each entry by name. Now all I have to do is find a new mindless activity!
10.22.05 @ 09:44 AM EDT [link]