A Plea

To those of you/us using Blogger as your blogging platform,

Please figure out a way to turn off Word Verification on your blog.  Please, please, please.

Recently, Blogger decided to enable Word Verification on every single blog.  And, unlike the previous voluntary Word Verification captchkas, they've made them nearly impossible to decipher.  Here's a random example of one that is almost legible.

imprison (?), ackgreer (?)

Go ahead. Make it bigger. It's still not going to make it any more legible. Why they felt the need to make one word all fuzzy and then use back-color to make the second word harder to see, I'll never know. And, like I said, this is one of the easier ones I've seen.  Sometimes it takes me 2 or 3 tries to get one that I can actually read. It's ridiculous!

So I figured out how to disable it on my blog. I hate that I hate to figure out how to disable something I never enabled in the first place, but that's another story.  There's a catch, though. You have to switch your Blogger editor back to the old editor to change the Settings on your Comments. The new Blogger Editor doesn't even have the option to turn Word Verification either on or off. It's ridiculous times two!

Wanna know what is really bugging me about this? I was using the Beta version of the new Blogger Editor called "Blogger in Draft".  So I always had the choice to switch back to the old Editor.  But since I did this, I inadvertently switched back to the new Editor which is no longer in Beta testing. So now I have no way of getting back to the old Editor should the need ever arise.  It's ridiculous to the third power!

So please, try to figure out a way to turn off your Word Verification if you can.  I know some of you have had issues with spam, as I have in the past. But I fixed that by selecting Comment Moderation on posts older than 7 days. If spammers want to hit me on my most recent posts...well, I guess I'll have to live with that. Because this new Word Verification system sucks ass!

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Fantasy Baseball Update - Still waiting to hear if more than 2 of you want to do this. I could open it up to some others how might be interested, but I kinda wanted this to be for my Bloggy and Tweety buds. Joining a league with folks you don't know can lead to some awkward moments.

Case in point, a couple of years ago I joined a league with a bunch of people at Gia's former job. I didn't know any of them, but I did it as a favor to her and her friend who ran the league.. Because I didn't know any of them, it was more difficult for me to engage them in trades or what-not. Then I was able to convince one of them to complete a trade with me (it was actually his suggestion) late in May. Like all my trade offers, I thought it would help both of our teams. I'm never one of those guys looking to rip someone off. I hate that. But I hate being accused of it even more. Which is exactly what happened in this case. Not by the guy I was dealing with, but another owner. This league had a veto rule. If half the league vetoed a trade, it wouldn't go through. Initially, this one owner was the only one who vetoed it. Then he started an email protest campaign against it and me, convincing the other owners in the league that I was ripping off the other guy and that it was THE WORST TRADE IN THE HISTORY OF FANTASY BASEBALL!!!  I wasn't even the one who initiated the trade in the first place, yet I was the asshole here. So he convinced the rest of the league to nix the trade. Whatever. But at the end of the year, he posted a note on the league message board that we were all saps. The trade he got vetoed was fair...beyond fair.  He just didn't want to see it happen for whatever reason.  He thought that was real funny that he was able to do that. I told him it made him look like a little bitch. He wasn't happy with that. Whatever. I wasn't re-upping for the next year anyway and Gia was leaving that job. So fuck that guy. Anyway, that's one of the reasons why I don't like being in leagues with people I don't know. Ya know?

Not again...

Blogger changed their dashboard again, and I don't like it.

Not because it sucks or anything, even though it probably does.  Mostly because I'm a creature of habit and I hate having to figure out anything new when what I had worked just fine.

For example, I really hate the fucking widget they have now for setting the date and time of your scheduled posts.  Clunky much? What was wrong with letting me be a human being and typing in the date and time I wanted to auto-post? Couldn't trust me with that little bit of independence, eh?  Fuckers.

Ugh...anyways.  I forget what I was gonna post about now.  So here's a crappy picture of the Fire Island Lighthouse that I took from my crappy cell phone while going a million miles an hour in my sister and brother-in-law's boat this past weekend.

Click to make it go boom!

PS - And for all you Blogger haters out there ready with your "That's why you should switch to Wordpress or host your own site blah blah blah"....pffft! Save it.

A little matter of ethics

Anyone who has read my blog at all over the past few years knows that I sometimes like to jazz up my posts with a picture every now and again. Add a little visual flair to some otherwise boring posts, if you will.

And there was a time that I had no problem just doing a quick Google Image search, downloading a jpeg file of my choice from wherever and then uploading it to my Blogger post. Nary a thought went into who actually owns these properties, if anyone.

But lately, I've been trying to be a better blogger. Well, "better" might be a stretch. How about more responsible?

There is a common image warehouse available on Wikipedia (Wikimedia Commons) that seems to be as close to an ethical place as any to snag images. On my post about Tomoe Gozen last week, I grabbed an image they had on the site that had fallen into the public domain a long time ago. That felt clean to me.

But what do you all do? What do you all think?

I'm too lazy to constantly snap my own photos that might go along well with my posts, so grabbing images off of the Internet is my go-to play in this arena. With that in mind, I have a few questions:

1. Do you download images off the Internet to post on your blog?
2. Do you use a common image warehouse or will any image do?
3. Do you credit the image source?
4. If so, do you research that source to make sure they were the ORIGINAL source?
5. How often do you masturbate?  (Sorry...thought I could slip that one in)
6. Even if I use something like Wikipedia Commons, is naming the image source necessary?
7. What, ethically, are we bloggers required to do in a world in which nicking someone else's images is so damn easy?

Now I have never been contacted to remove an image from my blog, but it is something I have thought about.  The only change, besides trying to only get pictures from Wikipedia recently, that I have made to my image policy in the past was something that NYC Watchdog wrote about a long time ago.  I'd provide the link, but it really was a long time ago.  It had to do with Blogger's two ways of embedding pictures.  One was from a file on your computer and the other was from a link to someone else's site.  He wrote about how using the second option was wrong because you would be stealing someone else's bandwidth or something.  I'm not sure about the technical aspects of it, but it made sense to me at the time so I stopped doing it.  Frankly, I'm not even sure that Blogger has that option anymore.

My point of this whole schmeggegie, is that I'm trying to to the right thing here.  If not in the past, then at least going forward.  And I'd genuinely like to hear your opinion.  Especially about question #5.

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Note: Remember to play the Badgerdaddy Trivia Challenge every day. That often?  You dirty birds!

Blogger in Draft

Uh oh. Not sure I'm gonna like this.

Is anyone else using "Blogger in Draft" out there besides Steph?

Hmm.  Putting an image in the middle of a post is now easier, but they took away that funcionality from their HTML box.  I kinda liked that.  And I don't see how you can align the image to the left or the right of a paragraph or re-size it.  Wait...I see how you can resize it now.  You have to click on the image in the Compose box.  Still don't know how to change the alignment easily.

What else?  They have an Undo feature now.  That's good.  I don't see a spell check button, though.  Where the hell is that?  How am I supposed to spell "parallel" correctly? OK, so they underline the mis-spelled word in red, but still.  Everything else seems about the same.  I just don't know why the took stuff away from the HTML editor.

What do you Blogspot folks think?

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. All the Blogidiots are doing it.

House cleaning, and a few requests

Doing a little cleanup on the ole' Bug-Eyed Blog this week. Out with the trash and in with the, well, new trash. Decided that there was a bunch of stuff on my sidebar that were really unnecessary. So I ditched 'em. Here's what went down:

Gone:

My stat counter - I dunno why I ever had this up in the first place. Vanity? Maybe. But it never really made much sense to me. I mean there is no way the number actually reflected the real people who read this crap. Judging from the people who leave comments, I would think a more accurate number is around 10-15 loyalists. That's just fine with me.

My Excellent Award - I know this blog is far from excellent. I don't even recall who gave it to me, but thanks whoever (whomever?) you are! So let's get rid of that vanity plate. Sensing a theme here?

My Blogger Logo - I honestly don't know why I ever put that up. Who gives a crap if I'm powered by Blogger? Except maybe Blogger. What was I thinking?

New:

Nada. Scratch. Bupkiss. Any ideas?


But there is one thing I would like to do with the old girl. I'd love to have two sidebars. One for my stuff (my profile, archives, etc...) and one for your stuff (Bloglist, recent comments, etc...). Plus I think blogs with two sidebars look kinda nifty. And I'm all about looking nifty. Blogger, of course, doesn't offer a two-sidebar template. But there are plenty of custom templates out there or I can hack the html of my current template using Blogger tricks. But I'm a bit of an e-tard (no...nothing to do with Ecstasy), so that isn't likely.

Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

It's the first funny thing I saw when I googled GIGO. Source

When all else fails...

...post a pic of one of the cats. Here is Syd looking quite fuzzy and, dare I say, leonine. Huh?


Sorry, but this time of the year my thoughts are all about the Yankees and March Madness/April Anxiety NCAA hoops. It's the "guy gene". I haven't found a way to suppress it yet, but there are a shitload of doctors working on a cure. I am getting a little better. I've made it almost a week without staying up for Baseball Tonight on ESPN

Thank God(dess) Gia is a Yankee fan too! Otherwise we might not speak for a weeks at a time at the beginning of baseball season. Phew!

BLOGGER.COM NOTES

• I see that they are working on another upgrade for Blogger. This one has scheduled post posting, new blogroll featuring Google Reader, Google gadget support and a bunch of other things. It's about time they upgraded around here. I was going to pick up my shit and move elsewhere. Not really...too lazy.
• I don't see it in the new features, but they really should make the comment editor/interface more user friendly. We've talked about this before...so let's move on.
• Maybe I am just stupid, but whenever I upload a picture to a post in the post editor Blogger always puts it at the top of the post and then I have to move it to where I want the picture to be. Why can't I just go to the spot in the post where I want the pic to be and drop it there? This annoys me. Either I'm doing something wrong or Blogger is just plain clunky with this feature. Aaarghhh.

That is all. Have a nice weekend! - Earl