As has already been documented elsewhere, the unthinkable happened last night and the U.S. has Bush and his cronies in charge for another four long years. I’m still as speechless as I was this morning at work when I checked BBC News for the first time and this evening when I turned on the TV to hear Kerry’s conecession speech.

I had lunch with a couple of guys from work, as well as an American and a Spaniad who were visiting from the company supplying our wireless management software. None of us could really believe that it was happening. As inevitable as it was under the circumstances, it was still a shock, and I doubt the full impact of what’s happened will be clear for a long time yet.

It feels like a jail sentence, which has just been bestowed upon the world, and it’s so difficult to see past the enormity what has happened and imagine what effect this will have. Let’s just hope the Democrats can do a bit better next time, if there’s anything left of America for them to play for in four years’ time.

Today I’ve deleted literally hundreds of spam comments from the blogs hosted on wabson.org, mine included. They should mostly be gone now.

I’ve also taken a few steps to stop the spam coming back, most notably installing the MT-Blacklist plugin into Movable Type.

MT-Blacklist is currently turned on, and will reject any comments that contain certain phrases, which should result in most spam being rejected. This shouldn’t cause any problems for legitimate comments, but please let me know if it does. For anyone who cares, the blacklist of phrases is available here in text format.

I’d meant to do this a while ago when I first posted about this, but didn’t get round to doing anything about it in the end. Now I have done and I really hope this will solve the problem.

Here’s an interesting one for any iPod owners out there, about how Apple have re-engineered iTunes to break a piece of third party software called iPod Download, that apparently made it easier to copy music off your iPod.

I don’t know a lot about iTunes and how it works with iPods (iPod support for Linux is just non-existant, so I can’t see buying one myself), but moves like this have to either be motivated by Apple’s desire to not share their ‘toys’ with other software developers, or the music industry’s desire to limit what you can do with music that you’ve legitimately bought.

Either way, it’s bad news for anyone who doesn’t want to be restricted with what they do with their music.

Not having done it for a while, and in need of something to do online to waste some time before Top B (maybe), I took a look on the Wayback Machine to remind me what wabson.org used to look like.

I remembered a few things. Firstly, I used to have new photos come up automatically at the top of my blog. I got rid of this last year to give more priority to the blog entries themselves, and I lost the photos completely off the front page when I moved over to MT a few months back. I need to put this back and stop this blog looking like a generic MT blog.

Secondly, I realised how much content I’d managed to lose when I moved over to MT. All of the old blog entries and all of the photos from the old system aren’t on the new blog at all, and I really need to get it all back up there. I’m FTP’ing all the old photos onto my computer from the old server at the moment, which is at least a start.

Now I’m going to go to Top B, and think about how I’m going to make all this work. There’s no rush, after all 🙂

Myself, Dave, Giles and Martin went to Oxygen tonight and ended up entering their Gay Pub Quiz, which we won! So we, as the members of team “Warwick Shame” are now the proud owners of a magnum of Heineken each. Not quite as exciting as a Scissor Sisters concert, I grant you, but it was a nice way to end the weekend all the same 🙂

How all we need to do is find some straight people to give the Heineken to… :-p