Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Monday, May 09, 2005

I've managed to get my slide deck ready for tonight's class by borrowing a laptop from ICC (a monster A## ThinkPad... and not 'monster' as in 'wicked' but 'monster' as in 'weighs-a-ton-w2k-slab'). I had no problem connecting to the Novell network and accessing my files (good as of Thursday). Internet connectivity was a no-go, however, so I'm at the library's information common's doing all the net stuff I needed to do for tonight's class.

I also scanned my email (nothing too critical.. will have to wait for tomorrow) and checked a few sites. I got a sinking feeling when I saw Karl's post on having lost his HD as well.

Once I get my laptop back, I'm going to do everything I can to minimize my dependance on any one piece of hardware. That means using web-based services as much as possible, and lots of backups. I'm sure it won't work nearly as well as I would like, and I'll still have a ton of software dependancies to deal with. Maybe I just phased by today's events, but I think it would be better if my work (and by extension, my sanity) didn't depend so much on any single end-user-maintained piece of disposable technology.