Holiday season coming to an end

Yeah, celebrations is over, we’re back into the “gray” everyday routine. Holiday season definitely coming towards an end.

Here in Sweden there’s still one thing left; the “13th day eve” (trettondagsafton; January 5th), which would be the evening before the 13th day after Christmas. We love doing our celebrations on the eves (we do the main celebration on Christmas eve; 24th, while I know many have the main day on Christmas day; 25th).

13th day eve is not that big a celebration day though, at least it never been for me and the family around me, but it is common for family to come together for dinner and spending time in each others company.

As I mentioned previously, I didn’t give any New Years resolutions this year either. I do have plans to make a best effort to achieving a few things though.

One of them being getting me a job. I don’t expect it to be easy, but I’ll try and hunt more efficiently then I have done the past couple months at least. I have for now put the idea of my own company at rest, I’m just not there yet mentally. I fear that I don’t have that discipline.

Another thing, which might be the harder one, is trying to get into shape, or at least better shape then I am now. Not setting the goal high, I’m trying to be realistic. I just want to loose some of the weight I’ve put on over the years. It was quiet some time since I was at “ideal” weight (we’re talking 15 years or so), but for many years the weight at least stood still, but lately I’ve seen it going up a few kilos. I know what to blame I guess.

New Years, that was some dinner that. We had fillet of ostrich, cooked slowly at 120 degrees Celsius until its inner temperature was at 65 degrees Celsius. You hardly don’t need to flavor it at all, but I “painted” it with a mix of white wine, soy, garlic, salt and pepper a few times during cooking. More tender meat you’ll have to look hard for.

A friend also brought her “deadly” chocolate cake. I dare not ask for the recipe… I know it has a good amount butter and sugar, and that it is very hard to resist… She did say she wasn’t gonna make any more of it this year, so that gives me a better chance at succeeding. I’m not really a sucker for candy, or pastries, but I just can’t resist a good chocolate cake.Thinking

Oh, and I’ve decided to run through an online book about php, I’m sure I’ll have good use of learning that a bit more Smile

A year has gone by…

Well, soon at least.

On Saturday we start a new year. Not sure where this one went though, time has gone way too fast.

Not going to give any New Years resolutions though, I simply don’t do them. Last time was about 10 years ago, I said I’d never make a resolution I couldn’t keep, so to stay safe I just don’t give one Smile

The closest thing to making a resolution would be me making up my mind to do something, never voiced publicly though, so no one would actually be let down if it fails. In general I only promise myself to make my best effort to achieve something though, and you can’t really fail with that, as long as you at least try.

New year, new possibilities, new adventures

Right now there’s a few things going on around me, so I have no idea where I’ll be in a year. Hell, right now I hardly know where I’ll be in 6 months…

Time will tell.

I do know one thing though, something has got to change.

These darn spammers…

I’m sure that everyone with a blog, or other system allowing users to post comments, has received them at some point, the comments that look legit but basically are spam. The spammers sometimes manage to post something that makes some sense to the topic in the blog post, others are as far off as can be.

Common for all these is that the comments in themselves is not the purpose, the linkback put in the field for website on the comment form is. Though occasionally you come across someone that posts an interesting, or otherwise useful link, most of them lead to pages of no interest at all (I for one is definitely not interested in where on the internet I can by certain meds).

To the inexperienced it looks just like any other comment, with an author linking to their website. After a while it becomes rather clear that the posts are essentially spam though, the exact same comment starts showing up with different sites linked.

This is a comment from one of my other blogs:

I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.

That looks like a rather legit comment, right? Taken out of context it certainly does seem so, but put in context with the subject of the post it was commenting, it is very far off.

That particular comment was found in a blog post containing a recipe for a Sandwich layer cake, on my Wine and Dine blog. I seriously doubt that helped the poster in any way regarding starting a blog…

Luckily there’s tools to help combat the spam, for me the tool of choice is the Akismet plugin for WordPress, which is also shipped with the WordPress installation package.