Busy day today. Got up at a semi-reasonable hour this morning, and sent off my passport renewal application. (Because I am a doofus, and left it so late, I had to send it FedEx express and pay for expedited processing and the whole bit, but because I'm not a complete doofus, those extra measures should ensure that it gets back to me in plenty of time for our trip. Apparently I have a finely honed sense of just how much I can procrastinate.)

I ended up having to FedEx my application, because I drove to the post office this morning and discovered that while the post office is open on Saturday mornings, there aren't any actual human beings there, so if you need to accomplish anything that can't be done by a machine, you're out of luck. Hmph.

After FedEx, and a quick Starbucks run, I dropped by 99 Ranch to pick up assorted Asian delicacies (and cute cheap chopsticks, with dragons painted on them).

After lunch, I attempted to get started on assembling the futon for our library/guest bedroom. (We have a houseguest arriving this coming Thursday, so we need to make sure she has something to sleep on.) Alas, my beloved Black and Decker cordless electric screwdriver would not operate, despite my having charged its battery. I decided that the battery was probably the problem, and went off to Home Depot to get a new one. Turns out I was right - after I charged the new battery, the screwdriver was working again. (I was relieved. I didn't want to buy a new cordless electric screwdriver. Aside from the one I own having the sentimental value of being a wedding shower present from my mother, Black and Decker now seem to be making all their power tools in bright orange plastic. It's probably unbelievably girly or something of me to say this, but I don't want bright orange power tools. The black and dark blue plastic of the screwdriver I own suits me much better.)

I've now assembled the pieces of the futon frame - all that remains are the bits that hook the frame together. I think I'll do that tomorrow morning.

I've also been monitoring the spam situation over on Daniel's blog periodically throughout the day. I put together a really simple .htaccess file to block off some of the referrer log spam - so far it's working, though I've got a feeling that the spammers will get more creative, and I'll have to think of a better way to keep up. (Right now, I'm just blocking the access of anything coming from a URL that contains words like "poker", "casino", and "holdem", which is working fine, but if the referral spammers start getting creative in their URLs, I'm going to need something more sophisticated.)

Meanwhile, MT-Blacklist has blocked over 250 comment and trackback spams. It's doing a great job on the comment spam - since I installed it, I think there have been only 6 comment spams that I've had to delete by hand, and all of those came in on the first day. For reasons that I don't quite understand, it's not doing quite as well with the trackback spam - I've had to delete about 40 of those since installing the Blacklist. I don't know if it's really worse at catching the trackback spam, or if we're just getting more of it. I'll need to look into it in greater detail when I have the time.

It's amazing watching these spammers at work, though. This may be an illusion, but it almost seems like they're evolving their techniques in response to my countermeasures. For example, I'm now seeing a lot more spam that uses HTML entities (special character sequences that begin with an &) to obfuscate content keywords that the anti-spam software uses in filtering. I hardly saw any of those in our initial spam attacks. (Of course, now I'm only seeing the stuff that actually gets through my filters.)

One thing that really got me was a spam for a public relations firm. Yeesh. It's bad enough when it's just poker and porn (interestingly, we get way more poker spam than porn spam), now I gotta deal with PR?