Alien Barbecue

In addition to the covers above, I’ve also worked on a couple more print book covers (still pending final approval), a couple more e-book covers (also pending final approval), a few magazine ads, and an illustration. I’ve gotten myself newly addicted to a game called MouseHunt, which actually helps my productivity. It’s rather a silly game with a simple concept—you have a mouse trap and some cheese, and you wait around for a mouse to get caught in your trap. Every mouse you catch earns you some gold, and with that gold you buy more cheese and bigger, better mouse traps.

I know, and this is my new work tool?

The thing is, you automatically get an hourly trap check, but if you really want to catch a lot of mice, you sound the hunting horn every 15 minutes and go mouse hunting with your friends. This means more opportunity to catch more mice and get more gold, so you can continue playing a game that at the heart has a concept that non-players just completely roll their eyes over.

…just like you are all rolling your eyes at me now. Hey, I know my worldview is weird, but don’t you judge me!

Anyway, I sound my hunting horn, then I work really hard for the next 15 minutes, telling myself, “I will have this thing done before the next hunting horn or else!” And before I know it, an entire day has come and gone, and I’ve not only cleaned the kitchen and the cat box, assisted in the cooking of a meal, and done some reading of a five pound tome, but I’ve also completed one print book cover, two e-book covers, and a full page magazine ad.

And that, my friends, is how you justify computer game addiction.

I got a note from my web host this morning about how all the comment spam from all the spambots are straining the database server, along with a friendly suggestion that I upgrade my content management system to help stop the spam.

Sure, make more work for me. What a waste of a beautiful morning.

So I upgraded WordPress to help stave off all the comment spam, and it went pretty flawlessly until I noticed that all my categories were blank, uneditable, and unlinkable. Swear words were muttered, and a lower lip puffed up and out in a pissy pout. But I persevered and did a search on the support site, didn’t find much of anything, and stumbled onto the solution myself anyway. It took a bit of manual work and re-entering all the category names and slugs into the SQL database myself because somehow the upgrade installation had wiped them all out.

And at the end of the ordeal, I nodded in satisfaction and noticed that I hadn’t gotten anything real done, and by real, I mean something that makes me money. Blog maintenance is all well and good, but unlike Dooce’s blog, it does not earn me over $42K a month. A nice pat on the back every once in a while, maybe, but that’s pretty much it. At the end of the day, it’s a pesky bit of coding trouble just to share a piece of my mind with the world.

I am geek woman. Hear me … cough.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

I don’t moderate my blog comments as often as I should, and unless a comment is from someone I’ve approved once before, a comment will hang in moderation purgatory until I get to it. Well … when I checked the comments tonight prior to writing a little something, I found around 750 comments awaiting moderation.

My jaw dropped.

Most of it is spam, of course—probably even all of them. But when I clicked over to the comment moderation page, the comments were so numerous, the page they populated so long, that my content management system couldn’t display them all for me. It stopped part way, meaning I had to find some other way to delete them because the mass delete option was no longer there.

Swear words were uttered.

So tonight, instead of writing up a post bemoaning all the sex and violence that I just read in a book called Tom Jones and sharing a super long book list I recently found, I’m sitting here deleting all those spam comments, 20 at a time.