Words

It’s purple prose for “plants you’re about to walk or drive into.” My family has been using it for the last fifteen years.

This branch overhanging a sidewalk:

becomes green leafy foliage if you walk into it while writing a haiku.

When I saw the subject lines:

WordPress Email System	[Will Angley] Contact – Name: …
WordPress Email System	[Will Angley] Contact – Name: …

in my inbox I was hopeful for a moment. Then I opened the messages and saw they were offering to submit ads in other sites’ contact forms for me.

This seemed like something that could backfire if I used it to advertise my personal blog; spamming my boss is not a career enhancing move. I passed.

My next reaction, after that, was “omg, this is exciting! I’m having a spam problem now! What cool technology can I use to fight it‽”

Then I remembered I was already using one; my contact form is protected by Akismet. I clicked around through the WordPress Admin until I found Akismet’s stats:

showing that I’ve been getting 75-90 messages a month, almost all blatant spam.

In hindsight I’m not surprised. Email spam is a hard problem, and contact form spam is in some ways harder; Akismet is doing really well here.

I know that big sites often need to do more to fight spam, using techniques like honeypot form fields (which look different to spam-writing robots than they do to humans), CAPTCHAs, and bot defense software that pokes at browsers to see if they look like they’re being used by people.

But willangley.org isn’t that big, and I like knowing I’m not breaking for readers who use content blockers, so I think I’ll leave things alone until I actually want to work on my contact form again 😛

Food conditioning happens when wild animals learn to eat human food. It’s most often used when talking about bears; learning to eat food left behind by people increases the likelihood that bears will come into conflict with people later.

People who think about this for a living make videos like this:

They’re deadly serious, but they’re also hard not to laugh at: their subject matter is, after all, a bear that loves garbage so much it might get shot.

Making matters worse, I promptly saw the analogy:

air conditioned : air conditioner :: food conditioned : food conditioner

where a food conditioner is a garbage can. It’s possibly the silliest way to refer to a garbage can that I can think of, and it’s hard not to laugh at that too.

And thus, food conditioned is my word(s) of the day.

Today’s word of the day is ancient Greek: kapnobatai, literally “smoke-treaders” or “those who walk on clouds.”

It comes to us as the nickname for an ancient people in Strabo’s Geography. The work Strabo cites is now lost, and scholars have advanced several theories to explain what the nickname referred to. One theory is that the people would enter trances walking in clouds of smoke.

It’s this theory that makes kapnobatai my word of the day, since it’s a word we need again, for modern engineers entranced by clouds of computers.

I use a Netgear R7800, running a release build of LEDE Reboot 17.01.2, and am happy with it.

It’s a powerful WiFi router, lets you load your own Linux on it, and will turn on WiFi once you do. And it has a recovery mode which lets you unload your own Linux if you mess up and put something on it that breaks it.

This was hard to figure out: I read a whole lot of forum threads that talked about discontinued routers, or routers that worked once but were now locked down, or routers that only worked in Europe, and then one forum thread that was enough to make a decision.

It took a couple hours in total, and that was with having some idea what to look for since I’d worked on WiFi for a few years. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure I would have gotten to an answer at all. (Anecdotally: I tried and failed to find an OpenWRT router once before, four years ago, and bought an Airport Express instead. I think I’ve changed more than the way the Table of Hardware works but it’s hard to be sure.)

Setting up the router with LEDE was straightforward once I got past this, and it’s been running smoothly for the past week.

Late last year, I got a note from my credit card company that their “Fraud Early Warning Department” had flagged some transactions as suspicious and asked me if I’d made them.

I hadn’t. I was able to get everything resolved within a few weeks though, and I was excited the company had caught this for me within a day of the charges happening, instead of needing to wait for my monthly statement.

I told a few friends about my interaction with the early warning department. One, who had worked in payments, was less impressed than I was. He said it sounded more like a “late warning department” since they didn’t reject the charges in real time :).

I didn’t think much of this at the time. But I’ve since had interactions (with other companies!) that went much like this, where something that could have been addressed with a few seconds of text messages at the time wasn’t and turned into a an hour or two sorting things out with Support the next day.

Can we please start making systems that ask us for help before problems get big enough to be annoying instead of after?