The most salient thing about last year is that it to me marked a sort of real liberation. In 2007, I graduated, moved to the DC area and started a “real job” with CACI in downtown arlington, but I wasn’t really making enough to buy a car, and I was spending entirely too much time commuting on the subway (about 1:10 door to door if there weren’t problems on the trains), not to mention the job was unfulfilling, with a couple of micromanagers staring over my shoulder constantly and no sense of empowerment to change things that needed to be changed. All in all, caci was paying the rent, but it wasn’t fun, or exciting, or good… everything about it sucked really… but it got me out here.

In early 2008, around the first week in February, I got a phone call from the staffing company I was hired through, saying that they’d cancelled my contract and wouldn’t be offering me a job. I was shocked and worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep doing what I do, because it was my first “real” position out on my own… so that night I sort of sat around in shock. The next day I updated my resume and re-posted it on monster, and by the end of the week I started getting preliminary calls from other HR companies that wanted to interview me, and by the middle of march I’d accumulated competing job offers from a place in Germantown, a place in the Reagan building in downtown DC, a place in Silver Spring, a contractor at the Naval Surface Warfare Center around Cabin John, and Mitre in Mclean. It was exciting, because I had 5 solid offers for at least 10 grand a year more than I was making at CACI. Can’t really complain about that, ya?

I took the job that seemed like it was in the best environment (which didn’t start me at the most money, mind you), and started there in the tail end of March as a contractor on a 3-month contract. In June, they offered me a permanent position, and I’ve been there ever since. It’s like the diametric opposite of the environment at CACI — I’m empowered, I’m valued, I’m generally respected and left to do my own thing with little or no supervision, and I actually feel useful and fulfilled.

The other thing about the Mitre job is that the pay increase meant I could afford to buy myself a car (mainly because I needed to get to the place, and it’d be like 3 hours commuting by train and bus). So I joined the world of people with mobility, got myself a 2008 Nissan Altima 2.5 SL with a couple of nice packages on top of it, and haven’t regretted that decision either. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, it’s responsive and it’s got pretty decent fuel economy. And most importantly, I can fit in it comfortably, which sets it in a very exclusive class of vehicles — when I went on my search for cars, I only found maybe 8 that I could reasonably drive, and only 4 of them were comfortable.

Having the car means having freedom to go places I couldn’t go before, and do things that weren’t in my reach before. I could go to stores and buy more than I could carry without depending on my roommates. I could go to fast food places that were longer than walking distance away. Little conveniences that having a set of wheels affords you… you know?

Of course, having the car also meant trimming about a mile and a half of walking from my daily routine (walking to/from the bus stops and whatnot), and I’ve been struggling mostly unsuccessfully to force myself to add something back into the mix to counteract that. On the other hand, the fact that I’m not eating at chipotle for lunch and pizza for dinner every day has probably moderated that a bit — even if I’m still eating fast food more often than not.

My financial situation is looking up, too. In 2007, my student loans started at about a 24k balance. In 2008, I paid them down to under 20. In 2007, I had a little remaining credit balance. In 2008, my credit cards are clear and I’ve got several grand in savings. In 2007, I had no retirement fund. In ‘08, I’ve got a couple grand in my 403(b).

Health-wise, I’m not sure where I stand. I exercised more on a daily basis in 2007, sort of by mandate of my living conditions — for the whole of 2007, I had no car and was walking to work, to classes, to restaurants. On the other hand, for the latter half of it at least I ate a bit worse than I do now. I had a scale that I thought was weighing me accurately, but the battery was apparently low, so I don’t know how accurate it was. I’d been relying on that from early 2006 up until graduation, and I don’t know how long, but for a long time it had been misreporting my weight. In Jan 2008 I got a nice medical grade mechanical scale and was dismayed to find that the scale I’d been using had been under-reporting my weight by like 15%. Since then I’ve been tracking, but not recording. So here, for the record, my weight this morning is 357 lbs. That’s entirely more than I want to weigh, but I’ve been fluctuating between 350 and 360 for all of 2008. I’d look and feel better in the 300 neighborhood, so this year that’s what I’m shooting for. And that means activities and exercise.

In 2008, I had no “active” activities. In 2009, that’s gotta change. I’m going to have to start deliberately exercising. Have to find outdoor things to do. Have to make that a part of my daily life again, somehow. That’s the looking forward thing. I made a lot of important changes in 2008. That’s the most important change I’ve got to make in 2009. Everything else, I just need to keep doing what I’m doing: save money, pay off debts, buy things I want to buy. But that one thing still needs change.

I feel like a sellout.

That is all.

But, that was not going to float when I started getting 20-30 comment spams a day. So I turned to a filtering solution: akismet. Akismet’s pretty decent, it does a good job catching about 99% of the spam that gets tossed at stuff, and leaving the moderation rules in place caught 90% of what made it past akismet (leaving only about 1 in 1000 that got through unmoderated). That was all well and good, right … it worked, it was sane, it had a good performance rate and a very low false-positive rate (I’ve seen maybe 3 false positives between here and gotwoot, which is set up exactly the same as this blog).

But, spammers have been winning the fight. Lately, they’ve been designing more and more messages that make it through akismet, and akismet’s false positives are getting worse because to catch all the spam means to catch broader patterns, which include legitimate comment patterns.

Well, I wasn’t happy about that. I don’t get a whole lot of traffic over here, but I do get a fair lot on gotwoot, and losing 2% or so of the legitimate comment traffic to false positives on spam filtering meant having to pay too much attention to the filters too often.

So, I decided it was time to move away from that model. Akismet’s a post-comment filtering system. The moderation queue is another post-comment filter. They treat the symptoms, but not the disease. So I moved the whole mess forward a step.

Captcha! is a more direct approach. Rather than guessing whether a comment is legit or not, why not just block out the generally irritating spambots before they can comment at all?

Captcha’s author suggests that it’s better for now to use other tools … like checking to make sure the user’s browser understands javascript, and that eventually captcha will be OCR-breakable (which is quite true). However, any technique can be automated given sufficient computing power. Breaking a captcha with OCR requires the comment-spammer to have the computer resources to OCR the image at all. While that’s not terribly hard, it’s a hell of a lot harder than just churning away using POST requests (since it means establishing a session, getting, parsing, ocr’ing, and then posting). It’s not a huge problem to do on a single page, but automating it will certainly slow down the spammer a bit, hurting his efficiency and making it cost slightly more than the nothing that it currently costs him.

They say “a stitch in time saves nine” and all that. The way I see it, captcha is the stitch before the tear gets worse, akismet’s the ten late ones to fix it up.

That said, I use them both now. If someone does break captcha with OCR, they’re also going to have to get past akismet :p.

Incidentally, since installing captcha on gotwoot and here, I went from ~50 spams a day being caught by akismet to none at all being either akismetted or moderated, and none getting through to the front page. So, so far it’s been 100% effective, which makes me happy. And I’ve aimed for a generally readable captcha, which nobody’s complained about yet… so I guess everything’s cool!

Yeah, so the meat is, a BBC pop sci show, “Horizons” did a recent episode on “Human v2.0″ talking about the idea of machine-augmented humans and such. A rich area to be sure (already having given rise to loads of actual good sci-fi, not to mention classic anime like Ghost in the Shell).

But rather than doing actual science, they paraded out a bunch of idiots :p. Yeah, go ahead and read on there. This reminds me a bit of a recent entry I wrote about The detriments of sci-fi. The last page really drives that idea home: media portrayals of science as something starry-eyed and insane and people not pursuing science careers may just be related :p.

(ISC handler’s diary requesting both people who’ve found botnets, and botnet operators for information about sizes, purposes, etc). I wonder if they’ll get any info via the direct approach from opers like that …