In the winter a slightly odd phenomenon sometimes happens when I do the rather mundane task of doing the washing up. When its cold outside and I fill the bowl with hot water steam produces tiny water drops all over the bar of soap on my window sill. I’ve normally only seen this at night but a few times I’ve found its happened late in the day. Tonight it was light enough to get a few photographs before the drops succumbed to gravity and ran into the soap dish.

The other day my old clockwork kitchen timer broke so I went to buy a new one.  Now in our topsy-turvy post Woolworths age the simple mechanical timer seems to have become an expensive , luxury item so I ended up with a Heston Blumenthal battery powered model that also doubles as a clock.  I picked it because I liked the look and it was the cheapest one I’d found.  On opening it I found a tiny sheet of instructions and a large sheet that makes me think someone is still running the Heston Blumenthal joke.  The guarantee makes it clear that the timer is for “Domestic Use Only”.  Yet the other sheet is headed “Electromagnetic Compatibility” and provides detailed warnings about factors that electromagnetic instruments may influence the timer or cause it to temporarily malfunction.  Which could obviously be a serious risk if trying to precisely boil your egg for the 416 seconds required for the perfect firmer, more creamy yolk with a completely set white.

A photograph of the overnight torrential downpour and hailstorm with thunder and lightning from the bank holiday weekend just gone. You can see a few of the hailstones bouncing off the top of the street light as bright dashes flying away from it.

Vue posts dominated the successes in the early years with Vue Python for Beginners, Vue 6 Tutorial: Cloud Layer Sculpting, Punching Holes in the Sky, V5I: Vue Dynamics 0.3 – Now with Added Particle, XFrog animation in Vue 6 Infinite, Object Sequence Importer Version 0.2.4 and Things Going Boom in Vue 5 Infinite all doing well.  I only really started posting photographs last year – the stand out attraction to date has to be Liverpool’s Pyramid – William Mackenzie Tomb although I’d put that down to the subject mater and not the photograph.  Reviews have always been a part of Too Many Ideas Face Shop Pro – Just Not Ready for the Big Time while The Expendables surprised me with the level of interest it got last year along with my RED – Retired Extremely Dangerous and the stong ongoing performance of my Yes, Prime Minister review.  I was pleased to see my Doctor Who: The Big Bang fighting for a place in my top posts. Of my gaming posts Paper House for Gamers Updated was the most popular – maybe I should be a little less niche or obscure in my topics in future.

Last but not least was one oddball post that these days would probably be a quick tweet instead of a post… Modern Mime.

Then hours later I’m burning some calories on Wii Fit advanced step.  My scores are poor by my usual standard but I’m not really bothered – it’s about losing some excess weight not the score.  When – wham! – for the second time in the day inspiration hits.  I know who the main character is and why they’re a spam bot.  I know who the bad guys are.  I know what they want, how they’re trying to get it and why it makes the main character so important. I know the day after tomorrow setting that lets the story happen.  Slightly annoyingly I think the main character works better as a woman rather than a man.  While I’ve written a female lead before in Mrs H’s Knitting Circle I’m never sure if its such a good idea.

In about an hour I’ve written a one page outline for a big chunk of the story before the main action kicks off.  I’m thinking a couple of sessions with the snowflake method might push me to a point where I can write it.  So damn the inspirons – full speed ahead on this I think.

In December my 404 error log checking picked up hits on one of the page that I’d made to automate this.   So I republished that page and now through the magic of the Internet the automation seems to be all systems go.

I’d somehow managed to knock out the redirection of my old blogspot blog to the one integrated here.  I hadn’t realised just how many visitors were coming through from there still so breaking / fixing it has had a surprising impact on the impworks visitor statistics!

I was also seeing occasional 404s on the directory page for tags that didn’t exist so I’ve thrown in a simple tag cloud page to give visitors to that page something to chew on.

There were 424 spam comments to my site in December 2010. Of those 74 had an associated 404 error for the comment page that WordPress would have made had the comment been approved. All the comments and 404 errors that paired had IP addresses that matched. I’d say that suggests that the spambots are checking if they succeeded to get a comment posted rather than someone auditing to check the inbound links they’ve paid for exist.

The test for a comment page that causes the 404 error isn’t happening immediately so the bots have been coded to allow for comments being delayed. I can’t think of a reason a comment would be delayed other than moderation. Most of the comments are so blatantly spam that I can’t see most of them being approved. I did a quick sample of the ones I looked at the ones with long lists of links weren’t tested to see if they got through and the random garbage text with a couple of links were sometimes tested.

The most heavily checked spam comments were short like “A very interesting post thanks for writing it!” or “Thanks For the exelent info. I’ll be back in the future. Thanks again! [Link to drugs spam site]“. Maybe a few of the short ones like the second one might slip past someone who’s taken the drugs from the site linked to? I imagine some like the first one will get through on a high traffic blog with lots of comments to moderate.