Word: “John Henry”
Usage: Slang for “signature”, used instead of “John Hancock”
Example: “Hey Bill, I need your John Henry here on the dotted line for this delivery of new computers.”
Understand this please, folks: “John Hancock” is the accepted slang term for one’s signature, because John Hancock is famous for his large, flamboyant signature on the Declaration of Independence.
John Henry was a steel driving man, Lord Lord.
4 comments October 28th, 2005
Just before I left work today, Kathy called to tell me that Lexi had a concert at school tonight, and that I should rush home so I’d be able to make it. Apparently, the kids in music class at Lexi’s school have been working with the great Michael Allen Harrison for the last several weeks, writing songs based on the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go, and this was the first I’d heard of it. Actually, the other day, Lexi was singing a song I’d never heard before, and I asked her what the song was. She said “It’s a song I’ve been singing with Michael Allen Harrison.” I thought it was cute that she was singing along with the radio; little did I know that she had been actually truly singing it with him in person.
It was an amazing concert, and I have a new appreciation and respect for all that this amazing musician does. Check out the pictures in the photo gallery.
3 comments October 25th, 2005
Several of my blogging buddies have been playing what I have dubbed the Google Images Game recently. I decided to join in the fun. Here are the rules: Go to Google Images, and do a search for the following:
-Name of the town where you grew up
-Name of the town where you live now
-Your name
-Your grandmother’s name
-Your favorite food
-Your favorite drink
-Your favorite song
-Your favorite smell
Then you post the first image that Google found, and also your favorite image. Here are my results:
I grew up in Gresham. First image:
My favorite images (tie):
I currently live in Beaverton. First image:
My favorite image:
My name is Bill Hayes. First image:
My favorite images (tie):
My Grandma’s name was Marty Hayes. First image:
Favorite image:
My favorite food is lasagne. First image:
Favorite image (tie):
My favorite drink is Diet Pepsi. First image:
Favorite image:
My favorite song is The Power of Love. First image:
Favorite image:
My favorite smell is Avon Soft Musk perfume. First image:
Favorite image:
By the way, check out this unrelated, but most awesome Google Images game.
2 comments October 21st, 2005
I’m going to have a new poll every week, on the right side of this page. Why? No real reason, I guess just to see if I could make it work with this site.
Have fun!
Add comment October 17th, 2005
So Billy was doing something, I don’t remember what now, that was really getting on Kathy’s and my nerves. Lexi did her best to diffuse the situation by writing a note to help us remember that it’s not all that bad.
It worked:
 |
|||
|
|
|
||
3 comments October 15th, 2005
There are so many things that are great about this story, I couldn’t possibly point them all out.
Add comment October 14th, 2005
Comment spam blows. I’ve seen it becoming more and more common on many blogs that I read daily, and it was also slowly increasing in numbers on this site. Back when I was using Blogger to manage this site, there wasn’t much that I could do other than simply delete the offending comments from the post. I understand that Blogger now has some sort of comment spam detecting system, though it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. Either most people aren’t aware of it, or maybe they have to manually enable it somehow, or maybe it just doesn’t work very well.
Since I converted my blog to Wordpress, I have only occasionally had to deal with comment spam. Recently, though, it has increased to the point that is almost unbearable. Wordpress has some basic comment spam detecting features built-in. I recently configured my blog to hold for moderation any comments that contained any links at all. The comments are first delivered to my email address, then I can approve them or delete them. There were several significant problems with this method. One, while I was on vacation recently, there were several legitimate (and very helpful, thanks RM!) comments that were held and didn’t get posted for a few weeks. I can imagine that the comment writers weren’t sure why their comment didn’t immediately show up.
The bigger problem with this system is that many spam comments didn’t actually have a link in the body of the message itself, so they were still posted without being held for approval.
So I had a choice. I could configure my blog to allow comments only from people after they register as a user, but I didn’t want to force people to do that. I know that when I want to leave a simple comment about something on a blog I’ve stumbled upon, if I’m forced to register with the site first, I’ll usually just click away, keeping my comment to myself.
I could moderate each and every comment. This means that I would have to approve every single comment that someone leaves, filtering out all the garbage comments left by spambots. I don’t get a huge number of legitimate comments, but I’ve been getting literally 35+ spam comments each day. I felt that this method was also unaccaptable.
What I chose to do is implement a Captcha system when leaving comments, using the SecureImage plugin. Captcha is a goofy acronym for an even goofier phrase that I’m not going to bother spelling out. What it does is pretty cool, though. When you leave a comment, you’ll be prompted to fill in the usual stuff like your name, email address, etc, as well as verify a random string of characters that is generated on the fly and presented in a graphical format that spambots can’t read. No registration required by you, no moderation required by me, immediate posting of comments.
Try it out now by leaving a comment on this post.
14 comments October 5th, 2005
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Sep | Nov » | |||||
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||