I’m Still Here

What ever happened to that guy who had the Flametoad blog?

I’m sorry for the long silence. Spare time has been at a premium, and I’ve been spending what little time I’ve had working on ETU. Quick update on that– it’s coming along well. We’re working on refining chapter 10 at the moment and we just have 3 more chapters to go.

Although it’s nothing you’re likely to notice, I used cpanel to block a repeat spammer’s IP address for the first time. I see from my Bad Behavior logs that it has been blocking harvestors and bots, but–more distressingly–attempts at SQL injection. I’m very thankful that the plugin is stopping them…but I can’t help but wonder about the ones it hasn’t. If you can read this post from a feed (such as at Livejournal, Facebook, your RSS reader, etc.) but are denied access to flametoad.com, please let me know!

Now for the linkdump:

• Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas was recently voted Best Anthology in the Preditors & Editors Readers’ Choice awards. We also had a pretty nice review at Bitten by Books recently. We’ve submitted it for the Origins award, so keep your fingers crossed that we get on the ballot.
• I’m signed up for the Google Buzz, so if you’re interested in connecting, here’s my public profile. I do share items of interest from my Google Reader feed, so that should be good for a laugh.
• “Offline Lending” Costing Publishers Billions
• Viagara might be useful for pregnant women in promoting healthy fetal development. (I just painted a giant target on this post for spam-bots, haven’t I?)
• It costs a business roughly $204 per card in fines and restitution when they are hacked and your card numbers are stolen. Often when this type of thing happens, the number of cards affected are in tens of thousands if not millions. It’s enough to put a mom and pop store out of business and cripple a multi-million dollar operation.
• There are some seriously neat technology improvements on the horizon for e-book readers. They’re going to make these first generation e-ink books look like… well, first generation iPods.
• Shopping for a new digital camera? Lifehacker recommends staying under the 7 megapixel range, for good reason.
• Finally, some problems can’t be talked out.