Annoyed

Annoyance #1: Mobile phones are quickly becoming more of an annoyance than television commercials. Today when I went to the post office, there was a woman in the lobby talking on her mobile phone at FULL VOLUME... YELLING OUT PERSONAL DETAILS FOR ANYBODY TO HEAR!! While I was waiting to pick up a parcel at the counter, I couldn't help but listen to her rambling on and on about her daughter's marital problems (we're talking all the juicy details, fit for a television movie). Is she too stupid to realize that everybody in this very public place can hear her? I'm sure her daughter would be mortified (and, since this is such a small town, I'm sure that several people at the post office knew her and who her daughter was). Have people no shame?

Annoyance #2: Comment spam on this blog is escalating at a frightful rate. I'd hoped that banning the IP addresses from commenting again would solve things, but it doesn't. Even worse, some legitimate comments are blocked in the process. I wonder if there is a legal recourse for comment spam? All I know is that I am getting really tired of manually deleting it every day. The folks at Movable Type are starting up a commenting registration system... I hope that works out.

Annoyance #3: Is it my imagination, or are automated phone answering systems getting more complicated? It used to be you had only one or two levels of "press 1 for this, press 2 for that, press 3 for the other." But now, I find myself easily going 6 or 7 levels deep in these systems... sometimes unable to get out. Do companies honestly think this is how their customers want to spend their time?

Comments

I've found MT-Blacklist (http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/) to be incredibly effective. It filters by advertised website, rather than by IP address. It has a large list of known offenders, it's easy to add new sites to be banned, and it makes the process of removing SPAM comments en masse quite easy.

Posted by Nate on April 12, 2004

   

That's pretty sweet! Thanks for the suggestion... I just installed it, and will see if it can save me some trouble.

Posted by Dave2 on April 12, 2004

   

Cool! It seems to be working just fine... not a single comment spam since I installed MT-Blacklist! Thanks Nate!

Posted by Dave2 on April 14, 2004

   

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