Even Spammers Can't Get Me Down Today

As regular readers will know, I occasionally get some comment spam on the site, and I've been trying to strike the appropriate balance between keeping them off the site and allowing legitimate comments.

I've failed several times.  Most recently, I had to restore comments from my most recent added reader that I only discovered through conversation, and just today I noticed two in the junk pile from regular and highly-respected readers.  It's frustrating.  I may need to do something drastic in the future, such as a CAPTCHA solution, but I hate do do that as I find it irritating.  Even so, it may be better than losing comments.

Anyway, since I missed two comments, I'd like to respond personally to show that I wasn't just ignoring them.

Stella: Great minds think alike!  I'm glad it wasn't just my fried mind giving me visions of fish.

Goofy: I have a several-year-old Dell Inspiron 1150.  It originally came with a Celeron and 512MB RAM, but I've since upgraded to a Pentium 4 and (as you know) 1GB RAM.  I'm running WinXP Pro.  It's other stats are pretty unimpressive, with integrated video.  The current HD is a 40 GB, 4200 RPM IDE HD.  I don't expect to get a huge boost from replacing it, but I think it would help with starting applications and, to a certain extent, some casual media things.  And, of course, probably more storage space (40GB is the size of my media player--and it gets full before I can put all my music--from my desktop--on it!).  At that point, the processor will definitely be the bottleneck, and there's nothing I can do about it then.