Sticky Music

My sweetie and I both woke up with Christmas songs stuck in our heads. For me, the song was “Toy Jackpot” by Blackalicious, with its super-catchy chorus “Is it time yet? Is it time? I can’t wait” in a smooth hip-hoppish vibe. My sweetie emerged from slumber with “10,000 Watts” by Crystal Antlers, a high-energy song about Christmas lights, made to be turned up loud.

Now I have “10,000 Watts” in my head, too.

While very different in sound, these songs have two things in common: They are both really cool, and they both came from Target. In fact, you’ve probably heard parts of the songs already, along with a bunch of others, in Target ads. It was after watching an ad with a song called “You’ll Never Find My Christmas” that the light of my life encouraged me to go in search of the original music to download.

Well, what do you know? There’s a whole Christmas album for download for free at Target.com, and there’s not a dud in the bunch. Target found a bunch of different up-and-coming bands and gave them a great opportunity, and got themselves some fun advertisements built around the music at the same time. To me, this seems like exploitation done right.

For the Ebenezer Scrooges among you: Yes, Target is a big, giant retail corporation, and I’ve just become a shill for them. Lighten up, would you? It’s Christmas! These are good songs you wouldn’t get to hear otherwise!

So hop on over and give a listen — you just might find your new holiday favorite.

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Trying a Different Spam Filter

Every day, literally hundreds of spam comments are sent to this blog. I have a a couple lines of defense, and generally they work pretty well. My first defense is a product called Bad Behavior, which inspects incoming messages and blocks the ones that look malicious before the WordPress code is even started up. Stopping evil at this stage can save a lot of server resources, as well as prevent this site from being hijacked by an unknown WordPress vulnerability.

Comments that get through that layer are then inspected to see if they look suspicious. Ones that the inspection service doesn’t like get thrown into a bucket behind the scenes where I can inspect them and approve innocent comments that were mistakenly flagged as spam.

I have been using Akismet for that, and in general I’ve been pleased with the results. The only downside is that now there are so many suspicious comments that I’m afraid that I’ll miss actual legit comments that were improperly flagged. Scanning through a list of hundreds of comments each day is not effective and, really, not a good use of my time. So, I began to look for alternatives.

Defensio is similar to Akismet, in that comments are shipped off to some service somewhere and then returned with a grade. The main difference is in the administration interface that I see, where Defensio sorts the rejected spam comments to allow me to more quickly spot legitimate comments that were falsely flagged as spam.

You may have noticed a surge in the amount of spam around here. This is (I hope) a learning phase for Defensio, and eventually it will stop allowing 3% of the spam comments to get through. (Akismet is still running, but mostly in a “see? I told you so” capacity right now.) I’m a little confused, because some of the comments Defensio displays are rated at 100% spamminess by Defensio’s own service.

Please bear with me through this somewhat-more-spammy-than-usual phase. I’ll be checking for spam comments regularly, and watching to see if Defensio’s performance improves. Also, this is a particularly good time to leave comments, from a training-the-filter perspective.