Catching Twitter spam accounts

I just noticed something interesting on Twitter. One of the hot topics at the moment is “LinkedIn Reaches 45 Million Users”. But that’s getting shortened to “LinkedIn Reaches 45” in the sidebar trending topics list. Now, one of the tricks spammers seem to be using is taking text from there and adding their link. So searching for “LinkedIn Reaches 45” without “Million” should flush them out

New name, new theme

Ok, so creating a theme from scratch proved to be an awful lot harder than I expected it to be. Luckily I found Lime Radiance, which was almost exactly what I wanted except a bit too… well… lime! Anyway I changed the background and a few other things around, and I’m pretty happy with the result. What really helped was using xampp to run apache and mySQL locally on my computer, so I could install WordPress and test out themes and modifications much faster. That was a trick I probably wouldn’t have found if I hadn’t looked to design my own initially, so it was definitely worthwhile.

I might make a few minor changes yet, but this design is pretty much how I want it. :D

And the new name is the obvious pun, which I think was my original idea for the name. Then when I couldn’t get the domains I originally wanted, I ended up buying astick.net, planning to do “blog on a stick”, “wiki on a stick” etc. I guess I always preferred this name though.

Boxed Water

Whilst searching the net (for pictures of turbine blades, can you tell I’m a materials scientist? :), I came across this ridiculous piece of Greenwash. Yes, these people are seriously trying to sell their water as environmentally friendly because it comes in cartons rather than those nasty plastic bottles. Conveniently ignoring the fact that:

  • The cartons come from a plant in Vancouver
  • The water (tap water!) is put in at a plant in Minnesota
  • The boxed water is then sold in Michigan …
  • … where the cartons aren’t even recyclable! (Though plastic bottles are)

D’oh!