Back at the Panera again today, because the stupid transformer behind our house blew out this morning for no particular reason, again. Of all the days to do so, this was a bad one; I’ve got sketches due this afternoon and a conference call. There’s nothing like shouting over the din of a coffeehouse during a conference call.

In happier news, a Flip Mino appeared on our doorstep this morning, mostly because the Kodak was sold out at Amazon and I’d still need to buy a memory card to use the damn thing. I opened it up before I left (clearly, they looked closely at the iPhone packaging; theirs was done very well) and within 15 seconds was shooting video. I then plugged it into the USB port of my MacBook, and within 20 minutes the battery was fully charged. Later this evening I’m going to do a side-by-side comparison of the video from my Canon G3 with the Flip video to see what the differences are. Overall, I like it very much so far.

Update: I totally get this thing now. And it’s really a work of genius; all of the best design cues (minus the case, which honestly feels a little cheap) are taken from generations of the iPod and put to good use here. What I’ve read elsewhere is completely true: It is absolutely perfect for capturing something quickly with a minimum of fuss and bother, at the expense of high quality output. But the portable form factor, ease of use, and utility outweigh my desire for uber-quality HD video—I’ll get something that shoots high-quality video a little later. Right now, this is all we need.

The spam issue has been solved, I believe. Yesterday evening the site got the shit kicked out of it by spambots, at the rate of one a minute, for about three hours. I shut commenting down completely, and then by accident stumbled on CommentRegistration, a plugin that lets me authenticate commenters locally. So if you’ve commented here before, please take a moment to register (it’s fast, free, and you’ll get a new toaster with deposits over $1,000!) so you can continue to comment all you like. I’ve fixed the problem with registrations not working correctly. I’ll verify you, and then you don’t need to wait a day to see your comment come through!

Really, give it a try so I can test out the system. Please!

In other news, the rain barrels are empty and the air conditioners are out of the windows. It’s officially autumn around here, which means I need to insulate the gutted exam room this weekend to keep some of our heat inside, as well as mix up some hydraulic cement and seal up the holes in the ice room downstairs. And, remember that cabinet I started refinishing last year? I have a few more screws to drill to finish it off so that we might actually use it! Oh, and there’s the lawn, which has two weeks’ growth and half the neighborhood’s leaves… I’m very optimistic, I know.

Update 10.23: I’ve disabled that plugin and removed it, because I was getting unreliable and unexplained results. The documentation is pretty sparse, and there isn’t any customization available unless I start hacking Perl, which I’m too tired to do right now. I’d like to just enable TypeKey on this site (a hosted authentication system) and be done with it, but the documentation for that is about as sparse as it is for this plugin. I found this writeup of someone else’s experience, and with a little tweaking, I’ve got 90% of the service hooked up. Please do me a favor and try this system out. I know it’s another web service to sign up for, but they can handle stuff like lost passwords and info updates where that plugin I tried could not. I’d really like to hear from you all; I just can’t deal with all of the spam right now. And please let me know how it works for you.

Matt Haughey, the creator of MetaFilter, just switched his personal weblog over to TypePad, and wrote a post about why he did so. If someone as technically proficient as he decides to make his life easier, I’m listening. There’s real food for thought in there, and I have to say, after four+ years of banging my head against MovableType, using a hosted CMS package is looking pretty good right now. One of the reasons this weblog hasn’t changed its look in two years is because it’s such a goddamned hassle to do so. For the short term, I’ll stick with what I’ve got, and look into a more modular template system for 3.3. Down the road? Who knows.