About & Copyright & Contact

I’m Ed Nisley and this is my blog…

What’s Going On

Everybody needs a notebook; I have shelves full of ’em. The problem is: how do you find anything?

Well, here’s another way of organizing all those jots & tittles: searchable blog posts, with enough metadata to make them useful.

Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s worse than paper. Time alone will tell.

Photographs

I reduce images to a rational size before posting, which means they’re not breathtakingly detailed even in the enlarged view. If you need more detail, contact me and I’ll help you out.

To a good first approximation, all the photos & screenshots came from my very own hands.You’re free to use them, subject to the CC license below, and if you need original image files straight from the camera, let me know.

Comments

You must leave an email address, which is the simplest way I have to deter of most of the spammers; as nearly as I can tell, your email address will not be viewable by other folks.

I review all comments before they appear and ruthlessly delete spam, so if you’re not actually commenting on a post or participating in a discussion, don’t bother.

Hint: if you want your comment to appear, don’t combine:

  • a user name like “Cellar Conversion”
  • a URL from a British concrete company
  • a throwaway@yahoo.com email address
  • an IP address that puts you in New Dehli.

Perhaps you’re legitimate, but your comment must then be far more substantial than “I’m having the same problem and have tried everything” to get approved. My heart goes out to you, but … tell us what you’ve tried, OK?

Yes, I know that no spammer will actually read this far, but now you know what’s happening behind the scenes.

Update: Here’s the userid, URL, and email address from a typical spam post:

jmmegxvn
gdfmsywtawsh.com/
tznuzq@hmoodb.com

The “comment” consisted of gibberish URLs, obviously intended to lure folks to a malware site. Either spam robots have gotten bright enough to pass that sort of minimal Turing Test or there’s enough money in the malware market to justify hiring humans. Probably both, alas.

I collect the more interesting and coherent spam comments there.

Formatting

This is a bone-stock variable-width theme, which has some compelling advantages:

  • The width adjusts to fit your screen, not mine
  • Printing actually works in Firefox

So, even though the theme seems pretty stark, I think it serves my purposes better than more highly structured fixed-width layouts that force everything into scrawny little columns surrounded by artsy foo-foos. Sheesh, you have a wide screen, why not use it?

640×480 is so 20th century.

Oh, and another thing: the text is black on a light background, the way text is supposed to be.

Copyright / Left

Wonder about the copyright for items found here? Thanks for asking:

Creative Commons License
Softsolder Blog by Ed Nisley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fair enough?

Hope you find something of interest…

Contact

If you’ve read this far, then you must be serious. This form will shoot an email straight to me…