I think this image tweeted by Scott Bixby yesterday really sums up the differences between the US and Canada.

Our for-profit media pushes terror, and their public news pushes…. News. I bet they’re not even all that afraid of Ebola up there. Though I hope if any actual highly communicable disease outbreak occurs, nobody goes to Texas for treatment, ‘cuz they just don’t seem to take this isolation shit seriously. Probably ‘cuz “Universal Precautions” sounds too much like socialism or something.

Speaking of socialism and undermining the American way of life, if you work for the right company, you may get cheap solar power as a benefit.

On Wednesday, three major companies — Cisco Systems, 3M, and Kimberly-Clark — announced they will now give employees a deeply discounted way of buying or leasing solar panels for their homes.

Called the Solar Community Initiative, the program promises a flat rate that is on average 35 percent lower than the national average and roughly 50 percent less expensive than average electric utility rates. According to the announcement, the offer will start as a benefit to more than 100,000 employees. If one percent choose to power their homes with solar, more than 74,500 metric tons of carbon emissions would be avoided each year.

Offered through Geostellar, a cost comparison site for solar panels, the program will also include options for employees’ friends and families in the United States and parts of Canada.

That ought to piss off a lot of teabaggers and Koch fiends. Needless to say, if anybody out there works for one one of those companies, please add me to your “friends and family” list.

I noticed that there might be some of you (OK, mostly one of you) running afoul of the anti-spam plugin I’m using now. It’s mostly there to prevent the annoying spam registrations that occur at the rate of about 20 per day, give or take. It also tests comments for spam, though that’s not really needed since you need to be registered to comment. It did allow me to turn trackbacks and pingbacks on again (not that that is really important, since we don’t get many here and they were a major source of spam for a while before I turned them off).

So, anyway, I don’t see an option to turn off the comment spam checker and it looks like we’re stuck with it. There are a bunch of algorithms that it apparently uses, but I turned logging on and noticed a bunch of legit-looking comments getting blocked. Really, just one comment, but somebody tried it a whole bunch of times. Here’s the only thing I can see about it that doesn’t look Kosher:


<a href=\"http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ben-bradlee-legendary-washington-post-editor-dies-at-93/2014/10/21/3e4cc1fc-c59c-11df-8dce-7a7dc354d1b1_story.html?hpid=z1\">Ben Bradlee, legendary Washington Post editor, dies at 93</a>


See that backwards slash right after the href= and before the “http://” part? That aint right. Neither is the one at the end before the closing ” in the link. I don’t know how those got there (tried duplicating it, but to no avail), or why they’d cause the comment to be considered spam. Maybe that wasn’t it, but that’s all I could see that looked funky.

So, anyway, if you find your comments disappearing, before you post, click on the “source” button and you’ll see the non-formatted code. You can try taking out anything that looks odd, or you can copy and paste the code and e-mail it to me, and I’ll see if I can figger out what’s wrong.

Oh well, time to get back to work.