Update – 9/16, 11:30pm
Please note that the following was posted in anger and haste. In all honesty, it doesn’t address what I was really upset about on Sunday…I was angry and hurt, and this just happened to be what spewed forth from my mind. It’s almost more like a parody of what I was really thinking, because it managed to address the least relevant part of what I was upset about. Also, it enraged a lot of people close to me – and for that, I’m sorry.

I’ve always endeavored to not censor either myself or my friends/readers in this space. To that end, I’m not going to try and “roll back time” by pulling the post down and pretending this didn’t happen. What I can do is prostrate myself at the feet of my friends and beg forgiveness for being a complete and utter ass these last few days.

You know something? I almost never comment on birthday presents, mainly because I’ve never wanted to appear greedy (in advance), a braggart (if I got a lot), or bitter (if I got squat). But this year…fuck it.

I just wanted to give a public thank you to my parents, Darren, and Denise, who thought enough of me to get me something for my birthday, even if there wasn’t a huge party/gathering/extravaganza surrounding it. (I’ve never been crazy about celebrating my birthday, and for whatever reason, 29 hasn’t sat very well with me. But still…)

For others who might be reading this, just three things:
1) I try very hard to find gifts that people will like when their birthdays or the holidays come up.
2) Think about how you’d feel if you got nothing on your birthday.
3) What goes around comes around, and reciprocity is a bitch.

29. Woo. Or something.

A couple of quick updates:

For starters, if anyone has been looking for Darren’s blog, he’ll be back shortly. There was a eeensy-teensy little issue to resolve (his domain expired), but his site should be back up shortly.

You can’t see the difference here, but I’ve installed the new version of Movable Type. And I did it all by myself! (Although I did need some independent verification to verify that I didn’t toast my damn blog. So far, so good.

Anyway, the reason I mention it is that MT 3.1 has a few new features for managing comments. One of the schema is requiring comment registration using a service like TypeKey to prevent malicious comments. I can also go to a solution like Spike and Stacey have implemented. And then there’s MT-Blacklist, which has served me well to this point, but isn’t what I’d call ‘proactive’. But since you, dear readers, are the ones who leave the comments, I thought I’d…well, not put it to a vote, really, because M-D’s RT isn’t a democracy, damnit…but I’d ask your opinion. And guess where we’re going to talk about this! You guessed it – the comment box!

There’s more to talk about, but…that’s for later.

Addendum: To paraphrase Steve Jobs, just two more things – 1) I forgot to actually ENABLE comments for this post. That’s done now. 2) I’ve gone back and installed MT-Blacklist 2.01b as a precaution, until the decision re: comments is made…mainly because I went back to my activity log and saw exactly how much work the old version was doing behind the scenes. In retrospect, very little comment spam was breaking through. But that doesn’t change the overriding purpose of my earlier post.

Taking a cue from Tina, here’s The Movie List. I was curious to see how many of these I’d actually seen.

Per instructions, I’ll be adding three to the end of the list – if you pick up the list, you should do the same.
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