It's times like this that I wished that I had some better way of displaying headlines. I don't know what, exactly. Maybe a big flashing sign. Or perhaps a rotating banner. Just something, because a story like this just begs for something more than text. I could always go retro and bring in the good old blink element, but that would just be annoying. So I suppose that means I'll just tell the story.

For those of you who don't live in Charlotte, or in the general area, we're low on gas. Really low. It's not because of the weather - at least not the weather that we have here. When Hurricane Ike hit what seems like months ago, apparently they shut off our gas pipelines or something. Because for the last week or so, stations all around town have gradually been shuttering their pumps, and now we're down to almost nothing. Gas-wise, I mean. Lots of lines, and plenty of horns. Even one arrest (maybe more, that's just all I've heard about).

Over the last few weeks, I've had the distinct (dis)pleasure of working on not one, not two, but three NAS (networked attached storage) devices. One of these is my own Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, one is a similar device from a client and the third is a smaller device, a ReadyNAS Duo, for another client.

While there were certainly a variety of issues to be had, in the end the problems all arose from one factor: The firmware hadn't been updated since installation of the devices. And when I say issues, I really just mean that what we were trying to do was made much easier once the firmware was installed. It's not like the devices stopped working or anything.

If you're like most people, your blog has an RSS feed. Chances are, you don't even know what RSS stands for, but you likely have one (if you're wondering, it most often stands for really simple syndication, but that isn't important).

Unfortunately, you may have more than one, which means if you want to know how many subscribers you have to your feed, you have a problem. At best, you have to add up each of the subscriber counts and get a total. At worst, you have potential eyeballs who want to see your latest and greatest, but they're looking at outdated content. Isn't it time you fixed this?

Movable Type version 3.2, released in April of 2007, included a plugin known as SpamLookup. This plugin was able to submit comments to a lookup service (hence the name of the plugin) to one of a number of blacklist services, which in turn would determine if the IP address used for the comment submission is suspicious, allowing you to better judge if you had encountered a spam comment.

However, way back in May of 2007, Six Apart released a guide on updating your spam filters for the plugin. Without the change, your comment-posting process will be horribly slow, because the process has to timeout before it will continue. Also, the default for the other service probably isn't the best (though that isn't mentioned). Want to know more? Read on!

Maybe I'm just getting old. If I am, I hope that it doesn't involve the need to signal that I'm going to turn a mile down the road - and then come to a complete stop before starting up again to actually make the turn.

I'll admit that it's been a while since I've lived anywhere other than the South (approaching twenty years now), and when I did it was - gasp - California. But the people in North and South Carolina are really bad at turning.

Something like nine months ago (in November of 2007), the Lynx Blue Line opened to great fanfare - and not a few Bronx Cheers. Those who thought that the entire mass transit system of Charlotte would be paid for - not to mention built - by that time had a few shocks in store, as the budget kept going up and up ,while the delivered goods kept going down and down.

The sleek cars were definitely nice and all, but ultimately there was a certain disappointment. Original plans had called for trains that could handle three cars. Scaled-back plans had many trains running with two cars, and some sporting only a single. Parking lots along the farthest reaches had been trimmed as well, because with citizens screaming for another referendum, it seemed like the only way to make ends meet was to trim the fat. That was done, and now things have been up and running for the better part of a year. To make things even more interesting, gas has gone up with no apparent end in sight. What does it all mean?