shinyPlasticBag

So, I was walking from my first class in the Life Sciences Centres back towards the CS building, and I heard the sound of bagpipes. Or, rather, the sound of the bagpipe droning noise. I looked around — a bit perplexed — and found the answer: a high pressure water spraying truck was set up in front of the library and had some hoses running inside. I hear the sound of the bagpipe everywhere, it seems, and this incident reminds me of the Great Mystery of our youth: who was playing the bagpipes that you could always hear from Steve’s house when we were sixteen? I’ll bet those of you who were there have completely forgotten about it, but on a good day, you could hear those from my house, too. Once upon a time, all of Cole Harbour rung out with the sound of “Banks of Loch Lomond

“, and it was good. Weird, yes, but good.

Anyway, I’ve been a busy code monkey, slaving away at Linkpool 3.0, which besides being (a) much easier to use (b) much nicer to look at and (c) much cooler overall, should alleviate the problem of all that spam it’s been getting lately. Each link has two buttons next to it (+/-) which let people rate the link. By default, links start with 3 votes up and 1 vote down, for an overall rating of 7.5 (votes up divided by the total number of votes), and if a link falls below a rating of 3/10, it’s toast. So, theoretically, spam and crap links should pretty much get cleaned automatically. Voting is open on each link for exactly one week, and any votes that survive seven days get to stay forever. It’s worthy of noting that I came up with the idea of tracking link popularity way back at the beginning, long before Linkpool was even publicly available and lived on at my site. It’s weird that it’s taken me almost a year to finally do it. At any rate, I’ve really only got two things left to do: the code generator, which will automagically create code customized to a user’s preferences (and tailored to their CMS, if they so choose), and the importer, which will take all of the existing links that have collected since, oh, last September, and shove them into the new system. Lovely. I need moderators, though, so let know if you’re interested.

Well, it’s almost class time, so I’m going to shoot on out of here. And by the way, whoever Googled for “you are holy” “free download” mp3 is an idiot, and it’s Taylor’s fault that they found me.