Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I promised a new Kernel Panic comic this week. This was the very last day I could have made good on that promise (technically Saturday would be the very last, but when it comes to the comic I tend to think in blocks of Monday through Friday) but I did deliver. The real question is whether I can continue to deliver. I don't want Kernel Panic to be an "updated yearly" comic, it just seems to work out that way.

I am currently extremely busy at work, putting in long hours to write brilliant documentation for complex and arcane things, and that has choked the life out of the streak I started in January. Work ethic has never been a problem for me but time management certainly has.

In other news, on March 31 Help Desk will turn 14. Any thoughts on an appropriate way to celebrate this milestone?

Today's title is a) relatively obscure, and b) pretty solidly wrong. For those of you who don't know, Stewart Brand is the guy who originated the phrase "Information Wants To Be Free." According to Wikipedia he uttered it at the first Hacker's conference in 1984.

Yes, they had computers in 1984. Now get off my lawn.

These days the phrase is used as a call to arms among the anti-copyright/copyleft groups, but at the time the complete comment was a lot more nuanced:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The Boss, obviously, is not interested in nuance, at least as far as this particular matter is concerned.

Alas, no update today. Thus endeth the streak.

Tomorrow I get back on the horse, though.

Over the last week or two the site has been hammered by blogspam, and the Spam Filter has been pretty good about blocking it. Unfortunately, it has also occasionally decided that a few of you legitimate commenters are spambots as well... even one or two of you who are posting from registered accounts.

Drupal comes with two default types of users: Anonymous Users, who don't have an account on the site, and Authorized Users, who have created a an account and post/browse from it. I have now added a third account: "Verified Users." It is identical in every way to Authorized Users, except that it has been given the additional privilege of being able to completely bypass the spam filters. Those of you being tagged by the anti-spam module in Drupal who have an account will be able to be upgraded to Verified user status and (hopefully) avoid the problem in the future.

The first person to be raised to Verified User status is the long-suffering David Nale, who has been tagged as spam (with a 99% probability, according to the spam logs) so consistently that I almost considered naming the new user status a "Nale Account" in his honor.

If it works for him I'll start updating Authorized Users to Verified User status when I notice them running afoul of the spam module...

Well, I'm back from Louisiana. I'm pleased to report that everything went well, the adoption was finalized and everything is completely legal. All we have to do is wait for Louisiana to mail us her amended birth certificate.

Thank you to everyone for all your well wishes.

Now for some more site-specific news (after the break).

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