Perri Nelson's Website 

Wednesday Hero - Solders' Angels

This Weeks Hero Was Suggested By Greta, Who Is Herself A Solders' Angel

May No Solder Go Unloved

Back in 2003, self-described "ordinary mother", Patti Patton-Bader, started an organization called Solders' Angels because her son, Sgt. Brandon Varn, wrote her a letter from Iraq in which he showed concern that some of the brave men and women there weren't receiving any mail or support from back home. Well, she wasn't going to allow this. She called a few friends and family asking them if they would write to some of the soldiers. They'd never met them. Didn't know who they were, but they wrote. And in a few short months, Solders' Angles went from an idea an "ordinary mother" had to having chapters all over the country and thousands of angels all over the world letting soldiers know that they were loved and respected by writing hundreds of thousands of letters, sending care packages, medical supplies, body armor and lending comfort and support to military families. Solder's Angels and the people who run and support it are heroes in the truest sense.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero. We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your blog, you can go here.

Wednesday

This linkfest is for the 3rd of October, 2007.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

Spam and Ham

I've got to find a better way to trap spam. I have my website configured to send me email for every trackback and comment that's posted to the site, including the spam. As a result I receive several thousand emails a day from my website (that's certainly a lot more than the number of visitors... hmmm.)

Why include the spam? Well, the email sent when spam is detected can usually be ignored and just deleted, but the spam filters occasionally are overzealous and block out some legitimate comments or trackbacks. When that happens, I can report the "spam" as "ham" to AKismet and publish the trackback or comment.

Of course that means I have to read all of that junk too. Bleah.

Despite the effectiveness of AKismet, sometimes it misses and lets some spam through. When it misses on trackbacks, my software tries to follow the link to the post and verify that there's a link to my post there. That just about always stops the trackback spammers. That doesn't work with comment spammers though.

Occasionally the trackback post parser fails. Usually this happens if the trackback link goes to a site with some problems. Lately a few "valid" trackbacks have had this problem, so I also get mail when the post parser fails. Unfortunately, the mailer I wrote to deal with that problem simply reports it. It doesn't provide me with a way to restore the trackback. Those I have to either post manually with Haloscan or my own trackback pinger, or put into the database directly. I really need to re-write that piece.

I also get notices when an exception occurs in the AKismet code. This is similar to the mail I get when the parser fails. It doesn't give me an option to accept or reject the ping or comment. The default policy in the code is to reject any trackback when AKismet fails. For comments, the default policy is to publish them. I'm going to have to change that too. I hate it when spam gets past the filters because of a mal-formed request.

Someone once suggested closing comments on older posts. Maybe I'll implement that, and set the system up to not send mail on closed posts. Maybe then I'll get less junk in my mail.

Homeschooling

I've been pretty busy lately, so I've been pretty light on posting.

My wife and I are homeschooling our son Lucas, and that take up the majority of my time in the morning. He's "going" to the Washington Virtual Acadamy this year. This has been an experience for both of us. I'm fairly certain he's been learning more already this year than he has in past years, and it hasn't quite been a full month yet.

There's considerably less social interaction for him this way, which is both a good and a not-so-good thing. He's not being bullied in school, and nobody is there to discourage him from doing well. That's the plus side. The minus side is that he's got fewer friends around for support.

Fortunately though, we do have neighbors with kids. He's also in a group called DeMolay. There's plenty of social interaction there, and he's enjoying it.

Anyway, with homeschooling Lucas, I have to go to work a bit later in the day. That means I get home a bit later in the evening too. I generally haven't been using the computer after I get home, except briefly, long enough to put up the open trackbacks posts.