mattlary's weblog

A strange thing happened- I was putting my spare change in my change jar, and noticed that one of the coins made a funny clanging noise. I found the quarter that sounded different and noticed that it didn’t have the copper ridge on it. Anyway, I looked it up and found out that it was a 1963 silver quarter- it’s worth more than $2.00 in silver content (it’s pretty beat up, so the coin itself probably isn’t worth much collecting-wise). I don’t think it’s worth finding someone to buy it, but I just thought it was interesting and I probably won’t spend it.

So, take a second look at your change once in a while- it might be worth 8x as much as you think!

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Originally uploaded by mattlary.

Calin put a spider-man action figure in my stocking for Christmas, so I staged a scene with him and Mary Jane at work- This will surely help me climb the corporate ladder!

I’ve been having some issues with spam comments, but I’ve had some mechanisms in place to shield everyone from them. I started by just moderating every comment that came through, and then I added the image verification to help filter out more. The image verification wasn’t working at all for some reason, so I’ve replaced it with a system that will try to guess if a comment is spam or not. So far it’s been working well, but we’ll see what happens. If it proves to work exceptionally well, then I’ll turn off the moderation for most cases.

On a related note, the counter climbed to around 80 hits today; all but maybe 4 of them were from the spammers or other bots, so I just removed it altogether. Oh well.

That’s about it for today; nothing terribly exciting; still doesn’t feel like Christmas.

I spent more time tweaking the blog software; I got the counter working, and I was able to tweak the date displays and some other things. This stuff probably doesn’t matter to anyone, but I wanted to mention it because I felt accomplished For those who read who care about blogging software, WordPress rocks- check it out if you haven’t already- it’s very flexible, and is written in PHP and uses a MySQL backend.

Today was a good day btw; it still doesn’t feel like Christmas yet though.

I’ve missed the connections theme, so it’s back.  Let me know if you like it (or dislike it).

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Originally uploaded by mattlary.

Just a little midday excitement; turns out someone left a plate in the microwave for too long and it caught on fire. All is well now.

I got my wisdom teeth out Friday- I wrote a very long graphic post about it, but I didn’t post it because I’m sure nobody wants that much information. So to make a long story short; it was pretty rough because I had a deeply impacted tooth that needed to be dug/drilled/squeezed/cut out. The other ones came out with no issues; just yanking and cracking. If it weren’t for the impacted one, I probably would have had little or no pain from the whole thing. Today I’m doing much better- I even decided to try to stop taking the pain killers because they make me dizzy.  The other thing worth mentioning is that I opted to go with gas rather than complete sedation- it was less money, and I was a bit worried about the potential complications of being put under.  It worked out well- I was completely aware of what was going on but didn’t care one bit .

Anyway, Calin has been pampering me all weekend, so that’s been nice, and I should be able to return to work tomorrow and start eating solid food sometime soon too!