It’s the season of giving, and apparently Apple needs to put some more umph into what their store’s servers have to give.

Several friends and family of mine have complained to me today about being unable to redeem their iTunes gift certificates in the iTunes store. Others have been unable to create new accounts to download the album artwork for all of their old CDs that they want to put on their shiny, new iPods.

I’m not the first to notice, but a look through Apple.com’s support site shows nothing about a 405 error and certainly doesn’t mention anything about their servers being inadequate to handle Christmas gift redemptions. It makes for some pretty dissappointing Christmas presents.

So I’ve decided to allow people to comment on posts without going through the trouble of registering on this site. I would love for everyone to register, and if you are going to comment more than once, it makes sense, since you can easily just create your login and then have your info put with your comments each time you leave one, automatically, reducing your typing.

However, I also don’t want to push away potential commentors (commentators?). The primary reason for requiring that people register in order to comment is to reduce spam, but I have (thanks to WordPress) implemented other ways of combatting that evil nemesis of the web world.

If you would like to leave a comment, you should know that this site has the following checks against spam:

• Comments with certain “spam words” will be held for review
• Comments with more than two links will be held for review
• All comments are checked against the Akismet service to see if they look like spam — if a comment looks like spam, it will be held for review

I don’t like to “blacklist” (i.e., automatically block) comments, because you could always put something here that looks like spam, but is really a nice, wonderful, helpful, insightful, or even just plain silly comment, and I wouldn’t ever want that to be blocked from the world’s view! Hence why all of the “holding for review”.

I want to do all that I can to encourage visitors to this site to leave their comments, not because I like to toot my horn (hopefully this doesn’t sound like a toot to you), but because I want to foster productive discussions that lead people to think (I promise not to post about my cute, cuddly, kitty-cat who likes to bite any more). When you take the time to leave a comment, it causes you to process the topic in a more thoughful manner than you would were you to just read a post and move on. So please, comment away! It’s easier than ever!

So it rarely snows down here in Louisiana. In fact, my latest estimation is once every six years, though, when it does snow, you’re lucky to notice.

I’m going to be visiting Wisconsin in January, for work. I met a couple people from there who said they’d take me ice fishing (I think they were joking). Apparently the snow in the cheese state has been on the ground for a while now and will continue to be on the ground well beyond when I come to visit. So, to remind myself of what snow is like, I dug up this video on YouTube. It makes me yearn for snow, which is good, because I fully expect to freeze my tushy off come early January. It’ll be time to pull out the old marshmellow jacket and dust off the moth balls.

Flatulent passenger grounds flight, aka, why lighting matches after passing gas must be an effective way of removing the stench. The article notes that other passengers didn’t smell the farts; they smelled the matches.

You have to feel sorry for this poor, flatulent person. Of course, at least she wasn’t arrested. She just can’t fly on American Airlines anymore.