Telecom Ramblings

Well, it’s getting late in August, and there must be a lot of people on vacation enjoying the fresh air.  I see now why some say that telecom takes vacation in August and many trade magazines skip a week or two rather than put out new articles.  So what better to do than some site housekeeping? 

Bowing to popular demand (or uproar) I have again replaced the CAPTCHA system for this blog.  For those who don’t recognize the acronym, I mean the letters you have to type in to prove you are human when writing a comment.  The original system required manual tweaking and had various bugs in it, so I had gone to find another.  I came across what I thought was perfect, reCAPTCHA, which uses these forms to help scan books into the internet that wouldn’t get scanned otherwise.  However, it turns out the scanned words that computers can’t understand are, well, rather difficult for humans also, and I got several public and many private requests to change it back.  Rather than return to something that wasn’t going to work, I am trying yet a new system – let me know if this one has any problems.

I have a few new features that may pop up over the next week or two if they work out, I’ll keep you posted.  The first that I am playing with is polls.  Down in the lower right you will this new feature – I don’t know if I will keep it, for now it is just for fun.  Any feedback or suggestions for poll questions etc would be welcome.