It happened, my first spam comment on my blog. What surprises me though is it was not from a bot, it was a real person. And worse, it was from a politician trying to further his cause. Last night Stephen Eli Harris made his was around the intricate web of interlinked blogs of my friends and family (as well as their friends and family), commenting on the most recent posting and in doing so, left a link to his Green Party blog.

If you know me, you know that I have many opinions, and most of them are political. For many years, following politics has been a favorite hobby of mine. Early on though, I made a decision not to make my blog a politician forum (well not in the party politics sense). I did not think I had the time or the energy to write and defend my many political views. It seems though that politics has found its way to my blog.

I’m am not sure the purpose of Mr. Harris’ comment spamming, maybe it was just to drum up traffic to his site, or maybe to up his page rank on search sites. What I am sure of is that I do not approve of the scheme. I have no problem with anyone adding a comment to my blog (as long as it is not offensive). I am especially happy when I found I have reached someone new in the world. However, using my blog (or that of anyone else) to forward a cause without the owners permission is not acceptable.

(Note: I believe that this was the purposes of the comments, as logs show that Mr. Harris visited many sites and only left comments on ones of those in Newfoundland.)

As soon as I finish this entry, I will be emailing Mr. Harris to ask him to refrain from continuing this practice, and remove the link to my blog that now resides on his site (as to me it implies an endorsement of sorts). Unfortunately, I am now forced to turn on the approval of all comments to end this practice on my site. And from now on, or at least until the time I see fit to change my policy, I will try to keep this site free of party politics.

Another year has come and gone. Last night I rang in the new year with a few friends at quiet dinner party Lori and I hosted at the house. With the help of my brother’s girlfriend, Kerry, I cooked some Chinese food. Eight hours of cooking… 30 minutes of eating, good thing the food was good.

With the end of the year, I, like most, like to look back at the last year and try to decide what I would change in the new year. Unfortunately, I set pretty specific goals in 2005 and no plan to achieve them. As such, I failed in all my resolutions: I did not lose the weight I wanted to, and I did not finish my thesis (I really didn’t get that far with it at all).

This year, I am setting goals instead of specific resolutions. These goals are as follows:

1) To be more organized.
2) To get in shape. This involves both losing weight and getting active (no specific amounts).
3) To complete my thesis (this one is specific, but needs to be done).
4) Continue to improve my cooking skills (it’s becoming a big hobby of mine).