After 10 days of sickness, I can’t stand it any more. I need to get out and find a life that has nothing to do with kleenex, Sudafed, Advil and chicken soup. Today the headache is finally gone, and I don’t feel quite so totally exhausted.

So today I met Linda for lunch at the new PF Chang’s out on Cornell & 185th, more or less. It was Linda’s birthday. Well, actually her birthday was several weeks ago, but what with one thing or another her birthday lunch kept getting postponed.

I love PF Chang’s. I’ve never had any dish there that wasn’t wonderful.

Linda ordered coffee, and I ordered tea (they have a tasty gunpowder oolong), while our waiter prepared our special made-to-order sauce. I asked for spicy, since I wanted to clear my head out. Lunch started with the lettuce wraps, which are wrap-your-own burrito thingies using lettuce as the wrap and with a spiced chicken filling. I added some of our special sauce to bring the spice level up (Linda is not as big a fan of heat as I am). The sauce was perfect.

PF Chang’s serves family style. Linda ordered moo goo gai pan, and I ordered crispy honey shrimp. I was pleased that we were offered a choice of brown or white rice. I went with brown. It was sticky and yummy. The moo goo was tasty, if uninspired. A dollop of the special sauce helped. The shrimp was fried in a crispy coating, and tasted slightly of honey. It was perfect, in my opinion. I threw a tiny bit of special sauce on it, too, but it didn’t really need it.

Since it was Linda’s birthday, a dessert was complimentary. We shared an order of banana spring rolls, a confection made with wrapped, fried bananas surrounding a scoop of coconut-pineapple ice cream, all drizzled with vanilla and caramel sauces. I would really like to know where they obtain that ice cream!

PF Chang’s for birthday lunch:
gabbing for two hours with Linda:
coming back to life: priceless

Bloggers exposed RatherGate. Now there are more documents that need to be scrutinized! Or so this site says.

I thought someone had made a mistake when they emailed me a link to Yes Bush Can 2004. After all, I haven’t made any effort to hide my disdain for Dubya. Then I looked a little closer at this site, and at the documents that need to be proved fake. Be sure to check out The USA Patriot Pledge. It’s worth the price of admission all by itself.

I’m only sorry that I missed these guys’ stop in Portland! But they got a nice photo-op with Vic Atiyeh.

After being hit with comment spam over the last couple of days, I’ve gone looking for solutions. I’ve made some changes that hopefully will help.

Automatic’s free email Enkoder: This little goody translates an email address into numeric equivalent gobbledy-gook and wraps it in javascript. The result is a displayable email address that can’t be parsed by most spam bots. And that means I can once again have an actual, clickable email link in the side blog.

Installation is straightforward, although you have to know enough HTML to recognize where to put it: Simply type your email address and a few other fields into the online form, then paste the results into your HTML page where you want the address to appear. Voila!

I’ve also tightened up the rules that determine if a comment is spam or not, I’ve increased the time required between comment posts, and I’ve installed a plugin that uses semi-fuzzy logic to decide if a comment is spam and deletes it if it is. That will keep me from needing to delete every single spam comments. Which sucked.

I thought about installing a captcha system, but there doesn’t appear to be an easily-installed plugin for Wordpress yet, and I’m not sure how much hacking I want to do. Besides, captchas can limit accessibility and aren’t 100% guaranteed. If the other measure I’ve taken don’t do the trick, then I’ll look at doing that. But not yet.

I also installed 2 new skins: Fabric Of Our Lives and Seafood Basket. Check ‘em out!.