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On my way home today I found that a truck had lost its load in the leften-most right turn lane off of a pretty major road in this area. I could see the truck driver and his mate standing in the middle of the road looking confused. I pulled over and called in to the Traffic Management Centre on a number that is advertised on basically every electronic road sign everywhere.

No one had thought to call it in yet, not even the idiot truck driver that had lost his load.

The TMC guy’s reaction…
Me: A truck has lost its load on this road
Him: Oooooh shi

So if you see something out there, say something.

Droughts can really devastate the landscape with crops dying and bushfires getting out of control. My own backyard was suffering greatly too, I know it is nothing compared to entire regions losing their crops but I felt like I had to do something about it.

So I did.

Thanks to the convenient location of my laundry I was able to run the outlet hose through a window so that I could collect all the water. At first I bought a 60L bin reasoning that a 13kg washing machine would use roughly 13 litres per rinse cycle, with two rinses per wash.

I was very wrong.

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Last night we got a really good storm, this is the approach of it from my backyard.

18 years ago when I registered lankyland.com I was still in high school, my first job was months away, I was single, and had no idea what I was going to do.

Fast forward to today and I’m married, I have two kids, I live further west than I ever thought I would, I’m not working in the industry I thought I was destined for, and I’m still wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up.

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One advantage to having an 18 year old domain name is it being on all the spam bot lists. This is the first time in a long time that I have had a blog here that allows comments on posts and even allowed for user sign up (I’ve disabled this already).

Since starting this iteration of the blog I’ve had more than 30 spam comments and 10 spam users in just 2 days. And that comes to the main question of my post.

What’s the freaking point?

With the amount of anti-spam plugins to enhance the already pretty decent anti-spam system here, is there any point to these spam bots just running continuously like they do? They go to all the effort of scanning a page, finding the commenting section, sending data to the form, some times they scan for keywords to include in the comment, and then the comment gets caught in the spam filters and either automatically deleted or manually checked.

As of the 9th of February 2020, the lankyland.com domain name has been continuously registered for 18 years. Were it a child I would be out at the pub buying it its first beer.

Lankyland has gone through many many many iterations. We started on Geocities way back in 2001 for a few months, then found its way to be hosted under CrackSmokingDucks.com for a while before the domain was registered in 2002.

The site has often been community based with basic blogging and commenting features being available a lot of the time. After a move to Dreamhost it grew to have multiple facets, the most popular being the Forums. The latest iteration of the forum is still available online, it started in 2008 and can still be posted on to this day.

The Lankyland.com main page has been fairly static but I am hoping to change that now, the forums will remain online but I am hoping that people will prefer to come here and build a community with me.