Maybe you heard me tell you that the supposed problems with Wii wrist straps was a bunch of hooey. There's no way, I reasoned, after the strap breaks there would be enough energy left for the thing to fly across the room and break your TV.

I stand corrected.

Last week I was playing a game of Wii Sports bowling and bumped the controller into my leg, lost my grip, and the controller went flying…right at my new LCD Sony TV! Except it veered a little off course and landed in the cabinet inches from disaster. It certainly was going fast enough to do some serious damage.

I immediately ordered the replacement straps and put Wii playing on hold.

The replacement came quickly and with a new reminder to wear the wrist strap properly.

So for all the stalwarts, check your straps and order replacements.

I've started to have a real problem with comment spam. For a long time I thought I was going to get a pass because I use a home-grown blog system, not MT or WordPress. I was wrong!

In the last 6 months I have over 2000 comment spams. Until now my only protection has been a general ability to turn comments off on a per-post basis and single IP address banning. That's not going to be effective in the long term.

For now, I found lots of lists of other peoples IP ban lists and have included 7000+ addresses from Gloved.com.

The next step will either be moderation – which could become a torrent if the spammers hit and would need a way to deny a large list in a single step – or some hurdles to posting like a simple math problem. I hate the image-based validations and eliminating those too dumb to do arithmetic might be a nice bonus.

“What's really behind a Steve Jobs keynote”

I've noticed several of these old videos with Steve wearing a suit (with or without bowtie). When did he go all jeans and black turtlenecks?

The Cube announcement features the new-Steve. Sometime between 1996 and 2000? He seemed to be in transition in 1997.