I realize that I haven't actually identified who I am anywhere on this blog except contextually, so I thought I should finally do so after 2.5 years of blogging.

Name: Tony Chor

Locations: Bellevue, Washington, USA. Grew up in Woodbury, Minnesota. Born in Bozeman, Montana.

Professional stuff: Group Program Manager, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corporation (This means I lead the set of people who design future versions of IE, take care of existing customers, and run the process of shipping all this goodness to the world.)

Prior to IE, I've been the Product Unit Manager (aka Management Overhead) or some form of Program Manager on Works (Mac and Windows), Golf 1.0 for Windows, Bookshelf, Encarta Online, Picture It! and Home Publishing, children's titles like Magic School Bus, media and devices stuff for Windows, and an ill fated attempt to put 16-bit Windows into telephones. I came to Microsoft straight out of college in 1990.

Education: BS Computer Science, Stanford University

Family (and characters in this blog from time to time): Michelle (wife - the one with the taste and sense in the family), Andrew (8 - sweet boy), Michael (5 - evil genius)

Other interests: It seems my hobby is collecting hobbies. I'm a good geek who loves all manner of food and drink (especially whisky and anything that's crunchy, salty, or rich), photography, golf, sailing, shooting, reading, travel, and electronic gadgetry. I've also started exercising -- running, cycling, and swimming mostly. Oh, I guess I blog too.

I wish I could play an instrument well, speak other languages really fluently, and get through all my email each day. I figure the first two are possible with a little discipline and hard work...

So, that's me in a nutshell. Back to the regularly scheduled program.

I upgraded the version of the blogging software I'm using. It was surprisingly easy, but I'm still shaking out some of the bugs (like the bad looking search results page.) Let me know if you're seeing anything else. Thanks.

As you may have noticed, I've added Google AdSense ads to my blog. This is mostly to check out what the Google experience is, but I admit that if a little money came my way, that would be fine too.

It was certainly trivial to set up. I signed up for an account and waited to be approved. A day later, I logged into their AdSense code page, filled out a form, and then copied the code it generated into the appropriate spots on my web pages. The hardest part was picking the colors.

So far the ads have been reasonably well chosen. My gear and running pages produce more actionable ads than the kids' pages, but I guess that's to be expected. I don't like the ads it comes up with on my IE content, but again, I suppose there are no surprises here.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

It's kind of amazing to me how my silly blog winds up coming up high on Google search resuls. I don't think many people really read this blog or link to it, so I admit I'm a bit confused as to why this site pops up on Google so prominently.

Anyway, here's a sample of some of the searches (other than for Tony Chor) result in top 10 hits (links are to the articles):

• San Juan Nationals
• Best rum (#1!!)
• Pokemon Aurora Ticket
• Root Connection
• Chuck E. Cheese is hell.
• Microdear cleaning cloth
• Oyster Olympics

It's interesting to note that none of these are in the top ten on MSN Search. I guess I should have a word with the MSN guys...

I'm super pleased about a new weapon against comment spammers. The top search engines including Google, Yahoo, and MSN, will ignore links that have the rel="nofollow" attribute set. Thanks to a plug-in from Movable Type (the maker of my blog software), this tag gets added to all of the URLs in the comments and trackbacks that people post. If the search engines ignore those links, there will be way less incentive for comment spammers to do their nasty deeds since their links will not increase their page rank.

Nice to see the industry doing something good together without a ton of bureaucracy and worries over IP.

Thanks to Scoble for pointing this out.

(Also, I should note that although Movable Type only tested the plug-in on MT 2.664 and above, it appears to work fine on my 2.64 installation.)

Jay Allen, author of my beloved MT-Blacklist, recently wrote a great article on how to fight blog spam using MT-Blacklist. I learned a few tips that will greatly improve my success on this front.

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen.

It's been a year since I started this blog. I didn't know what to expect or have anything particular in mind when I started it, other than it seemed to be an interesting thing to do.

There have been a few surprises, some pleasant, some not.

• Stories about Michael are far and away the most popular. People seem to like hearing about his evil ways.
  
• Comment spam is a tremendous pain-in-the-ass. Thank God for MT-Blacklist.
  
• I'm always surprised by people outside my circle of friends who read the site and comment. It's also been a way for old friends and family to find me.
  

I'm not sure what the next year will bring, but I'll just keep adding entries and we'll see.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have I recently mention how much I love MT Blacklist? It's so wonderful.

I have a new thing I like doing for a little lift; I look at the log file for my blog and see how many comment spammers MT Blacklist has stopped. It makes me smile. Score one for the good guys.

As some of you have noticed, I've had a little issue with comment spam -- site operators who put their URLs in my comments to get their Google ratings to go up. It wasn't a big deal for a long time; I'd get onesy-twosy spams. Then, this week, I got something like 80/day (virtually one on every article). Aside from fact I didn't want links to porn sites in my comments (at least ones I hadn't put there...) it became a major pain to remove them.

Fortunately, there's a great Moveable Type (my blog engine) extension called MT-Blacklist that allows you to block comments by domain (vs. the useless IP banning built into Moveable Type) as well as remove comments by domain. Best of all it's free. That said, I've already gotten enough value that I'll donate to the author, Jay Allen.

I'm sure I'm the last blogger to discover MT-Blacklist, but if you haven't added it to your blog, you should do it today.

Ok, trying again after messing around with the site (and getting randomized by that silly work thing). Let's hope it works this time!