I'd like to take a moment to apologize for the new commenting system on my blog. I realize that all commenters (myself included) now have to type in some letters from a box before being allowed to comment.
I think it's a huge pain, and I don't like doing it on other sites.
That said, deleting spam comments was beginning to be a bigger pain. I was leaving for vacation, and I didn't want to deal with three trillion spam comments when I came back. In my mind, spam comments block conversation and limit the flow of ideas (not that that's been happening much recently here . . . ).
For now, captcha is staying up until I can figure out something better. Perhaps when I have more time, I'll try taking it down for a little while to see how much spam I get. But for now, I just don't have the energy to deal with extra spam around here.