Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Odd things happening lately.
My roommate is out of town at his high school reunion, which is a bit inexplicable but that’s not the focus of this tale. What is, is the fire detector in the hall between our two bedrooms.
Every night it’s been emitting these odd little sounds – little beeping alarms. Loud enough to wake me, but not at full volume. This is the first time I’ve heard the sound, and it only happens at night. First night, at 4AM; second night at 2:30; last night at 4AM again. The very regularity of the times is unnerving.
I’ve checked the batteries and tested them and they’re fine. No problems during the day, only these times at night. If I didn’t know that the Little People don’t use modern devices, I’d be a bit nervous. As it is, I doubt I’ll sleep tonight, waiting for the sound.
Then, the surface of my glasses spontaneously started cracking. There seems to be a coating on the lens that is flaking off, and it’s left one lens slightly spotted and the other foggy, but usable. I have a backup pair, but they’re not bifocals, making it difficult to see my computer. I’d take this as a sign to take a break, but I can’t – too much to do. I’m only at day 10 of my 20 day plan to finally catch up on all the projects I’ve been putting off.
Speaking of overdue projects, I’m starting to move the rest of my old Gallery photo galleries to the Faux PhotoBlog. Just finished my St. Lous Arch collection. There must have been links to these photos because I’m getting a lot of 404 errors – the file where I record 404 requests is getting large. Which means I also have to finish PostCon so I can manage the rest of the file movements.
This is also a heads up that I’m going to be implementing hot-link protection for my photos. Hot-linking is when another site links directly to your photo, using your bandwidth. The problem is intensified because when the sites do, and they publish full content in their RSS files, then the RSS aggregators are also hitting the photos. Additionally, some people publish their aggregation results, such as Adam Curry.
When I started getting hits from Curry I went to investigate and found my photos nestled among a ton of soft and hard porn photos, from other feeds Curry is subscribed to. Nude woman, nude women having sex together, nude woman and…man with two penises? And then, there were my starling photos. They were a bit out of place.
I’ll write up hot-linking and how to prevent it when I implement it. This is just a heads up for those who are linked directly to my photos now. End of week, you’re in for a surprise.
Since I mentioned Adam Curry, there’s been a lot of conversation about the BloggerCon invitations that people have received. Meryl Yourish received one and so did Making Light. So did I, which surprised me a bit.
I actually thought about going, surprising as this sounds. I’m going to be visiting friends in Boston sometime this year anyway, about opportunities in that area, and I thought I would combine both events into one trip – until I saw the price tag of $500.00 US. No can do. I figure I can either get new glasses or go meet Adam Curry – guess which one is a higher priority?
There are not a lot of people happy about the reference to the fee being necessary to bring in the “talent”. Personally, I’d rather let the ‘talent’ hitchhike to the conference or stay home, forget the fancy dinners and hit some of the funky, great, and not quite as expensive places for dinner and drinks, and pay, oh, $50.00. That’s what this blogger’s conference was originally going to be – something affordable and open, in an economy that’s not that strong right now.
Too bad. Rather that, is anyone up for coming to St. Louis for a weekend of Katy Trail bike rides, visits to vineyards, walks, Blues, a gospel choir brunch for Sunday, and maybe a river boat ride, instead? No conference, no ‘talent’, nothing formal, but if you’re in the area of St. Louis the weekend of Columbus Day, let me know and I’ll put together some fun things to do. You haven’t seen beautiful until you’ve seen the Missouri Green turn fall colors.
Maybe I can get our academic friends to the North to skip out of school work for a couple of days and come down. Did I happen to mention the Gospel Choir brunches here?
Visited Tower Grove tonight, first time in a long time. Leaving you with a little color, as a good-night while I return to my next Semantic Web essay, “The Semiotics of I”, which includes references to Jeff Wards recent essays on names as well as the W3C TAG group’s recent difficulty with representation and identification.
