All the details are found here, but if you have a Digg account, please do me a favour and Digg this entry. I really want to see this thing explode!
Author: Jason Dunn
Thank You Akismet!
I don’t think I can thank the people at Akismet enough for their amazing comment-spam-blocking technology that they give out to most people for free (sites without ads). Every couple of days I get around 500 spam comments that are completely blocked by Akismet – I’d say no more than three spam comments a week slip through to my moderation queue, meaning that for the most part, Akismet’s system is completely administration-free. That’s truly amazing stuff – thank you Akismet!
More Green-Screen Scanning Fun
I continue to have fun with getting nicely isolated objects that would have previously been hard to extract without using the green-screen scanning method. Even coins are turning out quite nice…now I just need to finish editing all the rest of my Japan photos.
Thoughts Media Server Taken Down…By Me
Note to self: do not, repeat, do not run strenuous MySQL queries on the database that runs all of your sites in the middle of the day. That’s just plain dumb. 🙁
Nuclear Power: Bring It On
I was on my friend Vincent’s blog and he linked to a post on another blog that I found quite interesting and worth passing along. The topic? Nuclear power, and the blog post author has a cheeky exchange with himself about the “evils” of nuclear power. Turns out that from 1970 to 1992 there were 32 total deaths related to nuclear power. Deaths related to coal? 6400. Hydroelectric? 4000. Natural gas? 1200 deaths. Kind of puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Nuclear power has a perception problem, and changing people’s perceptions about something is a long and difficult task. Someone has to start doing it though, because nuclear power is the future of electricity generation. Yeah, solar and wind power are nice and all, but they can’t scale properly because they need space (wind) and have high distributed costs (solar panels on every house would be expensive). I’m no environmental expert, but when I look at rising food costs that (apparently) are partially due to farmers selling their crops to be used in bio-fuel, I see a big red flag: it makes no sense to save money on fuel but pay more for food. As a planet we need to rely even more on electricity, and we need to use nuclear power to generate that electricity cheaply and cleanly. Read the article for lots of great reasons why.
One Of The Craziest Tattoos I’ve Ever Seen
I’ve always found tattoos fascinating, and now that I have one I guess I’m part of the minority of people in the world that have been permanently marked with ink. This guy has a tattoo so crazy it’s in a class by itself…
Album Art Lovers of the World, Unite!
Emails like this make all the work on my album art project (completed with lots of help from Ashley) worthwhile:
“I just stumbled upon your album page this morning, and I felt compelled to tell you how awesome you are. I have an obsession with album art too, and when I put my iPod on Cover Flowand something is missing, I die a little inside. I have been searching the internet for months [for] a couple [of] fairly random album covers (Big Shiny Tunes 7 and Now 4) and finding them both at the same time, in supreme quality, was the best the [thing] that happened to me all week. Uploading all those covers must have been a killer project, but because of it my iTunes library is nearer to perfection. Thank you, oh random internet stranger, for helping me on my quest to a
flawless Cover Flow.”
And that reminds me, I have to update it – I haven’t uploaded new images in almost a year now and I’ve added quite a few more CDs to my collection since then. I loves the music!
This Is Not Art
There are a lot of silly groups on Facebook, and I tend to ignore most of the ones that I get invited to, but this one caught my attention because it seemed so insane I thought it was a hoax:
“In 2007, the ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery and began starving him to death. For several days, the ‘artist’ and the visitors of the exhibition watched, emotionless, the shameful ‘masterpiece’ based on the dog’s agony, until eventually he died. Does THIS sound like art to you? But this is not all… the prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of Central America decided that the ‘installation’ WAS actually art, so Guillermo Vargas Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action for the Biennial of 2008.”
I fully admit to not being a “modern art” guy, and not understanding or “appreciating” much of what I see in the realm of modern art. So long as my tax dollars aren’t being used to fund it, and the art doesn’t abuse the rights of others, artists can do pretty much whatever they want in my book. But this is so completely over the line it’s ridiculous. I wanted it to be a hoax, but it seems that it’s not. I’m not one of those hyper-PETA types that thinks animals are more important than people, but I am one of those dog-owner types that gets very, very angry when he sees people being cruel to dogs. If this “artist” Habacuc wants to explore the themes of starvation and suffering, he should chain himself up and tell people not to feed him. Doing this to any living being against its will is cruelty, nothing less.
How can we stop this from happening again? There are two online petitions: one in English, one in Spanish (I think), and if you take a minute to check out this Facebook group, there’s a well-written email that you can put your name to and send to the Centro Nacional de la Cultura, the gallery that has invited him to repeat this process again – although according to Snopes it seems he might not do any “art” involving a dog.
NCIX Charging Credit Cards Without Shipping Products
Does anyone know what the laws are in Canada surrounding charging a customer’s credit card when you don’t actually have the product to sell them? Back at the beginning of March I ordered a Trendnet KVM switch from NCIX. They had the product I wanted listed, so I placed my order and they charged my credit card. A few weeks passed, and I emailed them to find out where my product was – and I was informed that the product was on order. I was a bit perturbed because there was no indication that the product would take 2+ weeks to arrive, but I needed that one specific product so I waited. It was just today, nearly six weeks later, that I decided to contact them again, and this is what I was told:
“We had been on backorder for this item, and we had yet to receive any stock since you placed your order. However, after checking with our suppliers, it appears that this item has been unexpectedly discontinued. Unfortunately, this means we will be unable to get this item in for your order. At this point you have the option to either change your order to another item, or have the item cancelled for a full refund. Please contact us back to let us know how you wish to proceed with this order.”
Products get discontinued – that’s no NCIX’s fault. But why on earth would they charge my credit card if they weren’t buying the product from the supplier? There was no indication that this was a special order – the kind where you pay in advance and they order the product in – so it seems ethically dubious for them to take $50 or so from me, hold on to it for six weeks, then inform me that the product actually can’t be ordered.
I think I’ll be avoiding NCIX for a while… 🙁
Spammer Using This Domain for Email Spam
One of the most irritating thing that can happen to you as a domain owner is when a spammer decides to use your domain as the reply-to email address. When this happens, if you have your domain email configured as I do to capture email at every address @ the domain.com, you get hundreds of bounce-backs flying at you. The worst part about this? There’s absolutely no way to stop them – the design of email is fundamentally flawed in that it allows anyone to put an email server online and send email without having to authenticate who they are and if they have permission to send email. Worse still, if people flag the spam they received as spam, it hurts my chances of being able to send legitimate email from jasondunn.com. Someone really needs to fix email – it can’t continue like this for another 10 years.
So if you happened to have received a piece of spam from the jasondunn.com domain, I can assure you it wasn’t I that sent it.