Dust and Rust

Thinking Inside the Box

While not as extreme as the Cardboard Office, my friend/co-worker Mike was trying to come with ideas for gaining some privacy in our temporary office space. I’ve resorted to a pair of Sennheiser EH-150’s to block out the world… but his approach does a better job of getting the point across. On the technical side, the photo was taken with my iPhone… not my first choice in photographic tools, but it’s always there when a quick snap is needed. The crappy lens adds a nice soft glow to the image.

I’ve noticed a significant increase in comment spam… mostly poorly hidden (sorry http://losebellyfat.profitcruiser.com ) I noticed some referrals coming in from http://wpblackhat.com/commenter/modifiedblog.html . After looking into it, I found this site : http://www.contentgeneration.org/wpblackhat-faqs/ . Apparently you can sign up for $89 a month and get lots of tools and scripts to fake out Google, Amazon, and other affiliate programs by forcing visitors directly to ad links when they click on links that are supposed to go to a real posting. The also have lots of blog scraping tools that will generate craptastic conglomeration sites using other peoples content, which they plaster with ads.

The end result is that it is getting very hard to tell a real comment from a spam comment… so many comments are going to the askimet spam folder.

While none of this appears illegal… i’m sure it will hurt everyone long term… bloggers, affiliate programs, and anyone doing a search for real content.

The Ebony Hillbillies

It was a rough commute yesterday. Something happened with the fragile wires that make the trains go into Penn Station, and my morning commute turned into a 3 hour annoyance. I felt really bad for the guy across the aisle from me. He was headed for an important meeting, and I could feel the stress building in each cell phone call to his boss/customer/client as he tried to keep them happy. After leaving work at the end of the day, I headed back to Penn to see what awaited me for my commute back home. Luckily for me, the trains were running on schedule, *and* I got to listen to the fine Bluegrass of the Ebony Hillbillies. It took the edge off at the end of a long day. Just wanted to give them a quick shout out from a grateful commuter.

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- Sean

Picassa 3 Beta is now available from Google. I use Picassa as my quick and dirty editor for my blog posts, and web galleries I share with friends.  I use Adobe Lightroom for my main cataloging, raw editing, and printing tool, but Picassa fills a nice nich for me. Picassa 3 has fixed a few flaws, added some new cameras to it’s raw support list, and added some new features. It looks like Canon G9 Raw support is fixed. They have also added a very nice text tool for adding watermarks, which supports transparancy, rotation, and color picking. There is a new movie tool for creating animated slideshows with music.  Personally, this release resolves most of the issues I had with the previous version. The main thing that i still consider a major shortcoming is the lack of control in the sharpening tool. All they need to do is add a slider to control the sharpen amount.

Picassa is a great free tool that gets better with every release. Thanks Google!