Roblog

I just resolved a rather worrisome case of spam in my blog. As opposed to unwanted comments showing up in each entry (which is a manageable problem), There were spam links appearing directly in each blog entry! Specifically, every end-of-paragraph on the page had a spam link added to it.

After much searching, I realized that only the actual outputted HTML pages were affected - the database entries and Movable type code was unaffected. So simply rebuilding the pages fixed it.

But that's very troubling, since that means the actual HTML pages were changed on my site! That implies someone gained access to my files on my web host and changed them. Indeed, when I check the other sections of my webpage, they have the same type of spam inserted in their text!

This is going to take some time to correct, and I have no idea how this happened in the first place. Perhaps I need to change my site's password, if indeed it has been compromised. Still, if my site was compromised like that, I wonder why I didn't see entire pages replaced with spam ads, instead of just adding a small link to the end of each paragraph.

Ah well, for now, I'm going to start cleaning up may pages and making sure I have a clean backup. Wish me luck...

I uploaded a small set of pictures from my recent trip to PA, NJ, and DE to my website. Check them out here:
http://www.robreid.com/pictures/search.php?collID=60

My camera is dangerous. I love my (still new) Nikon D60 DSLR, and I’m still using it whenever I can. I finished my stint as my daughter’s swim team photographer this week, and I continued to get compliments on the photographs I took every week. In fact, the swim team organizers are looking for someone to bring an LCD projector so they can show the pictures during the swim party this weekend.

And this past weekend, I took a few pictures at a “water day” event at my family’s church. There were only a few people there, but I had my camera with me and tried to get some good splashy action shots. About half of them were good enough to share, and after posting them to my Picasa album, I get several compliments.

Water pictures are especially dramatic with my new camera. The good optics combined with the low latency of the shutter release (so that I can take a picture precisely when I want to, and not 2 seconds later) allow me to get people’s faces with abstract water blobs seemingly floating in air. It’s the kind of shot you can’t get with a typical point-and-shoot digital camera.

People just don’t realize that it’s not actually that hard with the right equipment (which I now have). Granted, I do color-correct the photos, only show people the good ones, and crop almost all of them (cropping photos correctly makes a huge difference), but it still isn’t difficult.

So the dangerous part is that I like taking pictures with my new camera, but when I do people are really excited about the results. I foresee being asked to be the official/unofficial photographer for future events. That’s not all bad, but I don’t want it to feel like a burden or that I’m obligated to be the photographer for every event.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to find the right balance. In the mean time, I’ll enjoy taking photos and the ego trip I get from all the effusive compliments afterwards.

A few months ago, I was moved at work from sharing a conference room (which afforded a certain amount of privacy) to what is called a “trading bench”. This is basically one step down from cubicles, in that I’m sitting at a long desk with people on either side of me. I have some desk space and a low (3’) wall facing me. Although I can do my work OK, I have no space to personalize and little-to-no privacy.

To block out some nearby conversations, I’ve started occasionally using my headphones. I’d been bringing in my CD collection, a few at a time, to rip onto my work computer so that I can listen to music when I need to block out the background chatter. For whatever reason, I stumbled upon the iTunes Radio Stations, which are a large listing of streaming audio from various internet sites. This is really nice, since I can listen to and discover new songs in categories of my choosing.

I tend not to listen to NPR at work, since that actually distracts me from what I’m supposed to be doing, but I do listen to pop music, guitar instrumentals, and a SomaFM station called Lush which is what I’ve been listening to a lot recently. It seems to be the right balance between being entertaining and ignorable.