Mike's Page

Yesterday I snuck out for a couple hours to paddle on Lake Greenwood, just down the street from my house. It was hot and sunny, but as I don't get out as much as I used to, it felt good to cook in the sun. I paddled up to the northern trestle bridge, and to the quiet inlet above it, one of the few undeveloped places in the northern part of the lake. There I saw a pair of blue herons, many Tetragnatha spiders hiding low-hanging trees, and a few clouds of buzzing midges.

As I headed back, I heard a train's horn and saw dozens of grackles burst from the nearby trees as the train appeared on the bridge. I found it odd that the CSX locomotive was facing backwards as it hauled its cars; I've seen rear-facing engines before, but always behind a forward-facing one.

After the train departed I stopped on the rocks under the bridge and inspected a beautiful pink wildflower, hibiscus-like and growing on some sort of vine. There was a calm nook there to park my boat, so I jumped out for a quick swim.

On the way home I stopped to see a lakefront construction site in my neighborhood from the water...there go some more trees . I chatted with an onshore neighbor, and saw several turtles sunning themselves on the driftwood near the boat ramp.

I took my GPS along and used GPS Visualizer to make the map. You can tell the USGS aerial photo is old because it shows very little development in my neighborhood, and the quiet inlet in the northwest corner no longer has a beach of any sort...it's eroded all the way up to the treeline.

Lately the web spider Pompos has been eating up bandwidth on my site. Watching the logs, I noticed that many of the major bots seem to ignore the fact that I am using mod_gzip to compress my data and use less web server bandwidth. So far this month Pompos has eaten 20MB (I'm thinking about blocking it) and Googlebot has downloaded 8MB. If they'd accept compressed data, it would be a lot less.

Thanks to Yahoo Slurp, which does accept gzip-encoded content.

As the admin for serveral websites, I browse the statistics generated from my server logs. One of the parts I like best is the "referer" listing, which can show other pages that link to your site.

Unfortunately, some people noticed that lots of webmasters do this, and decided "hey, we should fake the referer link so that webmasters will think we linked to them, and they'll visit our website!"

One of the latest ones I've seen faking a referer is this one:
http://www.webdevboard.com/showthread.php?t=22

I won't create an actual link to them since they don't deserve it. If you go there, they make you register before you can see what it's all about. This blog does a good job of describing it. Basically the webdevboard site is creating one of those annoying "broken link" notifiers, and instead of using a robots.txt compliant spider, they are feeding their bogus referer to the web server. Thanks for the helpful service guys!

(referrer is misspelled in this post since someone misspelled it years ago when the web was new, so I'm propagating the madness!)

Update 2004-09-10: These same upstanding citizens of the net are apparently now spamming with an adminshop.com domain referer. Going to that page shows that they're now trying to sell a package which intentionally spams referer logs. They might be related to devaddict.com, which has also been referer spamming lately. Ugh.

I wrote back in January:

Anyone care to build a website where I can upload GPS track data and waypoints, annotate it, plot it on a topo or aerial map, and legally publish the result on my website?

Apparently somebody did it. Check out the GPS Visualizer. I just found it today, and I haven't played with all the available features, but so far it does exactly what I want. Sweet!

As a demo, here's a quick map of my Capers Island trip that I made. Click on it to see the larger version. The color variation indicates changes in speed, so you can see where we paddled fast with the outgoing tide near Bull's Island (northeast corner) and then paddled slowly against the same tide on the way back.

Shifting Baselines, an enviromental group, has posted an interesting group of images from their photo contest.

I especially liked the image of the crowded Indonesian island...looks like one good wave could wipe that place out. I also liked the Morris Island lighthouse photo since I've seen that lighthouse in Charleston, sitting out there in the water by itself. Someday I'd like to paddle out there and have a closer look.

The Shifting Baselines concept is described on their site like this:

Shifting Baselines Syndrome can also be called "Old Timer's Syndrome," as in, "you shoulda seen it when." It's about reminding people of how things used to look, not to depress them, but to keep them from settling for a degraded world and to prevent us from some day living in visual monotony.

This really reminded me of an excellent passage from a Travis McGee book about Florida, from the Empty Copper Sea:

Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got there. So why should they fight to turn the clock back? It looks great to them the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it all for the first time and wouldn't change a thing. And meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard.

That was written in 1978 and is still true. It can just about apply to any place these days. I hope more people will start to appreciate the natural world around them so that the small changes are noticed before they turn into big changes.