Mike's Page

My wife got an interesting piece of junk mail today. It reminded me of personalized spam, because this piece of junk mail was personalized.

She received a plain envelope addressed to her at work, with no return address. Inside was a single sheet of paper, which appeared to be a page torn out of "Executive Focus" magazine, January 2005. I couldn't find a reference to that magazine on the web. It is one of those ads that looks like a magazine article with the tiny text "advertisement" at the top. The ad is for the "Trend Letter," some periodical that costs $195 per year! They seem to have a website but I won't bother linking to it.

Attached is a post-it note that is handwritten: "Try this, It's really good! J." We were wondering who the heck "J." was when I decided to surf the net. It turns out that this is some sort of bulk mail operation, and I found references to it back to 1997. The magazine "articles" seem to change, but there's always the same text on the post-it note. Here are some links:

• Best info, from July 1998 (apparently a Washington Post article)
• November 1997 (scroll to the bottom)
• June 2004

A quote from the first link said it best when it stated "Obviously if the personalization is perceived to be deceptive, it's not working."

We had warm weather Wednesday and great backyard bird activity. Just off the deck we saw:

• Tufted Titmouse
• Carolina Chickadee
• Brown-headed Nuthatch
• Carolina Wren
• Northern Cardinal
• Pine Warbler
• Dark-eyed Junco
• Red-bellied Woodpecker
• Downy Woodpecker
• Mourning Dove
• Eastern Bluebird (uncommon in the back of the house...usually out front in the open areas)
• Black & White Warbler — this one I'd never seen before and I think I ID'd it properly. It was a beautiful mix of black and white stripes. My uncle was visiting and saw it too, so I wasn't hallucinating! The field guides show my area as a migration zone for this bird.

I spent some time outside with my new long camera lens, but I only got the usual chickadees and nuthatches...the warblers always wait until I'm camera-less.

By the way, the Great Backyard Bird Count is coming up, February 18-21.

From my college friend Brian's blog, a link to some incredible before/after photos of the tsunami damage in Indonesia. In many photos the buildings in the before images are completely gone in the after. There are even some places where the land was stripped away.

On a happy note, there are some beautiful photos of the latest auroras on Spaceweather. The only aurora I've ever seen was a deep red one here in South Carolina in December 2001.

My website has been getting serious referer spam for over a month now. My referer stats page is becoming useless...probably about 2/3rds of the entries are bogus spam sites now. I don't publish the stats on the web, so there's no one to aggravate but me, but still it bugs me that they're wasting my bandwidth. Apparently their software targets blogs and tries to leave comment spam, but in my experience it branches out and starts to referer spam all the other pages on the site.

The referers are hard to block because they keep changing domain names and the IP addresses come from all over the place, presumably open proxies and/or zombie computers.

Ann Elisabeth has spent time researching the referer spammer and has lots of details on her blog. Others are posting about it too. (1) (2)

Apparently this current barrage of junk referers is the work of one person or group. I'm ready for someone to shut them down!

I was inspired by this blog entry to go out and take my own photos of Comet Machholz.

We've been fortunate to have some clear skies the past couple nights. The guy in the article mounted his digital SLR on a telescope that was tracking the stars to prevent star trails and blurring. My only telescope is a tiny Tasco from my childhood with a flimsy equitorial mount, so I decided just to put the camera on a regular tripod and live with the trails.

I tried my Digital Rebel with both my 100mm f/2.8 lens and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom. The zoom lens was easy to focus and handy for getting in close, but the slow aperture required longer exposures. The stars noticeably move in a few seconds when you're zoomed in, and my images all had small star trails.

I had some trouble focusing the 100mm lens. It seemed that I had to just bump the focus over from what I would call "infinity" to sharpen the stars. Once I did that it was nice to use the wide aperture for shorter exposures.

I took lots of shots at varying ISOs and shutter speeds with both lenses. My best shot is included here (click the thumbnail), and was taken with the 100mm lens at f/2.8, ISO 3200, for 11 seconds. It shows both the green ball of the comet on the right and the Pleiades cluster on the left, and has the shortest star trails. This photo is unretouched except for some cropping...I need to learn how to work on astrophotos in Photoshop.

At some point I'd like to get a decent telescope and mount the camera on it, or at least build a barn-door tracker. Then I'll be able to try better noise reduction and image stacking techniques.

Happy New Year!

I haven't done much interesting lately that's worth blogging about, but I am going to mention the unbelievably warm weather we're getting here in the southeast (upstate South Carolina in particular). We've had highs in the high 60s and low 70s Fahrenheit (~21°C) for several days. The forecast calls for more low 70s for the next 5 days, and who knows after that? A normal high this time of year is in the low 50s (~11°C).

I'm enjoying the warm weather, but I have the feeling we'll pay for it somehow. I'm not looking forward to the storm that would come through if we had a drastic temperature drop (we had a nasty thunderstorm last month). And if we don't get at least a little cold weather, the bugs will be out in force. There are still a few mosquitoes at work in the neighborhood. It'll be good for bug photography anyway.