Mike's Page

I'm going to take my son to the Georgia Aquarium soon. I was browsing their website and came across this tidbit (emphasis mine):

For the safety of our guests, everyone must go through the security checkpoints before entering the Aquarium. No guns, knives, lighters, matches or fishing poles are permitted inside Georgia Aquarium.

Well, I'm pretty disappointed about this, because I was planning on catching one of those whale sharks to bring home!

My blog has been getting a mountain of trackback spam attempts lately. So far this week there's been over 4,500 POSTs to my blog trackback links (wasting over a half meg of bandwidth!). I turned off trackbacks last fall, but it doesn't stop the hordes of zombies and open proxies from trying. I'm still seriously considering writing my own blog software to deter spam traffic, simply by virtue of the forms and links being unique and unfamiliar to the automated spamming software out there. It would be interesting to see if the spam traffic would drop or they would just keep pounding the site. If only I had the time!

On a positive note, I managed to get one open proxy closed. It was running inadvertently on a server of a municipal government here in the U.S. A message to their webmaster got the ball rolling. The other 99% of the time I bother to notify a domain owner of an open proxy or infected system, my message is ignored.

A couple weeks ago I took a solo trip to the Canadian Rockies, visiting parts of Banff, Jasper, and Yoho National Parks. The mountains, lakes and glaicers were impressive. It was pretty hot by their standards while I was there, and I did not see any of the big mammals (they probably went north on vacation!). Click here to see the pictures. Hopefully I'll have a chance to finish up my journal about the trip in the next week or two.