This Old Blog

This blog is now ten years old. A full decade. The first post has an official date of 8 May 2005, but I know that it's actually earlier than that. That's because when I first got into this blogging thing with Blogger, I was fooling around with some of the Blogger settings and managed to wipe out the original blog along with about a half dozen posts. Fortunately for me I still had all that content in a cache and thus reposted it all a second time. So when folks ask how old This Old Blog is (a.k.a. BlogBeebe) I just say a decade and then move on. Some folks, like Kirk Tuck, look at a lot of posts over a long period of time and announce that they're trimming the posts back a bit because they're old and as a consequence they're a burden on moving forward. I look at This Old Blog as a living historical document that shows my attitudes and the times they were shaped in over the last 10 or so years. Are some (many to be honest) of them embarrassing? Obsolete? Sure. Bu...

Not sure why, but a few a-hole sites out of Russia decided to ping my original post about referrer spam. So I removed the original post from back in late November 2013, right before I stopped posting to this blog for a good long year in 2014. I've waited about a week to see if the numbers would drop, and sure enough they did. A lot. Now that they're gone I decided to put it back up, more or less, with updates. And while I'm at it I decided to freshen up the content a bit, with a Youtube clip from where the lead photo came from. Referrer Spam What Is It? Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publish their access logs, including referer statistics, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site. These links will be indexed by search engi...

Two weeks ago gas was $1.91 at this gas station. Today when I filled up the price was back up 37¢. Even diesel hasn't risen this much, only 15¢ during the same period. Yeah, those speculator-driven free markets are so wonderful.

On Friday 30 January I stopped by a local Orlando BP gas station (rather rare these days) and filled up my 2012 Prius with $1.91/gallon gas. Spending nearly $2/gallon is still a lot of money to pay for gas, coming of age as I did in the 1960s when gas was around 25¢/gallon (that's a quarter). As a middle-schooler I can remember filling up my gas can for my neighborhood mowing service for $1 (four gallons in a five gallon container), then spending the weekend earning that back at roughly $2/yard. That low price stayed pretty much the same when I bought my first car in 1971 before I graduated from high school. Gas stayed relatively cheap through 2003, when I purchased my first and only mini-SUV, the Kia Sorento. When I bought it gas was 88¢/gallon due to a local gas war (remember when gas wars were only about selling cheap gas?) Gas mileage on the Kia was round 20-22mpg, and filling its 20 gallon tank cost me less than $20/week. Then in August 2004 Hurricane Charlie hit centr...

Last post I wrote about what I wanted in Project2015. This post is about what won't be here. In general, technology. Posts about Linux are a good example of this, as well as reviews of hardware (camera gear, primarily, followed by computers). I have a second blog, Arcane Science Lab , that is specifically for my technology side. If you want to read what I have to say about technology they you should meander over there. I wrote this post after looking at the statistics on this blog and noticing that folks are still finding my old Linux posts. The last time I wrote about Linux was back in November of 2013. It was about Ubuntu 13.10, among other distributions. Since then I've moved on to 14.04 LTS, and now to 14.10. Ubuntu is my primary (my only, to be honest) Linux distribution. It works well and I know how to tweak it to do exactly what I want in a mere minutes after initial installation. It runs the latest Oracle Java, as well as the latest Android tools (see above), among...

I have started a project for 2015 called Project2015. What is Project2015, you ask? Project2015 is one of those projects with very vague goals that just came sneaking in. It's so vague that when it's finished I can declare victory, no matter what, and say that the final results, however they turn out, were what I had in mind all along. Like many government projects it will be successful in spite of itself. It will consist of (more or less, generally speaking) a post/day, with at least one lead photograph. The lead photograph will have been taken sometime in 2015. This is not to say that this is a 365 project. I tried one of those back in 2012, and it just about drove me crazy trying to come up with something every single friggin' day. So this time I'll have a lead photo that was taken in 2015, with some words wrapped around it like this post. The posts will actually be something you recognize, such as this old-style McDonald's up in Gainesville Florida (at th...

anthropomorphization: noun: attributing human characteristics to something that is nonhuman (like an animal, such as a cat). We pet owners are a funny breed (non pun intended). We ascribe all sorts of human qualities to our animals. And how can we not, when we see them doing something not just human, but so very child-like? Lulu likes to sleep on the arm of the stuffed chair, with one paw stretched out and around the bottom. Kind of like a kid with a pillow. What makes this one particularly special is that the light came from the Christmas tree lights. Lulu has an affinity for that tree, more than the other two cats.

Seen while driving down Universal Blvd , stopped at the light at the intersection with Sand Lake. It's good to know you can get unlimited light bulbs with your zombie survival gear. You can always be guaranteed your lights will stay lit when the zombies come for your brains. Makes it easier to target the zombies before they get you. And always remember: Rule #2 .

Happy New Year. Just a very quick entry to prove to myself that the one and only post for 2014 (and the last post chronologically) wasn't a fluke. It's also the briefest of outlines for what might be in store for 2015 and beyond. I've been collecting Olympus gear, specifically OM-D cameras and prime lenses. The one you see above is my last lens acquisition, the M.Zuiko 1.8/17mm. Since that time I've picked up two new camera bodies, a second E-M5 and an E-M10. The photo above was taken with the Panasonic GX1 and the Olympus 45mm. With the three OM-Ds I have enough bodies to mount all my favorite lenses, and to just roam about taking photos without changing lenses. Sometimes I'll just take one of the bodies with a specific lens and just use it exclusively. This coming year I intend to start another photo project using just the OM-D bodies (the GX1 was given away, along with the Panasonic 20mm). I want to do something along the lines of Matthew Robertson's...