View From the Bushes

I set a new personal record yesterday for simultaneous bad things happening. In three separate unrelated events, I lost two servers and corrupted over half of the website. Fortunately, the tools to recover from all of these catastrophes were easily available (though I was not always sure of that which created a whole seperate level of stress and anxiety), and though I had to stay a couple hours late, by the time I went home everything was operating normally. I was going to use all this as an excuse for why I forgot to mention that it was my 600th entry yesterday, but then I realized that I posted my blog yesterday before the (excuse my French) "shit hit the fan."

One of the things which has gotten worse and worse the longer I've been posting is the spam comments. What I really should do is update my software and include one of those, are-you-a-human tests, but last I checked, Moveable Type wanted money to upgrade, and it's always been pretty low on my list of priorities in any event. Besides, it's simple enough to just mass delete any comment with a URL attached, which is how I generally seperate the spammers from the legitimate posters. Of course, occasionally, as they say in the business, you get a "false positive."

Yesterday I posted a huge story about a piece of art being censored. My brother-in-law (one of many) posted an excellent response, but apparently he included a URL (presumably to his blog), and as a result my crude methodolgy for deleting spam removed that comment. I'm sure that the irony of deleting a post about censorship has not escaped you, and I actually feel a certain amount of shame about it, even though it was completely unintentional and entirely without any sort of malice.

I haven't talk a lot about Katrina, mostly because I feel that it's very well covered territory. One of the issues that comes up over and over again is whether Katrina was caused by global warming. I would be in the camp that would say that that's such a horribly complicated question that saying "Katrina was caused by global warming" with any degree of certainty is impossible. However, there have been some studies on the subject and that at least is interesting.

Brimming with skepticism
Ross