Weather and climate are not the same- I get that. But I’ve been living now in the West Kootenay region for a whole six months. I listen to what the neighbours say, and I can do basic research. So I’m starting to get a handle on what the climate here is like. Sort of… maybe.
A senior Republican member of the US Government went to Auschwitz recently as reported in the Daily Beast. Rep. Clay Higgins decided it was perfectly acceptable to record a video blog while standing in the gas chambers where over a million Jews were murdered. Possibly worse, his recorded message revealed a complete lack of understanding of what happened in Nazi Germany, what the Holocaust was about, and what it should have taught us to fear.
Nazi Germany: Fascist xenophobic racist ultra-nationalist state, *not* terrorists
I’m a strong advocate for the exploration of space. I also firmly believe that we need humans out there. Yes, use robotics to validate assumptions, but please let’s get humans on the surface of the Moon and Mars before I die of old age.
But I also think Donald Trump is one of the most comically inept and arguably outright ignorant human beings to walk the Earth. The man quite seriously disgusts me, and strains my ability to show respect for the office of President of the United States, or for the citizens of that country that elected this dumpster fire on legs. So when Donald Trump signs one of his famous Executive Orders in support of space exploration with Buzz Aldrin, an honest to goodness hero, standing beside him, I’m really, really torn.
The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union. This was a surprise to many, but every report I read before the vote implied that it was going to be very close.
Why did this happen? What prompted rejection of a free trade union that had seemingly benefited every member country economically and socially? And what happens next?
I don’t have answers, but I have opinions just as others do: and since this is my blog, I get to share those opinions with you.
I registered a new domain name yesterday: geekonaharley.org. My current vague plan is to move my motorcycle-related posts from here to the new blog in an effort to make the ‘eclectic’ nature of my posts slightly less so. I.e.: people interested in my motorbike related posts won’t get any cat or politics related posts mixed in.
But that isn’t what this post is about. Instead it is about the scam email that arrived in my email inbox today, the day after registering my new domain.
You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
I’ve had a couple of tiring and rather stressful weeks at work in a row, so I decided to take Friday afternoon off. Since it was cold (and getting colder) I couldn’t really go for a ride on my motorbike. Instead, I decided to practice some retail therapy and “upgrade” my BlackBerry Bold to an iPhone.
My BlackBerry is on Rogers, so off I went to my local Rogers Plus store…
I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.
Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.
The last shuttle mission has flown and, with nothing to replace it, the U.S. manned presence in space has ended with it. The shuttle astronauts in the picture below are the last ones we will ever see.