I ordered some camera equipment on Wednesday and requested the “slow” shipping method to save some cash, Amazon marked it as shipped on Thursday, the USPS picked it up today, and, according to the tracking information, it arrived today (Friday). How’s that for fast?!?!

Followup: I had to know this was too good to be true. The package never made it to my apartment or even the office and, even though it was listed as delivered, I’m going to have to try to go to the post office to hunt it down.

I recently checked out the Google Webmaster Tools for my site and found that there were a lot of prescription drug related hits from what the Google bot was seeing. I’m really not sure how they got there and really want to get rid of them.

I moderate all comments, have my blog comment spam filter turned on, and even had, at one point, comments locked down to registered users only, but, still, link spam is visible to the interwebs. Does anyone know of a way to spam comments on a website, but keep them hidden? And, conversely, does anyone know how to prevent this kind of spam? Is it time to do an update to the old website platform again?

I recently gave away one of my old computers and decided that I’d make sure that all of my information was really removed from the disk above and beyond a disk format. A quick Google search, plus a few recommendations (quite a while ago) from friends, and I found DBAN or Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

The DBAN software download is a disk image that can be used to create a bootable CD or USB disk (based on a minimal build of LINUX for intel or ppc processors) that will securely shred the contents of a hard disk. DBAN uses a pseudo-random number generator to write over every location on a disk with multiple passes to statistically guarantee that no data on the drive can be recovered without quite a bit of time, effort, and expense if it’s even possible.

A few hours running 5 sets (quite excessive) of 7-passes or writing various patterns to the drive, and I had a “totally” clean disk.

I’m almost a week late with this, but congratulations Mr. Obama. Make us proud!

(picture of my cousin with bright blue eyes)

According to an article I was just reading in Discover Magazine, the genetic mutation that caused blue eyes is now thought to be only 10000 years old (quite new in the “long time” sense of the world being around).

The primary reason for thinking that blue eyes are thought to be a new phenomenon is that the genetic similarities between a sample-set of blue eyed people from varied backgrounds and geographic regions showed that the similar genes responsible for the blue eye mutation (and associated mutations in general levels of melanin and skin pigmentation) were next to identical with little or no new genetic distortions in surrounding stretches of DNA.

Not only is the mutation thought to be new, but they also theorize that it can be traced back to a single ancestor! It just blows my mind to think that we are that we, humans, are so interrelated that everyone that has blue eyes are most likely from the same macro-extended family.