I caught wind of this TED talk while perusing the internet this evening. Very inspiring! I, one day, hope to allow my children (future tense, none expected or planned for the next few years) to have the unhindered freedom to think and do as their creativity inspires them as with this video about “Tinkering School” by Gever Tulley.

Last night Lauren and I got to hang out at Aaron and Jenny’s place with Lance, Erin, and Kelly and we got a chance to play with AJ’s Galileoscope.

It’s a well-built plastic telescope with glass optics that was designed to be very similar (except for the plastic) to the one that Galileo designed and used for the first time 400 years ago this past August. The telescope was also designed as a way of commemorating the International Year of Astronomy which is a program to encourage people across the world to rediscover astronomy and the sciences.
On top of being built to be quality and provide entry-level astronomers with an amazing view, it was also built to be very inexpensive and cost only $35 with shipping (to the USA, other locations cost more) and handling included.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a scope of my own after seeing the amazing pictures that my co-worker Andy produces through his Newtonian reflector scopes, so playing with AJ’s made me really want to get one of the Gallileoscopes as a good first scope to learn with. Lauren was so taken with looking at the moon and trying to look at Jupiter (or was it Venus?… yes, I have lots of learning to do…) that she wanted to get a telescope as well. After seeing the quality of the scope first hand, we decided to order one this morning and it should get here in a few short weeks. We can’t wait!

He installed a solar water heater and 14 PV panels on his roof. Still waiting to hear how much energy he generates, but it’s still a very cool thing to do. When I eventually own a house, I anspire to follow in the good example that Sam has set in installing solar water heat and energy creating PV cells. Way to go Sam, I salute your forward-thinking eco-evangelism!

I met a few coworkers yesterday to do a 5-mile Mt. Lemmon approach and the first 5 miles of climbing for a total round trip of just over 20 miles. It was a great ride, but boy are my legs killing me! I’m not sure how people do all 25 to 30 miles of climb to the top! I did, however, greatly enjoy the ride down.

Apparently, my website was hacked a while ago (I suspected it previously, but couldn’t find any proof or evidence) and it reared its ugly head this morning in the form of text spam injected into my RSS feed.  Thanks to Lance and Face, who both emailed me about the problem.

After a few hours of hunting for the problem looking through MySQL entries, users, comments, and file permissions, I found an old plugin that had a file that was 2 years newer than all of the other files in the directory and the directory itself.  On top of it being newer, the payload of the php in the file was encrypted.  Encrypted php?  Really?  That’s possible?

After a few WordPress-hardening changes (recommended here and here); nuke the admin account, verify the permissions on files and directories, remove stray _rss_* entries in the wp_options table of my database, rename the wp_* tables of my database to a non-standard name, remove all non-necesary Plugins and Themes, and install WP Security Scan to hunt down vulnerabilities; I think that my site is fixed.

If anyone sees anything fishy coming out of the site from hence forth, please feel free to contact me!  My website maintainence email is webmaster [at] geoffkerr [dot] com.