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!