The power came back on Saturday night. It was off for 48 hrs. I appreciate heat and light more than I did before.

We lost power at 11:00 PM Thursday night. Currently, National Grid has no prediction when it will be back on. The outage is due to a storm with high winds all over the northeast corner of Massachusetts. The first day was kind of an adventure. Now, most the way through day 3, it’s getting pretty tiresome. We’re hanging out at my mother-in-laws house in Salem today.

The kids did two days, I worked from the lodge’s wifi the first day, then snowboarded the second. The conditions weren’t great, but the weather was nice. We had a fun time.

Just a nice picture of the kids. I just discovered the noise filtering in my new installation of ufraw – works nicely for low-light with my somewhat noisy D300.

Really, just testing my changes to use Wordpress for image hosting since my gallery is gone (sniff).

I rode in the snow a couple of times this week. It went pretty well all things considered. On Tuesday I rode in 25 degree weather. The single-track I had been snowshoeing on was just barely rideable – my tires stayed on top of the snow OK, it just took a lot of power to keep moving, and I had to walk the steeper climbs. Today it was warmer, about 36 degrees. The single-track was much easier – I think the snow was sticky enough to get better grip. The fire roads packed by snowmobiles are pretty easy to ride, though a bit bumpy from the holes the horses make. It’s 45 degrees now – I wonder if it will be even better after it freezes up again.

Riding on the ice was really fun – I’m tempted to pick up some studded tires.

I’ve taken my photo gallery offline. It’s seeing constant comment spam attacks, and there appears to be no easy way to stop them. I’ll probably move the content elsewhere, either on a platform that allows disabling comments effectively, or move to the “cloud” via flickr or some such crappy site.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this attack – the legitimate traffic on my gallery is between 10-20 hits a day – almost nothing. The comment spam bots hit it with 2000 hits a day. What’s worse, is that this loads the mysql server at media temple such that they’re requiring that I pay an additional $20/mo for a mysql “container” – some sort of extra virtual machine. I run a Captcha, and I’ve turned off access to comments. There must be some
hole in Gallery 2, as I’m still getting spam.

This is all because of spammers attempts to get page ranking on their scam sites by inserting links in comments on my gallery. The fact that Google is onto this gaming, and the comment spam has no effect doesn’t matter.

So, I’m annoyed at having to take time out of my day to address this, and ultimately lose the ability for independent participation on the Internet via my photo gallery. The Internet as an open, independent, non-commercial medium is at risk without regulation and enforcement to stop these chilling effects. Without regulation, all the internet will be is Google, flicker, Facebook, and MSN, soon to be mega-merged into a single AOL-like “service” .