Rain Storm in Wickenburg

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Not much to talk about.

It rained today. For those readers who live in places where rain is a part of life, you might be wondering why I’ve taken the time to write about it.

But rain isn’t a part of life here in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. Rain is usual. Rain is special. Rain is something to look forward to and enjoy.

The rain came with a strange kind of storm. The day started out clear enough, after high winds last night blew the desert dust around. The dust was hanging in the air this morning when it got light. The same dust we’ve been looking at for the past few days.

It’s spring and wind is part of spring. Calm in the morning, windy in the afternoon, then calm in the evening and overnight.

But last night, the wind didn’t calm down. Our wind chimes tinkled vigorously all night long. We had the windows closed to keep the dust out, so they weren’t loud enough to keep us up.

This morning, it was still windy. But then it got calm. And then it got windy. Calm. Windy. Calm. Windy.

Make up your mind already!

At 10 AM, I left my desk and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Although I’m usually up before 6 AM and have my coffee right away, I don’t have breakfast until midmorning. And when I reached the kitchen with its southwest-facing windows, I realized that a storm was on the way.

Windy, calm, windy, calm. What a strange day. I watched the hazy, dust-filled sky cloud over from my northeast-facing office window. At lunchtime, back in the kitchen, I saw that the storm was closer.

Oddly enough, my neighbor’s windmill was calm. So was my other neighbor’s windsock.

The calm before the storm?

I went outside and threw my MR-2’s old car cover over my Jeep. I still haven’t put the doors and windows on the darn thing and I didn’t want to get it soaked.

A while later, the wind kicked up again. Howling this time. The palm tree branches I’d cut off our little palm tree days before blew around the yard as a dust devil came through. I went outside to check the Jeep and was surprised to see that the cover was still stretched over it.

I let the dog in.

The rain started a while later. Drizzle then pouring then drizzling. Not enough volume to keep the pavement wet; certainly not enough to get the wash flooding — a good thing, since the horses were down there. The rain cycle went on like that for a while. I checked the radar images on my Radar In Motion widget. The storm was all around me, moving in from the west.

But never enough rain to really get the pavement wet.

We have a problem here in Arizona. It’s often so dry that when it rains, the rain evaporates before it hits the ground. People think I’m kidding when I say this, but I’m not. It’s called virga. Look it up.

Sometimes, even when the rain does reach the ground, it dries before more drops can join it. The drops appear on the pavement, but dry before more drops fall around it. So the pavement doesn’t get wet. That’s what was happening today. Very disappointing.

But when I poked my head outside, I smelled the rain. A nice, fresh smell. The smell of water on the creosote bushes. A smell so unique that the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix has an exhibit that simply sprays water on creosote branches so people can smell it.

I kept working. The storm passed through. It got quiet.

When the UPS man arrived, I went outside. The pavement was dry.

To the north, I could see the mountains again. The radar showed the storm had moved to the east.

The storm was past. The rain was over.

Now I’ll have to wait again for the next storm. I hope it’s better than this one was.

One Good Reason NOT to Put Google Ads at the Top of a Page

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Google goes down.

Is it possible? As I write this (April 12, 12:03 PM MST), I cannot view any Google content. That includes Google ads on Web sites and the Google Web site itself.

Sites with Google ads prominently placed at the top are extremely slow to load and, when they finally appear, page design may be messed up. Sites that have no Google references are fine.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this happen.

Ah, it’s back. The problem lasted for about 5 minutes. Did anyone else notice? We’ll see.

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

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How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

  • Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
  • Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

Aircraft User Fees

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And why general aviation pilots and businesses should be fighting back.

There’s been a lot of talk — and fighting against — the Bush Administration’s “Next Generation Air Transportation System Financing Reform Act of 2007.” I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the details. But here are a few things that seem pretty clear to me.

Higher Fees Hurt Business

The User Fee system proposed by the Bush Administration may severely cut the activities of general aviation pilots. According to AOPA President Phil Boyer, “Nine out of 10 AOPA members have told us that this would reduce, curtail, or end their flying.” What’s that going to do for the aviation industry? As current pilots who can no longer afford to fly regularly sell off their aircraft, the used aircraft market becomes flooded. Fewer people will be buying new aircraft, so manufacturers will suffer. Suppliers to those manufacturers will suffer, as will employees all around.

As costs increase for general aviation businesses like flight schools, charter services, and tour outfits, those costs get passed along to consumers. That drives prices up, possibly making these services too costly for the marketplace. There are fewer customers. Businesses fail. This continues the cycle of used aircraft sales and unemployment.

Proposal Seems to Ask General Aviation Pilots to Bail Out Airlines

Shifting the cost of ATC services from airlines — which are responsible for hundreds of thousands of passenger hours a day — to general aviation is simply unfair. Many of these companies are failing financially because of their top-heavy management organization and unreasonable pay scales. Why is it that some airlines — Southwest comes to mind — are financially fit and offer good service to their customers while other airlines — think United — can’t stay afloat without government funds and pension rule changes? Could it be that some companies are simply managed better than others?

Do you think it would be fair for all people who use banks to pay a certain tax to the government for a fund that’ll bail out mismanaged banks that go under? Like the ones that gave out mortgages to anyone capable of writing their name on a form, no matter what their financial situation was?

Or how about a tax on drivers to be put in a fund to bail out automakers who don’t build the cars we want to buy at a price want to pay?

Or a tax on homeowners living in the desert for a fund that rebuilds oceanfront summer homes destroyed by hurricanes?

Is any of that fair?

Get Involved!

If you think the administration’s proposal is a bad one — or even if you want to learn more — get involved. If you’re an AOPA member, you can sign up to get e-mail notifications of developments, as well as instructions on how you can contact your government representatives to tell them what you think.

You can also go to this page to get more information about the funding debate.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Act now.

Is America a Free Speech Zone?

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Apparently not.

I just read an article on Wired.com, “NYPD Intellligence Op Targets Dot-Matrix Graffiti Bike.” The article provides background information about a bicycle built by Joshua Kinberg which uses computer technology to spray dot-matrix characters in water-soluable chalk on pavement as he rides. This same bicycle was featured on a number of popular Web sites, as well as Popular Science magazine.

Kinberg, a proponent of our First Amendment right to free speech, had planned to use the bike to spray messages around the streets of New York during the 2004 Republican National Convention. As reported in the article:

Though they’d never seen him use the bike, the police arrested Kinberg on criminal mischief charges prior to the convention start, during an interview on Broadway Avenue [sic] with MSNBC’s Ron Reagan. The arrest took place on a spot where, two days earlier, Kinberg had printed out the water-soluble message, “America is a free speech zone” during an interview with MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann.

The article goes on to provide information about how the NYPD had been collecting information about Kinberg and his bicycle long before the arrest was made, thus proving a “premeditated desire” to prevent his project.

It’s been more than a year since the arrest. Although Kinberg has gotten his computer and cell phone back — both of which were part of the bicycle’s equipment — the police still have the bicycle. In addition, the NYPD will not release Kinberg’s file, so he has no idea what kind of “information” has been collected about him. (Sounds a bit like Big Brother style secrets to me.)

You can learn more about Kinberg’s efforts on his Web site, Bikes Against Bush.