Sorry folks. Bastard spammers are onto me bigtime. I just looked through my logs and it isn’t a pretty sight. For now I’ve had to turn off comments. I have not rebuilt my templates, meaning the links to comments will still be present in most of the posts, for the time being. Very sorry for the inconvenience. It’s not like most of you readers comment much anyway though so not much harm done I guess.

While I rather like the current design of my weblog, I’m in the habit of redesigning it about once a year as an exercise in keeping my html chops solid. I’m about a month overdue on a new design so I’m starting to look around for stuff I like that I can use. I’m partly tempted to use the wikipedia.org design as the basis of my site, in part so I can stitch in a mediawiki-engine wiki right into my site (I’ve been experimenting with it at work, it’s really solid), but then I’d look rather cookie-cutter.

Anyway, I’m open to suggestions. There’s some urgency, in that the comment spammers are really attacking my site – (look through the archives and you’ll see that magically over the past month or so 10-12 comments from spammers have been added to the posts – it’s destroying the value of what few real comments there were) – and I need to switch engines or update MT to deal with this problem.

So – got a cool url? Send it along and I’ll consider it.

Check out the shopping list feature. Build your buying wishlist from thousands of vendors instead of just Amazon’s partners, and use price comparison tools to help you find the best deal. They should buy resellerratings.com and integrate their merchant reputation tools – if they did, this would be almost perfect.

This is well worth a look, especially if you want to do your part to contributing to the economic armageddon I mentioned in an earlier post today. Rack up those credit cards with christmas shopping and do your part, you know you want to.

The Boston Herald is running a story about recent comments by the chief economist at Morgan Stanley indicating his expectation that we’re…ummm…hosed. As in 90% likely to be hosed, most likely in the short term. The basis of his beliefs are the same we’ve been hearing for years now – runaway deficits combined with huge personal debt loads combining to wreck the economy. While I’m glad to not be a numbers geek working the stock market, stuff like this really does make me wish I understood the dynamics of economic systems better such that I could draw conclusions I can trust. I have no idea if this guy is right or wrong. Should I hold off on buying a house? Should I buy a metric ton of processed cheese food, saltines, and a shotgun and prepare for the end of times? Or should I just assume we’ll muddle through this as we have for the past decade or more (I first became aware of these deficit-related predictions when I was in college). I have no idea. Anyone with any sage wisdom on the subject?

Here’s a cool flash application. 75 folks at a time play with the digital equivalent of alphabet fridge magnets. It’s fun just watching to see the different patterns that emerge – folks trying for profanity, hoarding schemes, decorative schemes, scrabble and crossword puzzle-like structures, and more. I spent 10 minutes last night defending my turf, inexplicably fixated on the word ‘Fizz.’ Check it out when you need a 5 minute break today. It’s Flash-based, fyi.

Cinnamon, one of the dogs at Nicker Barker Farm where I am getting my puppy from, had her litter this week, and one of these puppies is going to be mine. As things stand now it looks like I have second pick of the females, of which there are either 3 or 4, I had a little trouble understanding the phone message I just got. Woot! I’m getting the dog a bit earlier than I expected. Sometime early January the dog is coming home with me.

I’m still sticking with Soolin unless I hear a better suggestion.

Most likely you’ve heard of Microsoft’s terraserver. I happened across an excellent alternative today, the acme mapper. Mostly it seems to be the same dataset that Microsoft has for aerial photography, but they also have the usgs topographical dataset stitched into the interface. It all looks very rudimentary/old school, but it works great and is relatively speedy. Check out this close-up of 5th peak in the tongue mountain range. The red target is where I was standing when I took thiscrude but effective panorama shot last weekend.

One of the main things that concerned me about taking the position at Skidmore was loss of access to the sea – my main summertime activities have revolved around kayaking the last 5 years or so. I consoled myself with the fact that I would have access to the adirondack park system, which I had hiked and camped in extensively when I was a kid. I looked forward to all the mountain trail hiking I would be able to do. Then I tore a muscle in my abdomen and got sick, and spent two months doing a whole lot of nothing in terms of physical activity, which essentially blew the warm months for me.

Fortunately I’ve been gradually recovering. I’m not lifting weights yet, but I can be physically active again, and the past month or so I’ve been getting out hiking as time and weather permits. I’ve also discovered something cool – I can hike even when it’s cold, whereas with the Kayak, while it was technically possible to paddle in the winter months, it wasn’t something that appealed to me.

Anyway, I’ve been snapping photos on these hikes, and I finally sat down and put a bunch of them online. You can scope them out in my gallery, specifically the new Lake George Hiking Gallery. In the past month I’ve summited Buck Mountain, 5th Peak in the Tongue Range, and (sort of) Prospect Mountain on the west shore of Lake George. If you’re not interested in browsing through all the photos (there are perhaps 50 across the 3 hiking galleries), then you might at least want to check out the topographical map of part of the region and possibly the crude but still cool panorama of the summit of 5th Peak

I just bought myself a GPS unit so I can produce better and more accurate topographical maps of the areas I hike. My intent is to summit all the peaks in the Lake George region and then ultimately become a member of the 46 Peaks club by summiting all the peaks in the adirondacks. Watch this space, there’s more cool stuff to come.