fellowshipofthechainring.org

56 spam attempts in 1 week — all are foiled with 1 click. I’ve been doing email and noticed that  5 spam attempts came in the span of 1 hour. Yikes! They are desperate for search engine rank boosting. Fortunately, you the reader never have to even see them.

“Why, Samwise, do we have to put up with such spam?” you ask.

As Patrick Crispen (my technology pedagogue hero and creator of netsquirrel.com) in his Guidelines for Good Web Design once said, the good news is that anyone can create a web page or web site. The bad news is that anyone can create a web page or web site. 

Patrick is right. The wonder of the internet is that anyone with a computer and a connection can contribute to the internet. That’s great! That means I can blog on my passion: cycling.

The bane of the internet, on the other hand, is that everyone with a computer and a connection can contribute to the internet. What’s going on is that now that everyone can contribute, there are a myriad of voices out there dieing to be heard, and some sell their souls in a desperate attempt to rise above the noise; they take shortcuts.

One of the main shortcuts is spam. Yes, that highly-salted, processed meat of the internet is being dished out wherever the purveyors can send it. What’s going on is that people want high search engine placement, and the best way is to do that is to have everyone and their dog linking to their site.

And how do you get everyone and their dog link to your site? By having a quality web site that’s full of valuable, scintillating information and content? By being so interesting that people naturally link to your site (like netsquirrel.com)? That would seem the natural way to do it. That’s the intent of search engine rankings, but as I already noted, these voices are desperate voices–voices that take shortcuts. Instead of focusing on good content, they bombard the easy targets–namely, blogs.

They don’t even have the decency to visit the blogs themselves and identify which ones are a natural fit, they try the shotgun effect. They get webbot minions or whatever the technology (that’s not my area of expertise) to go out there and find any place to enter a comment.

I know that these people (they) don’t visit themselves because if they did, they would note that their insipid comments would be sent to the queue where they sat until I had a chance to look at them, scorn and mock them, only to ruthlessly destroy them. Maybe if they took the time to visit personally, they would decide that it wasn’t worth their effort to post in the first place since their completely unrelated drivel and shameless attempts to eek a link would die a quick and painless death in the world wide recycle bin.

In Conclusion 

First of all thanks for putting up with my rant. I feel much better now after having mocked them. Unfortunately, the spammers will never mend their wicked ways, so there’s no real point in trying to change them. Instead, I want to help all you future bloggers out there.

Here’s a word of wisdom for all you contemplating starting a blog: force all comments into the moderation cue. It’s much easier to delete all spam with 1 click than to do 56 search and destroy missions after the damage has been done.

So yesterday brought a nice surprise in the morning: snow! Despite all the newscasters did to downplay the potential for snow, we got 3 inches. Once the kids were all bundled up and having snowball fights, I decided to finally move the Lumbering Rhino to the shed in back — the LR was left out by the gate after Mrs. Samwise finally convinced me to move it off of the front porch (that’s another story).

Anyway, on a snowy day, you can’t just walk a bike to the back shed; you must ride it, and ride it I did. It was so much fun, but there was no excitement or danger when I could simply pull my feet off the pedals in case of a slip. No, I had to clip into Little Joe if I was to have any real fun.

Before I go any further, I must admit that I’m a “Zonie” from Phoenix, and the only snowy day we had in Phoenix was when my sister graduated from college (as we always predicted). Being a relative newbie to snow, I had no idea as to how well MTBs are suited for snow play, and I just had to find out.

So I ditched my snow pants (didn’t want to get the pants caught in the chain) and oversized shell that tends to wrap itself under the back of my saddle, making a quick escape much less possible. I put the helmet on but kept my snow gloves on.

It was a blast. I did a few bunny hops until the Mrs. Samwise pointed out that I wasn’t jumping very high. Little Joe handled the virgin snow very well. I do admit when going around a corner, I sometimes unclipped my SPDs just in case, but I never did lose it.

My assessment:

Let me first make the disclaimer that I am no X-games-type, death defying daredevil. I have the sprockets to think of: I don’t want to set a bad example, and I want to live to ride with the sprockets on their first century. I’ll also admit that I didn’t stay on Little Joe for more than 20 minutes. I just rode around to get a feel.

With that being said, it seems that riding LJ on fresh snow is quite easy. I had a tougher time in the middle of our cul-de-sac where the kids had already been tromping around and sledding around. I don’t think it would do well in ice, but I do think that the added friction of an uneven surface, like a rocky or earthen ground, beneath the surface is better than straight pavement under the snow. I also learned that bunny hops are even less impressive in 3 or more inches of snow, since the first 2-3 inches are completely hidden from spectators. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I will only commute to school if the outside temperature is above freezing or the streets are completely dry.

On a totally unrelated note, we watched interesting footage of multiple car crashes on a steep street in downtown Portland. It was like watching a smash-em-up derby. And loud, those smashes were really echoing off the buildings. Can I just say that it’s not worth it to attempt a steep, snow-covered street before everything is sanded?