• By The Copper Gutter Shop - Rain Chains Product Review - Oldhouseweb.com
  “Typically used in place of downspouts, these brass rain chains allow water to cascade through each vessel, creating a soothing sound and a lovely visual.”
  (tags: house home_improvement)
• Home Remodeling, Repair and Improvement - Products, Ideas and How-To Tips - OldHouseWeb.com
  “Explore the exciting world of old house remodeling and restoration with the Old House Web home improvement site.”
  (tags: house home_improvement)

• Blog Power - Why You Should Consider Setting up a Photoblog
  “Here are 10 reasons you may want to consider getting a photo blog of your own, particularly if you really are serious about becoming a notable photographer and/or making the jump to the status of professional.”
  (tags: photography blogging photoblogging)
• Building Your Blog: 10 things to consider when building your rockin’ photoblog
  “Natalie Norton recently authored a post entitled Blog Power: Why you should consider setting up a photoblog. This post is a follow up to that article.”
  (tags: photography blogging photoblogging)

• Orwell did not guess the worse half of it - Network World
  When private organizations are required by law to install security cameras or other monitoring devices, they are no longer acting as private organizations. The author misses this point.
  (tags: privacy security technology society culture)
• Opinion: Telling Google and others to do less evil
  “Left to their own devices, the search engine companies would keep the data they collect about you forever, but they are slowly waking up to the fact that the Orwellian aspects of their business are beginning to get to people.”
  (tags: privacy security technology society)

• interview Pixar Brad Bird - Innovation lessons from Pixar Director Brad Bird - Strategy - Innovation - The McKinsey Quarterly
  “Brad Bird: I think the best leaders are somewhat subversive, because they see something a different way.”
  (tags: creativity innovation film media work life work_life)
• Web Worker Daily » Archive Procrastination Can Be Your Ally «
  “Procrastination [may feel] like a weakness, but you can use it as an opportunity to learn more about your working habits and improve them.” — Nice article!
  (tags: work life)
• http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/08/04/14/
  No comment is possible….
  (tags: photography politics)

Have you ever spent two hours on a Saturday afternoon chasing a snail around your back yard?

I thought not….

Well … I have. A few weekends ago I splurged on a new lens for my Sony A100 camera …

… and as I was crawling around my back yard trying to figure out how to use it properly, I spotted this tiny creature resting on a dried up leaf….

It started to move …

… and you’d be surprised how fast a snail seems to travel at this magnification.

The focus on these shots is not great, and I’ve learned a lot more about using the lens since that first day, but I got a big kick out of how close I could get to something that was smaller than a small shirt button and still capture very good detail.

The poor thing must have been camera shy, something I can certainly relate to, so I was careful not to use any flash but it tried to race off the leaf anyway …

… yet the only way out of sight was through a whole in the leaf …

… where it got stuck …

… so I set the camera aside, split the leaf to release it’s head, and off it went, disappearing into the forest…. I mean, uh, pine bark.

The lens is fantastic, definitely the best purchase I’ve made for the camera. I’ve gotten a lot better at predicting how it will react to light and focus at these close distances, so you can expect a huge quantity of photos of very small things — especially buds and bugs — to start appearing here and on my Flickr account pretty soon. I’ve also got a massive set of closeup shots from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, taken over several weekends, that impress even me — and that’s pretty hard to do….

From our friends over at YouTube, here’s Paul McCartney and Wings singing that classic, "Snail on the Run." (It may sound like they’re saying "Band" — but they’re not.) Is the song stuck in your head yet?

• Deep Jive Interests » Getting Back To Blogging’s Origins
  “… I discovered I needed a place to leave thoughts, reminders, and notes for myself and only myself….” — Great idea!
  (tags: blogging notes_to_myself)
• Why Do You Write?
  “The reason why you write actually has a big impact on how you write and what you write about, and understand that identifying this reason can actually help you write better and work faster towards achieving that goal.”
  (tags: blogging writing)
• 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider
  Darren Rowse provides a 20-item list of different types of pages for a blog, and the reasons why those pages are important.
  (tags: blogging)
• Gartner Says Vista Will Collapse. And That’s Why The Yahoo Deal Must Happen
  “Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald told a conference audience yesterday that Microsoft’s Windows product is collapsing and must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.”
  (tags: technology economics microsoft yahoo)
• Feature: Stitch Photos Into Panoramas with Free Software
  “Shooting for panoramas: With Hugin’s software, you can blend two side-by-side photos together, or you can cram 138 multi-angle Grand Canyon shots into one mega-vista.”
  (tags: photography)
• Dante’s Gates of Hell | Stuck In Customs
  “This is Rodin’s huge famous La Porte de l’Enfer, also known as the Gates of Hell….The sculpture depicts a scene from Dante’s ‘The Inferno’”.
  (tags: photography culture history)
• Why China is the REAL master of the universe | the Daily Mail
  “The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.”
  (tags: economics culture society asia)

For the past couple of weeks, I had noticed that most of the Google ads appearing on the home page of my site were for credit card offers, credit repair services, credit-no-matter-how-much-your-credit-sucks offers, and so on … and I was puzzled about why ads of that type kept appearing. Since the ads are supposed to be contextual, it didn’t seem like any of my posts supported them — especially when I would look at other pages and the ads did seem to reflect my post content very accurately.

I was doing some general cleanup on the site on Friday evening, and ran the site through an RSS feed validator to see how it fared. That’s when I saw errors referencing hundreds of links that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t take me long to track the links to my WordPress header.php file, where I found this:

Click the picture to see it full-sized. It’s obvious to me now that Google was generating ads for my site based on this content. There were, in all, about 600 such links at the very end of header.php. I didn’t put them there, and I don’t know anything about the two sites you can see repeated throughout these links (nor did I try to find out). I removed the 600 lines of code from the header.php file, but on Saturday discovered that several hundred others had been added, referencing two different sites but similar content. In both cases, the blocks of code were surround by <font> tags that caused the text to be hidden.

If you want to see if this has happened to you, bring up your site and select View/Page Source if you’re using Firefox, or View/Source if you’re using Internet Explorer. In my case, the spam links always appeared at the end of the source listing, but you might want to page through the entire listing since I suppose they could appear anywhere.

After the second occurrence, I changed my WordPress admin password as well as my hosting login password. So far it hasn’t occurred again, but I can see that this is yet something I’ll have to keep an eye on. If I figure out how it actually happens, I’ll certainly share it here.

Leanne Wildermuth of Artist By Nature has written about the same thing, and it was from Leanne that I learned that the source of the problem was header.php:

Got Spam in YOUR Templates?

For now, I’ve also removed most of the ads from my site, except those for Amazon.com. I may not put them back….