Too Late to Party
Just a quick note from Ohio.
I’ve had very little time near a network connection, in spite of having attended a Linux conference. That’s been ok, though.
Asymptomatic
There must be intelligent life down here
Taking a Trip
It’s early in the morning before I’m about to set out on my trip to Ohio for the OhioLinux Fest in Columbus. I needed to dump the photos off my camera so that I’d have room for more pictures, so I’m writing a short post.
I’m not really fond of taking long trips like these; being sequestered in a car for 7+ hours. I’m not really crazy about driving, period. But I make the trip to Johnstown every few months (half the length of this one) and come out unscathed. I keep thinking it’s just a matter of time until I run into someone or hit some traffic cones or something. Better to keep my thoughts on arriving back home safely after it’s all over.
Insurance Salesman Visit
Last night, an insurance broker visited our house and gave Berta and me some options for mortgage insurance. Basically, we were interested in having at least a portion of the mortgage paid in the case of our death. So we sat for his hour and a half presentation, and now I present some notes of the salient details.
Sometimes companies will offer “accidental death” insurance along with some other thing you’re buying, like credit cards or bank loan or cell phone plan. These policie sound great for the money you pay, but there is a catch. They only pay out if the accident directly causes your death. So if you go to the mailbox and get hit by a car and left for dead, it pays off. But if you die in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, tough luck - that’s improper medical care, not accidental death. After all, you weren’t dead from the accident, right? (!)
There are a few plans to choose from, which are basically combinations of various riders. For example, you can just get a plan old policy - Pay your premium every month, if you die, the policy pays off, the end. But with a special rider, you can have all of your premiums paid back to you if you survive the term of the policy.
Essentially how this works is the insurance company holds on to your money for all that time and earns interest. They’re happy just to make the interest, and give you your money back. It costs a bit more, but assume it costs $10 more a month on a $30 premium, you can either save $3600 and buy the insurance for 30 years at $30 per month, or you can spend $40 per month and get $14400 back at the end of the term. You can see how you’d never be able to turn that saved $3600 into $14400 just by investing it or putting it into a savings plan. And if you “activate the policy” - an insurance euphamism for “die” - then you get the full insured amount.
The odd fact of the matter is that only 8% of people who buy insurance ever use it. So there’s a pretty good chance that we’d live out the term of the policy and get all that money back.
The Renaissance Revisited
On Saturday, we took the kids, Mary Ann (Berta’s sister), and Ryan (her husband) to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Mount Hope.
We used to go every year, but it seemed like we were seeing the same show every time, so we haven’t gone over the past few years. They have since added many new things, and have chagned the show a bit. But I think they may have started to give in to the commercialism of it a bit more than what it used to be all about.
For the uninitiated, the Faire is basically a 20-acre area that has all sorts of recreation from the era of the Renaissance. Everyone there dresses in period clothing and speaks with an accent. The actors are all quite friendly and usually try to immerse you in their fantasy. One of the best things about the Faire is that it’s not just something you go watch, it’s something to take part in.
But it seems things have changed a bit. Maybe it’s just from my perspective, but it seems like a lot more people come to the faire and expect to be entertained rather than participate in the fun. It also seems that people spend a lot more time eating and shopping than they do at the actual attractions. This is not so surprising, since the joust this year was pretty weak, too.
Help Defeat the Sploggers with AntiLeech
I had an online conversation yesterday with an acquaintence of mine. She was alarmed to have found that her entire site’s content had been republished by some other site!
Apparently, their site had been sucking on her site’s RSS file for quite some time, and managed to download a sizeable chunk of data, which they subsequently republished with their own ads strewn about. And she’s not the only one by a long shot.
If you’re not aware of this phenomenon, it’s generally referred to as “Splogging”, for “spam blogging”. The idea is usually to re-blog content form other people’s blogs to gain emphasis on their popular terms for your splog site.
For example, if I wanted my site to be a popular search result for “student loans”, first I would install a blog on my server. I would then use some software to aggregate, say, the Technorati feed for posts tagged with “student loans”, which gives me a rich bed of content to start populating my site. Using some some dodgy plugins sold by less-than-respectable authors, I can even have WordPress do all of this work for me.
Then, I sprinkle a few links onto the splog that point to my money-making page, and voila! Instant PageRank!
The bottom line for bloggers is that your popular content will be stolen and used to fuel a link farm that profits someone else. How nice. So what do you do to combat it? I have a suggestion or two.