Thoughts

It’s funny. I had pretty much abandoned this blog a long time ago, but here I am contemplating actually blogging (my last false-start probably shouldn’t count). Why? Because the WordPress php script notified me of some comment spam that was recently added to an old post. That was sort of amazing to me, since I have never advertised my site anywhere. There has never been a link to it from my homepage (there isn’t even a homepage right now). In fact, I don’t think there has ever been a link to my blog from anywhere in the world. But somehow the spiders and spammers found it and started adding comment spam. That’s pretty interesting to me. Why not until now? ...

Your personal information is not yours at all. Companies collect it, buy it, sell it, archive it, mine it, crunch it, and even lose track of it. Many companies have recently disclosed that they have lost track of the information they collected on their employees and customers. Citigroup has begun the process of notifying 3.9 million of its current and former customers that information about their accounts (names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, account numbers, account balances, transaction histories, etc.) has been lost. Apparently, this data was contained on backup media that was being shipped to an alternate location. Citibank shipped the backup tapes on May 2nd, but didn’t realize they were missing until May 24th. ...

I like movies. I buy the movies I enjoy on DVD, so that I can watch them with my friends. Sometimes I expose my friends to movies that they really enjoy, but probably would not have seen if it wasn’t for my recommendation (The Spanish Prisoner). Other times they introduce movies to me that I wouldn’t have seen if it wasn’t for their recommendation. We give our honest assessment of each movie when asked. ...

When you shave your head, you become more aggressive. In high school, I was on the swim team. In preparation for the state championships, we would follow the tradition of many swim teams across the world and shave our bodies. The theory behind it was to cut down on drag. More hair meant more drag. More drag meant more effort required to swim fast. So we shaved our arms, legs, chests, backs, and even our heads in the name of eliminating drag. Freshly shorn, we swam to victory. Looking back, I think we gained as much from the feeling of being shaved as we did from having less drag. ...

how do you start a blog? this is the question that’s been on my mind ever since i installed wordpress and created my about page. actually, i wrote a first entry at that time, but i was messing around deleting users and found out that deleting a user also deletes all the posts of that user (too bad they didn’t warn me of that when i clicked on delete). but it wasn’t anything worth worrying about losing. ...