The Gathering Shadow

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The Star Wars Episode III scrolling intro is out, for you Star Wars fans who just can’t wait for the next crumb to drop from Lucas’ table. Here’s the first half of it:

It is a time of uncertainty. The empire’s ambiguous tariff statutes mandate close reexamination of galactic import quotas. Interim Princess Agoomba has co-chaired a subcommittee to draft amendments to existing trade policies. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies are being heavily lobbied by a consortium of mercantile interest groups and their suppliers to streamline loading restrictions for Class C cargo vessels…

Update: Those of you who didn’t get the joke; it’s a Simpsons reference, from the episode where they parodied Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with “Cosmic Wars: The Gathering Shadow.” More Star Wars references in the Simpsons here.

MiniTru: Here For You

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Cheney in black at Auschwitz, Photoshopped

Here you go, Mr. Cheney. Please have a care for proper attire next time, but in the event such a doubleplusungood indiscretion reoccurs, we at MiniTru are at your service.

Aviation Disaster Movies

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Want to rubberneck at videos of plane crashes and other aviation disasters? Then check out:

(Not for dialup, and not for the faint of heart, especially if you don’t enjoy flying!)

Unforgiven

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Roy Jacobsen on the “Unforgivable Sin.” (See Matthew 12:22-32 for the pertinent passage.) I’ve always figured that the unforgivable sin of speaking against the Holy Spirit had direct reference to the sin that leads to death, and the irredeemability of he who falls away. My Bible Baptist pastor back in Parañaque, when talking about these passages, was always quick to follow up the words “unforgivable sin” with the qualifier, “the sin of unbelief,” driving home his firm stand that the only offense from which one can never be saved is the persistent denial of the Lordship of Christ in the face of the conviction of the Spirit (and perhaps arguing against the Catholic use of this text to distinguish “mortal” from “venial” sin). That leads well into the interpretation of Hebrews 6 as a description of the clearly hopeless apostate — which begs raises the question, if one were to take John at his word, should we then not pray for such a one?

(It also occurred to me that the story of Ananias and Sapphira might be related, but their offense appears to have been more related to lying about their offerings rather than denial of the faith.)

Agent to an Engagement

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Congratulations go out to Daniel and Jennifer. I was both startled and ecstatic to see their “She said yes” and “I said yes” posts, and now I’m startled and ecstatic all over again to see that I am, in small part, initially responsible for the happy coupling. My weblog seems to have turned into some kind of inadvertent matchmaker.

(Is there anyone else out there who may have met via my weblog that I’m forgetting or that I don’t know about?)

Union NJ in the Snow

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Union got a bit over a foot of snow through what they’re now calling The Blizzard of 2005. Amy and I spent most of the weekend indoors, watching lots and lots of Futurama, with an occasional stroll/wade out into the wild, white, windy storm.

blizzard-1a

blizzard-3

blizzard-4

I didn’t need to stay an extra day, but my train was about two hours late and standing room only till Philly — still better than I expected, though.

Photos taken with a Canon Powershot A400.

A Coming Blizzard

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I’m now in Union, NJ, where the water sphere is tall and the blizzard warnings are in force. Excerpts from today’s storm warning:

...BLIZZARD WARNING FOR THIS AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING...
TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS WILL BE 16 TO 24 INCHES BY SUNDAY EVENING.
VISIBILITIES WILL BECOME POOR...WITH WHITEOUT CONDITIONS AT TIMES.
ANY TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. IF YOU LEAVE THE SAFETY OF BEING INDOORS...YOU ARE PUTTING YOUR LIFE AT RISK.
THIS IS A LIFE-THREATENING WINTER WEATHER SITUATION! PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD COMPLETED BY NOON TODAY!

I think I may be forced to stay an extra day. Which I don’t think I mind. Amy and I are off to buy snow boots.

Potential Track Trouble

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Argh. I sure hope they clear up the mess from yesterday’s Amtrak derailment before I get on the train up to New Jersey tonight. Then, on Sunday, I hope the snow from the weekend snow storm will have been cleared from the tracks for my trip back to DC. This isn’t looking like a good weekend for rail travel — though it’s looking fun if you like snow, which I do. So here’s hoping for fun snow days up in NJ while I’m there, followed a quick, thorough cleanup for the trains, without any track delays. Yes, that would be perfect. No doubt everything will work exactly the way I want it to. Just so, just so.

Adding rel=”nofollow” to Refer

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These instructions are for Dean Allen’s Refer.

First off, are you still running a public referrer log without any robots exclusion? Stop right there, and add a file named robots.txt to the root of your public html directory with this:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /refer

… using the pertinent URL of your Refer directory. Alternatively, you can open up /refer/index.php and add <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> to the <head> section.

After doing that, rel="nofollow" is pretty much redundant, since search engines will be completely ignoring your Refer installation, but, that all righteousness may be fulfilled, we’re going to add it anyway:

  1. Open up /refer/display.php.
  2. Scroll down to function rHref (around line 283).
  3. It’s that return statement we want to modify. Replace this:

    return tag($content,'a','href="'.$where.$param.'"');

    …with this:

    return tag($content,'a',' rel="nofollow" href="'.$where.$param.'"');

    …removing any line breaks that this narrow column may have inserted.

  4. Save and you’re done.

The spam is not going to stop, though; spammers will keep trying to hit your weblog and referrer logs. They don’t care about the loss of results from just one site. Like email spammers, they want to hit as many targets as they can, strafing the internet wildly and indiscriminately, on the off chance that at least some of those hits will return the desired 0.01% result. Robots exclusion and rel="nofollow" cut down their chances with the search engines, but it’s still up to you to keep them off your own back. See my “Referrer Spam Attack” entry for links to tips on doing just that.