very simple

So, I finally decided to download my photos from Labor Day weekend, given that it’s almost November and I haven’t even put up a post since September. I’ll blame that part on the whole ‘having a job’ thing, even though, truth be told, I do have my weekends free. I’m just lazy.

But that started me down a wonderful journey of discovering that there was some sort of script error in my blog installation, which forced me to spend the last three hours venturing further down the rabbit hole of wordpress reinstallations, backups, “emergency” password fixes after wordpress decided to no longer recognize me…fun stuff.

it all appears to be (hopefully) working again, at least insofar as I can actually log in and write a post, but I had to delete a lot of plugin customizations particularly around stats. Not that anyone reads this thing anyway, so I guess that’s no great loss!

Anyway…on to the original point of this post. Labor Day weekend, as usual, was spent in the Berkshires. This year it was very rainy, so we ventured up to The Clark in Williamstown to check out some of the art. The coolest thing was an exhibit by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who refashions the multitude of liquor bottles foisted upon the local population into beautiful wall hangings. So this is mostly that. As always, click on the thumbnail to get the full image.

Finally got my nook today, and it was very exciting. until, of course, the latest software patch got uploaded automatically, and apparently killed my ability to access one of the features called “the Daily”. Luckily, this is the least essential feature because it only relates to B&N updates and magazine subscriptions, and since they haven’t actually offered most of the newspapers and magazines that I’d even want, it’s, at least right now, not very important to me. Doesn’t mean that I don’t want it to work forever though! Which is why I spent 2 hours this evening on hold to get through to a digital support person who, after listening to my issue and talking to his colleagues, informed me that I had stumped them (go me!). They’re going to try to replicate the problem, and if I haven’t heard back from them in 2 days, I need to call back and they’ll either have a solution or they’ll have to send me a new one.

But in the meantime, I can read books, and since I’m using calibre to side-load all the newspapers and magazines that I wouldn’t have access to because B&N isn’t actually offering them yet anyway, I’m not losing (much) functionality in the interim.

Product launches are fun!

This is my baby (someday, I hope to have another baby that takes pictures in full frame, but I need to get another job first).

Nikon D80, purchased in August 2007. I’m up to 3 lenses. The small 18-55 kit lens that came with the camera, and which I rarely use. It’s a perfectly adequate lens, and when I’m in hyper tourist mode I’ll sometimes throw it on because it’s really light and it’s the widest angle lens that I’ve got, but otherwise, it stays tucked away.

The lens on the camera is a discontinued 35-70/2.8 macro lens, that is my “primary” lens. This is the one that lives on the camera, and i bought it at the same time that I bought the camera, at the recommendation of my former boss who is a huge Nikon fanatic. He still uses film, but owns a ridiculous number of different format cameras and lenses, and when I was looking at what to buy, he dug up the research on this and told me I needed to get one, especially because they were killing the model. And I have to admit that I love it. It’s pretty heavy because it’s metal (the newer lenses are plastic) and it’s got a ton of glass in it. but it takes great pictures and it goes down to f/2.8 regardless of the focal length. It’s also got a macro feature that lets me take all of those close up shots of the tiny things on my desk. It’s also the reason I haven’t splurged on a true 35mm or 50mm prime lens. While I’d like the option to go down to f/1.8 or f/1.4 on certain occasions, this gives me the 35mm (prime for a digital) and 50mm (prime for a film) focal lengths (plus a bit more leeway), and f/2.8 is pretty big and gives me a pretty nice shallow depth of field when I want it.

The third lens is my most recent acquisition – a really cheap grey market 70-300mm zoom lens. Again, while I need a job before I do crazy splurging on the high-end stuff, I was looking for something that would give me more telephoto range above my 35-70. While that one is great 90% of the time, there are times that I wish I could zoom closer in on an object that I couldn’t physically get closer to. This one doesn’t have built-in autofocus (so you need a body like the D80 that’ll do it), no VR, and no aperture ring. Like I said, cheap. On the flip side, I did take all of my marathon pics with it, which came out pretty well (if I do say so myself).

and then, of course, there’s my iphone, which was necessary because I couldn’t take a picture of the Nikon with the Nikon.

I didn’t think this blog was popular enough to actually get hacked, but I was apparently wrong.

Evidence the first – For some reason it was taking a really long time to load, even though I had cleaned out a lot of extraneous crap code recently.

Evidence the second (and, really obvious) – I was going through the source code because I wanted to add a graphic to my header, and I was trying to find the right spot.  In doing so, I noticed a bunch of weird links to external sites that I certainly hadn’t put in there.  Online pharmacies and whatnot.  So I went into the header file in wordpress, and found extraneous code pointing to a .ru site.  yeah.  Not so much evidence as, well, concrete proof.  I also did a google search for the code, and discovered that it appears on many other sites.

I don’t know how it got seeded (perhaps through a plugin?), but the code to search for in your header.php file in wordpress is “alkoltashov (dot) narod (dot) ru / sites.txt”.  This apparently pulls in the multiple http addresses.

I’m off to go search for more strange code to make sure my site is actually clean.  I’ll post an update if I find anything else.

Update: Found another one – in the footer.php file, somehow the link to demus design, which designed my template, got switched to “elavil lab”, with another link to an online pharmacy.  And the link to wordpress.org linked to some third-party site rather than the real wordpress.  I’m off to change my password as well!

Update further: from a little searching online, it appears to be a vulnerability of wordpress 2.8.1, which is the latest version available by my hosting provider (although the latest available overall is 2.8.4).  looks like I’m going to have to keep a close eye on things until they upgrade further over at network solutions.  I also found a few other small things.  My only advice is to go through all of your template files and look for code that doesn’t belong.  This is so annoying.

Ok, so I’m late to the twitter game – I started an account not too long ago, and…yeah, in a lot of ways a lot of it is kind of pointlessly entertaining, but I have to take real issue with crap like this. Not because it isn’t true in all circumstances, but because it reduces a service like twitter to its most useless part, and then assumes that everyone pointlessly uses it the same way. Sure, I follow some celebrities because I find them entertaining and whatnot, but I also follow several real friends and, quite frankly, I’ve made new real world friends thanks to twitter, in the very short amount of time i’ve been on the service. Here’s how that worked…

A few weeks back, I twittered something about cycling in NY. Someone who was looking for other NY cyclists found me and started following me. So I followed her back (hey, she posted good bike tips). So then…she organized a bike ride to coney island. Which I, at the very last minute, decided to participate in. I had a blast, met some great people, and made some new friends. who then proceeded to follow me (and vice versa) on twitter so that we could keep in touch easily. Today, we met up for another (yes, real life) bike ride out to red hook, and it was another blast (and heck, when a few people got stuck with a flat tire, we actually used twitter to try to find each other). So rather than the alienation that people seem to think is inevitable from each new social networking site, I spent the beautiful day today out of doors, on my bike, with 20 other like-minded people who I would have never in a million years met in any other way.

Each of these things is a tool. How one chooses to use them is really dependent on the individual. People who trend towards loneliness and alienation may continue down that path, but it’s because they already had that propensity. twitter didn’t make them that way.

I’m a loner by nature. When I was a kid, I was often much happier in my room with my nose buried in a book. And many of my closest friends (who I do see as often as we are able to make plans) have kids and stuff going on which makes it a bit harder to drop everything and go get a drink (and they’re certainly not bike fanatics like me). A lot of the “burying in a book” mentality has perhaps transferred to electronic media, but at the same time, if that media didn’t exist, I would have most likely spent my day today by myself. Maybe I would have gone for a bike ride, by myself, but knowing myself better than that, I would have spent half the day vegging out on my couch before I thought to go outside and enjoy the sunny 77-degree day.

I’m sorry, but the catastrophic “[insert latest technology] is destroying all of our social skills and making us all [narcissists/nihilists/sociopaths]” has just got to stop.