If you've got to patronize one of the "big box" outlets, this New York Times story makes clear why Costco is a far better choice than Sam's Club or Wal-mart.
The debate over a classified research center is still active at the University of Hawaii, but the University of Washington appears to have dropped its bid for a biodefense laboratory similar to one being chased by UH, according to a report this week in the Seattle Times.
Remember those kittens rescued back in April? All were successfully adopted, and two were adopted together, but after a couple of weeks of hand feeding, we were pretty invested in them all. So it was a big treat for us to arrange a visit with the two this week (along with the parrots, fish, and even people who now share their lives).
Then
Now
Click on these photos for "before" and "after" views. They are quite a fine pair and put on a great floor show for the visitors!
The little (or not so little, depending on your perspective) calico also displayed her interest in the aquarium. There wasn't much light, so the photo quality isn't the best, but I was partially successful in catching her in motion.
click for larger version
July 22, 2005 - Friday
We had dinner last night with friends up at the top of Waialae Iki. From there you have a good view of former Gov. Ben Cayetano's humble abode at the top of the hill. Click on this photo for a larger view.
The original 2001 building permit put the home's value at 850,000, but it is now appraised for tax purposes at $2.7. And neighborhood gossip of unknown reliability says it's being marketed in today's real estate climate for some $6.5 million. With 5,782 square feet of living area on 2.7 acres of land, it's not a bad spot up there at the top of the ridge although you certainly wouldn't call it "cozy".
Fooling around yesterday with Google Scholar (scholar.google.com), I unexpectedly ran into a 1986 article I wrote with Meda on the tourism-crime connection. At the time, it wasn't politically acceptable to delve too deeply into this issue, and subequently police reportedly stopped collecting data in the same manner so that similar research could not be done today.
I had several replies to yesterday's somewhat off-topic entry.
Founding Star-Bulletin webmaster Blaine Fergerstrom weighed in first:
Hostrocket is correct. You just need to read their explanation carefully.
Google ranks pages by how many other sites link to them. So the scumbags have discovered that by visiting your site (and thousands of others) an entry is added to your log files that shows their visit and their site address.
When your stats software reads the log and displays your stats, it generates a link on the stats page from you to them. And if the stats page is publicly accessible, as they are guessing, Google will crawl it, find the link from your stats page to the porn site, and will give them another "credit" in the rankings.
They have no links to your site. They don't want to promote your site. They're exploiting the behavior of your stats reporting software. Password-protecting the directory is the best you could do.
If all that about logs, links, crawling and Google makes sense to you, then now you know what's going on.
Nancy, a Libertarian at heart, had another view. Forget the scumbag talk, she advises.
Look, sweetie, like it or not, MEN LIKE PORN. It must be natural and healthy, or they wouldn't ALL like it. (All except the henpecked few so-called "feminist men" who, frankly, bore real women to tears.) Let's let guys be guys and stop turning these people into pariahs.
Whoa! What's this? More of that "Girlie Man" talk? Maybe I'm just used to hanging around with a bunch of undiagnosed henpeckees. Anyhow, I still don't like obnoxious porn peddlers messing with my site and creating phantom links that don't really exist.
July 21, 2005 - Thursday
I've discovered a hidden secret buried deep in the statistics for this site--hundreds of mysterious referrals every day from explicitly pornographic web sites, many with unusually creative names that leave little doubt about their nature. Even though these porn sites don't seem to be affecting iLind.net, any kind of association is disturbing.
The log of all traffic through this site shows these porn entries are single hits with a simple destination: "HEAD /stats/ HTTP/1.0".
At first I tried to erect a cyber wall that would deny entry to anyone referred from any of these specific porn sites, but it proved impossible to keep up with the new names that kept appearing. Finally I changed the site to require a password to access the stats section. So far this month, there have been 13,861 attempts to access that one spot that have been rejected as "unauthorized".
Searches via Google or other systems don't turn up any links from porn sites to this site, so it's hard to figure out what's going on.
It's been puzzling to support staff at my hosting service, HostRocket.com. The most recent communication suggests a scenario that sounds plausible, but I don't have enough technical savvy to evaluate it:
I believe the reason your /stats/ folder is being linked to by pornographic sites is that those sites are attempting to build up their search engine ranking. Search engine ranking is largely determined by the number of sites linking to a given site. Every time the porn sites' webmasters or a search engine web crawler follows the link to your stats page, a return link to their site, in the form of the referer log entry, gets a added to your stats page. Thus the web crawler will see a link back to the porn site and, in theory, raise the porn sites ranking. The porn sites' webmasters likely also run programs to follow the link over and over again, to raise the number of hits.
By password protecting your stats page you have effectively blocked this approach to referal link scamming. As the porn sites probably have not removed the links to your site, you will still see some web crawler traffic hitting the 401 page.
None of this should impact any other visitors to this site, and I'll keep trying to cut these unwanted referrals off altogether. Any suggestions on other defenses I could erect would be much appreciated. Just email me, ian(at)ilind.net.
July 20, 2005 - Wednesday
It looks like there's been some movement in the dispute over recording of a public lecture in Hilo. According to a story in today's Star-Bulletin, Mike Sakamoto will be allowed to record the presentation over the objections of the speaker, state biologist Bill Walsh. However, Sakamoto got the go-ahead because he is considered a reporter and the recording ban is still being applied to the general public, the S-B reports.
William Greider's sobering assessment of the empirical impact of the economics of globalization in yesterday's New York Times is definitely worth attention.
And the Boston Globe reported Sunday on two studies of the backgrounds of foreign fighters entering Iraq to battle the U.S. which show most did not have prior "terrorism" links. Instead, the studies found these fighters had been radicalized by their opposition to the U.S. presence. This undercuts the position of the Bush administration on the dynamics of the Iraq violence.
The labor news coming out of the San Francisco Chronicle is grim, according to a bargaining bulletin just issued by the Newspaper Guild. And Metro Times, Detroit's alternative weekly, looks back at the infamous Detroit newspaper strike and its impact on the industry.
Back when Meda and I attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, talk about the area becoming a land of vineyards and fine wine would have been dismissed as the product of chemically enhanced consciousness. But the valley has been transformed in the intervening years, a process described today by the New York Times. It's a remarkable remaking of a small town that should give encouragement to other areas looking to recreate their futures.
July 19, 2005 - Tuesday
Apologies for a faulty RSS feed that's been sending visitors to a dead-end error message. It serves me right for trying to do things the hard way, but it appears to be fixed now.
Thanks for your comments on Leo's video debut. The best was short and to the point:
"I see owner training has been successful for Leo. Congrats Leo."
What can I say? It's obvious Leo does have me completely trained, a credit to his tenacity.
You can't make up a story like DeWayne McKinney's, a jump from a life sentence to life in paradise, as told in today's Los Angeles Times.
Ruth Dawson, a professor of Women's Studies at UH, writes of her personal impressions of London after the bombings, one right across the street from where she's been staying.
An interesting public access issue is brewing in Hilo, where a journalist has been told he will not be allowed to record a public lecture by state biologist Bill Walsh of the Aquatic Resources Division, Department of Land and Natural Resources. The program is scheduled for Thursday night at the Mokupapapa Discovery Center, a facility of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve.
The program is related to a controversial proposal to eventually ban fishing in protected areas comprising at least 20 percent of the ocean surrounding each of the major Hawaiian islands. A bill considered by the legislature this year failed to pass, but did lead to a concurrent resolution urging statewide discussions. There is a lot of interest in the plan among fishermen, many of whom oppose the proposed restrictions.
Mike Sakamoto, host of the cable program "Fishing Tales" and contributor to Hawaii Fishing News, says he plans to attend and videotape Walsh's lecture, but Reserve officials say no recording of the session will be allowed because of personal objections by Walsh.
"He (Walsh) is a public employee, and he's speaking to the public at a public facility about a public issue," Sakamoto said when reached by phone yesterday at his Hilo home.
Sakamoto's attorney, Russel H.Yamashita, complained about the video ban in an email to Judson Feder, general counsel for NOAA's Southwest Regional Office in Long Beach, California.
I can understand the limitations put on the press if there were national security issues involved, but when the speaker is just a state of Hawaii employee explaining aspects of his work and duties with the Department of Land and Natural Resources, I would be hard pressed to have an adequate justification for banning a free press from exercising their rights under the constitution.
Sakamoto intends to challenge the ban by attending the meeting along with a camera crew from KHON.
Attorney Yamashita has advised NOAA that he supports Sakamoto's action: "If your agency chooses to ban or arrest my client, I assume that NOAA will have an adequate justification in writing as soon as possible."
As they say, stay tuned.
July 18, 2005 - Monday
So after reading various accounts of Time reporter Matt Cooper's conversation with presidential advisor Karl Rove about Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, including an interview with Cooper on "Meet the Press" yesterday, I have a question: Just when and how was Cooper's now famous promise of confidentiality made to this White House source?
Based on what's been said so far, it does not appear that there was a specific discussion of confidentiality as part of this particular conversation, which supposedly lasted only a couple of minutes, which means that there was some ongoing blanket agreement, perhaps covering all of their contacts.
With some journalists, including the jailed Judith Miller, referring to the need for explicit releases from such pledges of confidentiality, should we expect that the initial promise of confidentiality should be similarly explicit and targeted? I can see a source saying, "look, I'm going to tell you something important now but I need to be protected." Okay, you can then consider whether promising confidentiality is worth it under the specific circumstances.
But that doesn't seem to have happened in the case of Cooper and Rove. Theirs was, it seems, a long term courtship and relationship wrapped in the warm bonds of promised confidences. Are such vague and extremely broad promises of confidentiality justified in the same way that specific and limited ones are? I have my doubts.
Cats. It's been hot here in Kaaawa. Well, not hot like the 116 degrees reported in Las Vegas last week, but hot and humid nonetheless. This has prompted Ms. Harriet to claim a new favorite spot--my bathroom sink. I've spent some time assessing the possibility that the change in behavior indicates a health problem of some kind, but that doesn't appear to be the case. She's just very happy to have found this new cool cat bed. In the meantime, I've been washing my hands and brushing my teeth out in the kitchen, or else using the sink but immediately wiping it out for her when I'm done. Cats.
Harry's summer spot
And, speaking of cats and their antics, I caught Mr. Leo in the act yesterday as he bargained for an afternoon snack, complete with sound effects. So turn on your speakers!
Warning: I edited it quite a bit, but this is still a large file, so don't run the movie unless you've got a fast Internet connection or time to wait for it to load.
July 17, 2005 - Sunday
Sunday morning, and I fell back asleep for another hour after the 4:35 a.m. cat call, and had to stumble out the door towards the sunrise almost immediately. Hence this very late posting.
Our daily walk takes us right past the location of yesterday's fatal accident in Kaaawa. Engine 21 was returning to the Kaaawa Fire Station as we walked towards the scene yesterday about an hour after the crash. Fisherman on the beach across from the accident scene said the car had been "flying", estimating its speed at perhaps 80 mph. The car hit a telephone pole and the short wall in front of art dealer Robyn Buntin's Kamehameha Highway home. Today there were flowers, a flag and other items left at the scene. Very sad.
Did you catch Howard Dicus and the new PBN Friday show on PBS Hawaii? Twice in this week's program Dicus displayed small color charts to illustrate a point, referring to each as "this crappy drawing". I enjoyed the candor, but there was probably a PBN editor somewhere biting his tongue.
I had surprisingly little response to yesterday's comments on the Akaka bill. Interesting.
After mentioning Nolle R. Smith Sr. in last week's comments about Hawaii's general excise tax, I ran into this 1942 photo of Smith in a war bonds promotion (that's Smith at the right, standing). Click on the photo for a larger version. The photo is among those collected by the Hawaii War Records Depository and now available online.
