Nearly Normal

Despite still needing to replace the car, things have gotten close to normal now. A slew of things need doing and are slowly being stricken off the to-do list. So what does normal mean?

Well, I’m sick again, this time with an earache that slowly developed over the weekend in time to become a problem yesterday evening. My sense of balance and perception had been off, but I’d attributed it to being overly tired. No such luck.

It made driving the borrowed pickup truck interesting yesterday since I still don’t have the “feel” for driving large vehicles. As a result, I took out the mailbox while frantically backing out of the top of the driveway when confronted with a UPS van charging up its steep slope. I haven’t felt that way since being chased by a protective cow when I nearly stumbled into her calf.

Suffice it to say the back end of a full size pickup is a lot longer than I realized. Now we need a new mailbox.

Normal also means I can allow my dad to drive on his own and do repair calls solo again. The only reason I was driving on Monday was due to his eye exam for replacement glasses. Irony is that with his pupils artificially dilated, he gets to experience what I do normally in regards to light hurting the eyes.

Still haven’t gotten the headphones apart and will have to wait for my balance to return to mess with them. The way my aching left eardrum reacts to bass, there is no way I’d be able to tolerate them anyway.

Box Elder bugs are out in force, which is yet another sign summer is over. I’m hoping to get some photographs of fall colors later this week since the maples are turning yellow and orange now. My suspicion is that autumn foliage was going to be disappointing again this year, but hope springs eternal.

Not everything has been negative or mandatory the past week. Various Hammer Films DVD sets had their prices lowered on Amazon and I’ve gotten all the early horror films they made I liked, aside from one oddball. The Vulture is a rarity and one of their more absurd movies so I doubt I’ll find it. Correction: Hammer didn’t make it, which explains its lack of availability!

The best thing about this is I get to review my favorite Hammer Film for Halloween. It will be my surprise review and the next one to go up.

Another sign of normality was the coming around of General Conference again. For once I had trouble picking out favorite talks due to the exceptional quality all the way around this time. If I were forced to pick one out it would be Elder Bednar’s talk on tithing which should be mandatory for every Latter-day Saint to see. Anyone wondering how money is handled in the Church will find out it is the same model as how we are advised to run our personal finances.

Well, the ear is hurting so I’m going to wrap the post up. At least doing screen captures doesn’t require sound!

Whisper of the Heart (1995) Review

An early attempt by Hayao Miyazaki to step back from directing led to this soulful adaptation of a manga about a stubborn middle school student trying to find a direction in life. Filled with trials of school, friendship, family, and even romance, her journey takes her to the most controversial ending in Studio Ghibli history.

Adolescence is a turbulent period in the life due to all the new and confusing situations you encounter. Most of the trouble is in dealing with others while trying to figure out just who you are. This is a tricky balancing act in even the best of circumstances.

In our current culture, that time has extended well past the teens through the twenties to encroach on the thirty something’s. But in 1995 when Whisper of the Heart was released, there was still a desire to mature at an early age though it was fading.

Set in a Japanese city, the film greets us with a montage of urban life after the sun has faded and the lights have just flickered on providing the glow that can make night life possible. It’s that period when responsibilities have mostly ended with the promise of things possible wafting through the summer air. Ironically, the Olivia Newton-John version of the song “Country Roads” is used as a backdrop for the cityscape.

Eventually we follow a girl leaving a market and accompany her home to a small family apartment. Shizuku Tsukishima is enjoying her summer break by burying herself in books about fairy tales. But a mystery arises for the middle school student when a name on the checkout card of a book she’s reading seems vaguely familiar. Sure enough, the same name appears on all the books she’s checked out from the library: Seiji Amasawa.

And So It Goes

Life hasn't returned to normal at the Boonedocks, but it is getting closer to what passes for it. My father continues to recover and after seeing the accident scene along with hearing first hand accounts it is obvious he shouldn't have survived. Yet he's up and about, having even attempted a repair call Friday.

I'm behind on things thanks to the events, a screamingly bad back, and little things coming up. Hopefully this week will be different, however it is already looking oddball. As soon as I finish the review of Whisper of the Heart I'm working on, I'll have to move directly into the scary movie theme for Halloween. One rewrite and one new review are all I'm guaranteeing.

Meanwhile, the leaves are turning colors, the winds have cooled, and summer is over without having made much of an appearance. It has simply been a disappointing year in regards to weather and quite a few other things. Good thing that I expected it to be an off year for that has ameliorated the disappointment.

At some point I should do a couple of posts on the two sets of headphones I've recently gotten. One goal for the week is tearing apart the larger Superlux 681 cans to solder in a corrective filter made by chaining resistors and filters. Practice with spare parts will happen first, since I'm a novice at soldering.

Then there are the amazing Noontech Zoro HD portable headphones. No corrective filter needed there, they are simply superb with a neutral bias like studio monitors. I should re-cable them though. For awhile the built in condenser microphone worked with an adapter for PC usage, but then it went into constant static. While it doesn't affect the sound I hear, it makes me wonder about the long term survivability of the cord.

Anyway, I need to get some screen captures for the next review!

Spam from Google?!

Just a short report this time around on a strange referral spam that showed up briefly on my Blogger statistics. This time it was http: // dailydeal . de / gutschein-freizeit-ruhrgebiet-alpincenter-ski-tageskarte-060913

 

Checking out the spam in my trusty virtual machine setup revealed a professional site that held up under further scrutiny. A little research revealed Google owns the company which is a typical special offer promoting kind of place. DailyDeal was purchased by Google in 2011 and is based in Germany. Of course I’m not German, so talk about hitting the wrong target!

Now why would a false referral from a Google company show up in the first place?

This is where things get murky and necessarily go into the realm of speculation. My first thought is that the provider of the deal is trying to goose the results by paying a runner of a botnet to spam the listing. However, it is more likely a competitor to the tour outfit is engaging in negative SEO.

What is negative SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process where a website builds up presence in Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, and other search engines on the Web. Much is done by trickery in the HTML coding of a site, making sure keywords (short matches on content) are present in certain amounts.

The most tricky and dangerous optimization involves link exchanges so that it looks like the site is popular. Google has automated algorithms that periodically hunt down any behavior that looks like that. When a detection is made (real or false) an automated penalty is assessed against the webpage. This is all done by software and appealing to a human to quickly straighten out a false penalty is nearly impossible.

That means you can frame a competitor for building up paid links by purchasing said links. This is part of the “black hat” methods to boost your business on the Net by lowering the rankings in search results of your competitor. They can be dropped many pages in ranks by negative SEO.

While it is speculation, there is a higher probability that this referral link is pushed by someone other than the seller of the ski trips than something they did for themselves. However, they may have paid someone for SEO and that company may have engaged in bad practices.

So there is a mystery here that I won’t see solved. There are other possibilities including Blogger/Google getting the stats system screwed up to the point that an error caused the referral to show up.

At least this isn’t a dangerous or hostile site spreading malware.

Posting Slow Down

Since things continue to fall out from the car accident and need attention, I'll be slowing down a bit as far as posting. In the pipeline is one movie review and another referral spammer, but they get done when they get done.

I'd had grand plans for the month of October to fill it with Halloween appropriate reviews. Those plans are shelved and if I get some scary movie reviews done at all I'll be fortunate. Frankly, the original plan was unrealistic as it was and would have involved a giant gorilla theme. Maybe another time.

My father is doing well and getting more mobile, so that's going well.  Me, I need to get some rest.

Not Even Frankenstein Could Raise It Again

Friday was going reasonably well until I saw a black and white police SUV come down the driveway. When you live out in the countryside, it means something is very wrong. In this case, it was the bearing of news that my father had rolled the car and seemed to be okay, but was being taken to the hospital.

It turns out he lost control just as he was calling me to let me know he was nearly home and would pick me up to visit an ill member of my church. Those plans were dashed with the need to get a ride to La Crosse ASAP. Fortunately, my neighbor Randy was home and so began a tired night at the hospital.

Talking to the police officer, I’d heard that the car was airborne for at least twenty feet. Today I got a chance to see where the accident happened and can say it was at least twenty feet and quite an impact coming down. My father is extremely lucky to have survived going off the road in that location.

Back to last night, we got to the ER at Gunderson to find my father finishing up being questioned by a state trooper. Speaking to the trooper I was told that Dad’s cellphone had been destroyed in the crash, which explained the old fashioned method of being notified in person.

Dad was lucid and alert, so began our entertaining the doctor and nurses involved. It might not be the wisest idea to make a doctor laugh while stitching up lacerations, but that’s what we did anyway. Two areas at the eyebrow level required some stitches and more were needed on the right hand where skin had been peeled away by a deep gouge.

At the time, I guessed the windshield had shattered since it was already weakened by the deer collision in June. Today I discovered otherwise, adding to my testimony of the ruggedness of Suburu products. Amazingly all the doors were able to be opened after the accident.

The wounds were caused by my father’s destroyed glasses and cellphone, which was torn in two by the airbag! This was a ruggedized Samsung, so the power of a deployed airbag is something fierce.

Observation is required for any head injury, so my father had to stay overnight. He got the all clear this morning and we retrieved him this afternoon after salvaging the contents of the Outback. Brand new tires did not survive the event as the photos show.

An outpouring of support and aid has made this a less traumatic event than it could have been. Friends and acquaintances have helped out with me particularly grateful for people visiting my dad during his brief hospitalization. Food being brought has been most welcome as neither of us feel like doing much ambitious.

Looking back over the years, it is a minor miracle the Subaru survived this long. Far too many miles and collisions with deer happened, but we managed to somehow keep it going. A new round of repairs were planned, but alas we have lost the best car we ever had.

It will be impossible to replace.

Secret Spam

Everybody loves a secret, or so it is said. So it is no surprise that old marketing gimmick of using “secret” somewhere in the pitch showed up in some referral spam in Blogger stats. That means another chance to fire up a virtual machine and do some investigating. Don’t try this at home, kids.

http: // www . 7secretsearch . com / is the latest spam to hit and it promises all sorts of secrets to upping your web traffic. The big come on is a form where you can enter your website URL and find out how much it’s worth. Featuring a slick presentation it is an enticing trap, no doubt.

The wrong sized ads showing up in the right sidebar are another giveaway that this isn’t a really a professionally setup website. Poor placement of the title graphic resulted in a banner text ad overlapping it. But the best has to be more Google +1’s than Facebook likes. That is highly implausible, don’t you think?

There was no way I’d put my own website in there, so I decided to click on the Amazon entry. An impressive amount of data comes up including that the site has no threats reported and is “SAFE to browse.” Looks kind of legit, until you notice they are using Bing stats only. Yeah, like Amazon isn’t indexed by Google.

That last oversized ad raised a lot of red flags so I clicked on it.

Anytime something pops on a web page that says you need your system scanned, it is time to get out of there immediately. Systweak has been know to present a download of one program that turns out to be another which grants remote access to your PC. They are bad guys who will take your money and mess your computer up.

What I find amusing is that they had this ad show up when I was using Ubuntu to browse the site. Windows errors on a Linux machine is not logical.

So there are layers of shadiness to what’s showing up at 7secretsearch. Avoid at all costs.