Salary Comparison and Bitcoin Spam

With a sudden stop to the flood of Russian blog spam, I’d been feeling a little lonely this holiday season. But hey, Cyber Monday brought me a deal! UPDATED: Added links to articles on Bitcoin malware at end of post.

http:// www . amiricherthanyou . com / ec_recommended . php ?q=Oved&id=473535 arrived in my blog stats to assist me in feeling financially inadequate. Oh boy! Just what I wanted, more spam! Sarcasm aside, I was wondering why things had gotten so quiet lately. So firing up my trusty virtual machine and TOR, I checked out the link. Remember, don’t try this at home, kids. Never click on suspicious links or you will be sorry.

Surprise! The link took me straight to an ad for BitCoin trading. Yeah, that doesn’t look shady at all, does it? I’d have a better screenshot, but I forgot to maximize my browser and there was no quick way to get that site back – there’s a good reason for that I’ll go into later.

Thanksgiving 2013

To all my fellow Americans reading the blog, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

It may be a world of entertainment and mass distraction for those of us in the first world, but I’m far too aware of those who live in conditions much closer to that which the pilgrims faced in the desperate early years of the new world colonization efforts. Having food to eat, a roof over one’s head, and a warm bed are simple things that we all should be grateful for. It’s all too easy to lose perspective when trying to keep up with whatever expensive toy a neighbor or acquaintance has gotten themselves.

It is going to be a quiet Thanksgiving here at the Boonedocks, devoid of a turkey and the traditional trimmings. In fact, my father and I aren’t sure what we’re going to eat having made no preparations. Getting older and with little family living far away, the holiday simply doesn’t have the allure it once did. Substance matters and without it, the trimmings are pretty boring.

While I’m thankful for what I have, I’m even more so that I’m not going Black Friday shopping. It’s my idea of one of the nastier circles of Hell imagined by Dante.

The Month That Ate My Homework

Or any other ridiculous excuse that you can imagine for not getting more done on the blog in November.

A wintery mix of weather, intestinal bug, and doing more in the real world than usual has led to my getting very little accomplished online lately. When it takes forever and a day to recover from expending energy, productivity suffers greatly. A couple of weekends ago I went on a trip up to the St. Paul area where I ended up assisting a close friend in teaching a merit badge course on computers to Boy Scouts.

Since then, I’ve been one of the walking dead and some extended trips out helping my father on some repair calls made me hungry for brains. Wait, that came out wrong. I lost my brains somewhere along the way, that’s what I meant. If you find them alongside the road, please send them to me and I might remember to repay the postage.

It depends on what shape the gray matter is in, you see.

Vigilantism

In the past I've mentioned how much I like light weight fighter jets, so I decided it was time to show some love for something larger. In this case, North American's A-5 Vigilante series which is one of the largest carrier based planes the U.S. Navy ever had in service. Browsing through YouTube led me to a video showing the plane in its various incarnations from prototype to retirement. Be warned, excessive use of techno is the only sound on the video:

Big, beautiful and very fast, the Vigilante was a Mach 2 nuclear bomber designed in the 1950s, the era where all things seemed possible and brilliant minds flourished. Due to politics limiting the role of the Navy in strategic nuclear weapons delivery, the A3J (as it was originally designated) saw little service as the bomber it was designed to be. Politics wasn't the only reason the very advanced aircraft didn't work out in that role.

Health 11-13-2013

It’s been awhile since I updated the ongoing woes of my health problems. I only do it to document them for posterity which means I generally omit the minor issues. Lately, I’ve had to force myself to nap in order to maintain any functionality at all. The last three weeks have not been good.

The body is demanding repair time thanks to a host of minor infections of various types visiting me with sinusitis being the worst. Things had gotten so bad that scratches and minor skin breakouts were refusing to heal properly.  As much as I hate enforced rest, it is rectifying the problem.

Veterans Day 2013

As much as I’m grateful for all that our armed forces have done for us throughout the history of the United States of America, I find my thoughts elsewhere on this day of recognition. Specifically, Leyte in the Philippines.

Oh there is a connection to Leyte with our armed forces, for that is where General Douglas MacArthur started the liberation of the Philippines in 1944. Fulfilling his promise to return, U.S. forces and Philippino resistance fighters fought quite a battle there. For me, Leyte is synonymous with kamikaze planes slamming into ships thanks to old footage.

Something far worse than a worn out fighter plane loaded with explosives slammed into the island of Leyte Friday. Typhoon Haiyan hit with category five winds accompanying a massive storm surge. This is a storm so huge that it covered all of the Philippines.

At least 10,000 are dead (the count will rise) and more than half a million have lost their homes. Estimates are that between 70-80% of the buildings have been destroyed in the city of Tacloban which is the location of most of the deaths.

Things are incredibly grim in the news reports with looting to survive and incredible misery due to nearly all the structures being destroyed. Watching footage and looking at photos is a heart breaking experience, but nothing compared to what the people there are dealing with. Fears of starvation have the survivors teetering toward out of control behavior.

My thoughts and prayers are with them.

Comments and Spam

It truly feels like a Monday, complete with the first significant snow of the season. In the wee hours of the morning here, a comment came into my blog that looked somewhat legitimate. After publishing it to get full access to all the html involved, I decided it was too shady to keep on the blog. Here’s the content of the post:

Social Cubix said...

Comment spamming you can only prevent by configuring your posting software appropriately. There are some technics like image code verification to verify a human is posting, against human postings with inappropriate content helps only an editor review before release. Machine posted spam may increase, if you use well known templates from popular blogging software.

12:21 AM

Freestyling

After the brutal demise of the Subaru in September, we’ve been using a borrowed behemoth of a pickup truck. Not only was it not fun to drive, it was brutal on the backs of me and my father. Due to our need for a good winter vehicle with serious cargo space (that also gets reasonable mileage), the search for a replacement in the price range we targeted was looking pretty bleak. Another Subaru was completely out of the question with used prices sky high for Outbacks and Forresters.

Grabbing the bull by the horns, I made sure we went out for an exploratory search of what, if anything, existed in our price range at local dealers. I had little hope of finding anything decent and planned to sacrifice longevity or capability. Our first stop ended up being our last thanks to a newly arrived used 2005 Ford Freestyle SEL at the dealership.

Strange Influx of Russian Spam, Part 3

Given how much I’ve already documented the new wave of Russian referral spam showing up on Blogger, I’m simply listing the new links as they come in. For more information on what this is all about, please see my previous posts here and here. In what may be a coincidence, vampirestats has been showing up in large numbers during the same time period. Also, I'm starting to see repeats of the same links, but they always register four times when they hit.

Strange Influx of Russian Spam, Part 2

Another day brought in another round of the odd referral spam to my Blogger statistics. Following the same pattern as the first batch, things took a turn toward the sinister once I started checking them out.  If you receive any of these in your referrals, do not click on the links!

http: // art-cs . ru / ?p=275 linked to a post on a Russian blog, just like all during this onslaught of faked referrals. This one does have phone numbers in one post, though I didn’t look them up. Last post was in September of 2012 and most of the posts were put up on one day.

The second of this wave was http: // etiketu . ru / ?m=20120907 which links to a blog about proper etiquette and how it helps in business. Like the farming site in the first wave, this one has an about page. Unlike that one, no name is associated with it. Instead a mission statement of promoting humanism and decency is present. This will turn out to be highly ironic.

It was last posted to in October of 2012.

Strange Influx of Russian Spam

November has brought cold winds with it and a flood of Russian spam on the 3rd. The false referrals on my Blogger stats lead to a  baffling variety of blogs. Only one is an obvious attempt to sell things, which makes it very mysterious that they all came at once. Oddly, all showed up four times with the exception of the first. All use Wordpress and none have ads placed on the pages, but do have LiveInternet statistics links.

UPDATE: Continued with a theory of why these are being sent out.

Now the individual links:

http : / /www . kyho . ru / was the first to arrive Sunday morning. I copied the link for future investigation and headed out to church. Little did I know that it was the first of a larger group of spam arriving through early Monday.

Firing up my virtual machines for safe and compartmentalized browsing, I found out I’d be using Google translate a lot in trying to decode the mystery. This site is dedicated to hair care with repetitive posts which raises suspicions of being an automated site scraping content from legitimate blogs. There are no comments and it is a barebones blog layout. It also was last updated in November 2011!

With no ads and no immediately visible malware on the page or in the source code, it looked like another case of zombie spam.

A New Season

Hope is said to spring eternal and sometimes it feels that way in regard to seasonal entertainment, or in this case the television variety. Having cut the cord years ago, I have no cable or satellite version of a 150 channels with nothing on worth watching. Broadcast and streaming are all I need given most fare is dreck these days. So it is a bit surprising to be following  a number of live action shows and anime this fall season.

It takes a lot to get me into live action TV since after decades of watching every variation of story has been seen more than once. Even a foray into South Korean dramas didn’t last long once it became apparent they drag things out for far too long at too high an intensity.

UPDATED 20 Nov 2013 to reflect being deeper into the season. New comments are in bold.

UPDATED 10 Dec 2013 with further comments in blue.

Final Thoughts in green.

Trollhunter (2010) Review

College students go out in the woods with a camera and disappear leaving only footage behind. Sound familiar? Well, this time it’s a wee bit different thanks to plenty of dry Norwegian wit and a ludicrous subject played with straight faces. Hoping for an interesting story on bear poaching, the students soon find out the object of their pursuit is hunting something different – trolls. Is the man insane or is there more than bears out in the wilds of Norway?

The found footage craze has slowly died down in movie making much to the relief of serious cinema buffs. However, this indie gem out of Norway proves that the format isn’t completely worthless and that a good movie can be made in the style. It doesn’t hurt that a very dark sense of humor is complimented by legitimate tension building, great effects, and deadpan acting.

Like all found footage movies things begin with text on screen informing us that the following content was edited from footage recorded by missing people, in this case college students working on a project in 2008.  We quickly get to know the main characters through glimpses of them setting up their gear and an early introduction for a documentary they are filming.

Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud) is the nerdy and earnest face of the production, clearly in charge even if not respected by his cameraman. Johanna (Johanna Morck) is an attractive blonde in charge of the boom mike and recording system. Her other job is trying to keep cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) from being a jerk toward Thomas.

Their quarry is a suspected poacher killing bears and depositing them in random places in the countryside. Clued in by the hunting community, they eventually track down the mystery man known only as Hans. Hans (Otto Jespersen) is a gruff cipher who rebuffs the trio when they confront him at a trailer park.

Something isn’t right though, even accounting for his illegally killing bears. One look at his battered Land Rover reveals some very nasty claw marks that don’t look very ursine in origin. Then there is the horrible smell coming from his camper.

A Frightening Innovation in Malware?

It may be Halloween and a time for spooky tales from the dark recesses of the imagination, but real life has more than enough frightening things. As we are now a high technology bound society in the West, it seems some of the more alarming things involve computers. A new strain of malware has shown up that supposedly can use a computer's speakers and microphone to transmit data.

If this turns out to be a legitimate thing rather than a hoax, badBIOS is a thing of nightmares for IT and security experts. Normally I'd call this a fraud or someone having a paranoid break, but the technology has existed  in the world of espionage for decades that allowed lasers bounced off of windows to measure and detect conversation inside rooms, for instance. This would be the kind of project a government would be capable of in theory, most likely one of the big three: the United States, Russia, and China.

It's been awhile since I've seen a BIOS based attack get any press, so this caught my attention quickly. Of course simple precautions will prevent malware from getting on your system and this one is said to have come in on a USB thumb drive. However, the way this thing works is fascinating if real.

Part of me wants this to be a hoax, because this kind of PC infection would be incredibly difficult to deal with if it spread widely. Another part of me wants it to be real simply because it would be an amazing feat of computer science. But most of me is holding judgement until more evidence is brought forward.

UPDATED 6 Nov 2013:

While there is a possibility this is a real virus or trojan, the evidence isn't checking out and some are calling into question the mental stability of Dragos Ruiu. Strange behavior by him in social media is making it look like a paranoid episode, which is still bad news of a different kind. Given the fragmentation of BIOS implementations, it would be extremely difficult to pull off with limitations to attacking specific brands and models of PC's.

The Halloween Scary (and Not So Scary) Movie Review List!

While I'm working on one last review that hopefully will be finished for tomorrow, here is a list of movie reviews I've done that fit the Halloween spirit. Featuring monsters, supernatural doings, or unsettling science fiction all offer something a little spooky fun:

The Black Hole
The 'Burbs
The Curse of Frankenstein
The Curse of the Werewolf 
Dracula (1931)
Dracula (1931 Spanish Version)
Forbidden Planet
Frankenstein (1931)

Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris
Gojira
Gorgo
Horror of Dracula 
The Legend of Hell House
The Mummy 
Pacific Rim 
Rodan
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Spirited Away
The Watcher in the Woods

I hope everyone has a happy and safe Halloween!

Pacific Rim (2013) Review

A high budget love letter from director Guillermo del Toro to Japanese science fiction cinema, this story of giant monsters and titanic robots failed to light up the domestic box office. Yet it was far from a failure becoming a massive hit worldwide. Aimed squarely at twelve year olds (including inner ones), a simple heroic story told mainly visually also targets the human heart despite being a brutal slugfest. Beautiful to behold, packed with action, and supported by a good cast it is a whole lot of fun.

A last minute decision was made to add this review to my Halloween lineup since it was time for a giant monster movie in the rotation. Featuring kaijus (giant monsters) fighting with mechas (giant robots) rendered with the most modern of effects, it certainly fills the bill. Also, I love this flick and wanted an excuse to do a full review of its Blu-ray release. Thanks to a large amount of extras, it turned into a Herculean endeavor.

But hey, better to go large, right? Speaking of which…

Pacific Rim launches straight into a prologue packed to the gills with action and information narrated by a rueful voice looking back at the events. Set in the near future, a huge amount of exposition both verbal and visual comes at the audience at a furious rate. In summation, giant toxic monsters have emerged from a dimensional rift called the Breach in the ocean floor of the Pacific, towering robots were built in an international effort to stop them, and humanity thought they were winning.

This data overload is presented in the form of news clips, flashes of monsters called the Kaiju (Japanese for giant beasts) trashing cities, and scenes of Jaegers (German for hunter) being built. Not only does it set things up, but the montage gives glimpses of Kaiju and Kaeger designs that didn’t make the final cut. More interesting is that del Toro did not direct this portion of the prologue. Not one to use the “found footage” or pseudo documentary style, he instead assigned it to a trusted friend and was delighted with the results.

It has been awhile since I’ve seen a big budget movie dare to start in the middle of a story and while it might not be what people are now used to, I’ve always felt that it adds to the suspension of disbelief. After all, most of life is about wandering into a situation as it messily unfolds rather than being there from the beginning.

With the setup explained the movie really begins.

Not Dead, Just Pinin' for the Fjords

It was with some surprise that I realized I hadn't posted in nearly a week. Not feeling well, but not terribly ill I simply haven't had any energy.

So some tweaking around the edges on the site is all I've done, other than work on a review that will go up tomorrow after a final pass. Since the top posts widget is effectively broken thanks to it recording referral spam as hits, I've manually gone through my Google Analytics records to create a list of the most viewed reviews to replace it.

It means more work for me, but at least I'll know it's somewhat accurate.

To while away the time, watching old horror movies has been the main item on my agenda. That's been a fun nostalgia trip and exercise in comparing childhood memories to reality. So far my memories have been more accurate than expected, though I've remembered things from one movie being in another on a couple of occasions.

It is amazing what trivial things stick in our heads and my suspicion that because they are audio/visual in nature movies lodge more easily in our memories. Anyway, off to watch another!

Halloween Self Torture Time

Without anything special planned such as going to a party or some such thing, tonight I’m going to go see Plan 9 from Outer Space at the Spring Grove Cinema near by for a Halloween treat. Twelve miles is what I consider “near by.”  Now why would I pay money to watch the worst movie ever made (or so many think) after having seen the RiffTrax and normal versions of it within the past couple of years?

It’s going to be shown in 3D, that’s why.

Yes, Tor Johnson will loom larger than life out of the screen, fake Bela Legosi will jump out at slowly approach us, and flying saucers will zoom by realistically. I’m hoping for the wires to show up in three dimensions.

So it will be a welcome break from watching quality movies and taking notes on them for I will be abusing my sanity and lowering my IQ by watching Ed Wood’s gloriously awful masterpiece…

IN 3D!

Some time much later…

Well, that didn’t happen. I really need to stop planning to do things, especially things for fun. Unfortunately for me, the trip to the movie theater instead turned into a five hour detour into a nightmarish repair call of my father’s. So I’ll never see Plan 9 in 3D.

I really need to stop wanting to do things, all it does is cause me grief.

Odds and Ends October 2013

It is cold and damp as I write this post, which means winter draws ever closer. It has been a time of painful sleep that's slowed me down more than I expected, so every time I get a post up it feels like a minor victory. The weekend was a loss thanks to this.

For some reason Google has failed to fix a rather massive bug that appeared in their Blogspot code within the last month. Actually, it had appeared for some earlier, but now is getting widespread. What's the bug, you wonder?

They broke the ability to edit text widgets in the sidebars. For two weeks I've been struggling to edit the ones on the right of this post to no avail. Finally somebody came up with a workaround that I didn't want to use, but now am.So now I'm able to update what movies I've recently watched.

How Google can ignore this bug is beyond me, but so is most of their behavior in regards to support. I'm too tired to trash them at the moment.

Again With the Spam

While there hasn’t been a lot of new spam hitting this blog (been a lot of vampirestats lately), there has been one showing up under two different links and one that showed up on another blogger’s site.

First up is the worst offender. Coming in as www . seoanalyses .com or under its real address,  ourmeets . com , this is a pornographic “dating” site. As you can see, it was blocked by OpenDNS, which I use to pre-filter anything coming into the house. Don’t click on it as it is exceedingly unsafe to visit.

Next up is one that commenter Sarma listed.

kallery . net out of South Korea looks like a real site at first glance, but digging further reveals that it sends you off to other sites where art is for sale. That’s a traditional tactic of cross promoting links used to generate ad revenue or of black hat SEO to up search engine rankings. Appears relatively harmless, but I advise avoiding.

Notice the art quiz winners on the right hand sidebar of the first screenshot. What are the odds that four of them would be links promoting the site? The mind boggles!

I wonder what percentage of Web pages in the world are actually spam sites? The search engines have enough trouble keeping up with the legitimate content being put up.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) Review

Known for its revival of the old horror franchises it was odd that only one stab was made at the werewolf subgenre by Hammer Films. Starring a novice actor named Oliver Reed and loosely based on a lurid bestselling novel of the 1930’s, it was something of a gamble. Fortunately for audiences, what they got was a portrayal of the warring sides of the human psyche and what I view as the best werewolf movie ever made.

Director Terence Fisher (Horror of Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein) was unquestionably Hammer’s go to guy when it came to directing reinventions of Universal’s old monster films. Adept at handling action, moody tension, and able to get serious performances out his actors, Fisher once again was called on when it was time to bring back the werewolf to the silver screen.

Adapted from a novel, Werewolf in Paris, the movie takes huge liberties with the source material and all for the better. The biggest change is in setting, which is moved to late 18th Century Spain. This is made very clear by the bold lettering that was considered so stylish at the time. After seeing how that screen capture turned out, I couldn’t resist using it. In fact, it’s the only reason for it to be in the review.

Time to get more serious and write about the story. But I still am amused by the screenshot.

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.

Not Missing the Mark

The following is a talk (sermon) I gave at church last Sunday. I can safely say this had to be the most unorthodox inspiration I’ve ever received for speaking on a spiritual matter.

In talks or lessons you may have heard about looking beyond the mark. Moses once held aloft a metal staff for the Israelite's to look upon and be healed. Many expected something flashier and looked for something amazing behind it. That failure to exercise simple faith cost them dearly.

I'll quote from the Old Testament's Book of Jacob, Chapter 4, verse 14:

But behold, the Jews were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall; for God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble.

I was asked to use What Thinks Christ of Me? By Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from the April 2012 General Conference for themes to use in this talk. He touches on many things ranging from the decay of society to the power of simple faith. Mostly it is about being a disciple of Christ.

So I went by inspiration that came to me after reading it again and it took me down a path I didn't expect. A sentence in that talk reads as follows:

Jesus’s call “Come, follow me”is not only for those prepared to compete in a spiritual Olympics.

I hope you will bear with me as I begin with an Olympic sporting event that appears to be a contradiction to that statement. There is a sport called the biathlon that is amongst the most challenging in the Winter Olympics.

Now I will invite all of you to use your imagination. Picture yourselves out in the countryside in gently rolling hills covered by white winter snow. It is a very pretty, very alluring world out there that glitters brightly in the sunlight as you cross country ski through. At first it is easy to keep your arms and legs moving, but after awhile the cold air begins to have a bite to it. Still feeling strong you keep moving forward with purpose, for you are in competition with many others to qualify for the Olympic Games.

The Blog Layout: Opinions Wanted

One of the mysteries of blogging for me is what layout is the most useful to readers visiting From the Sidelines. As a result, I'm always tinkering with what's presented with only some feedback from trial and error showing vague patterns in analytics. Also a factor is a desire to make the blog load faster on smartphones and tablets.

Since people rarely used the category tags to look for related posts, I used the page function on Blogger to make index pages though it wasn't meant for that usage. It was a rare dramatic success at improving the site and they get used far more than expected.

Over the years, I've eliminated some things such as links to other blogs since nobody ever clicked on them. Right now there are a couple of sidebar items that I'm thinking of axing. One is the Hall of Fame and the other is the Most Read Recently. Both use Blogger widgets that are not accurate thanks to referral spammers.

An example of that distortion is my review of Varan the Unbelievable. According to Blogger, it has 769 pageviews. From StatCounter and Google Analytics, I can tell you it doesn't even have a tenth of that! So there it sits at the top of Most Read Recently at the time of writing at this post and it should not be there.

UPDATED:  They're gone. The ghost hits on Varan got out of control today, so something is seriously wrong with Blogger statistics. Google has really failed badly at making those work correctly which is slightly ridiculous given what their forte is supposed to be.

Because of this, I'm looking for some input from visitors to this blog. What part of the layout here do you look at and use?

I've added a contact form to make it easier to answer if you don't want to publicly post and it can be found at the bottom of the right sidebar. Please feel free to comment here too. I'm very curious about what works and doesn't work for you here.

Zombie Spam

I kind of wish the following referral spam had shown up in October so that I could have had a Halloween themed commentary. Instead it arrived in the middle of September. But hey, the undead always show up at the most unwelcome of times – sometimes repeatedly. At the time of writing this, http : // jetsli . de / crawler has shown up fourteen times in my Blogger stats for the day.

Using my trusty virtual machine running Windows XP, I checked out the link safely. Remember kids, don’t try this at home!

What showed up was a classic dead domain, which was mildly disappointing. Since the spammer had let the domain lapse, there wasn’t much evidence of what kind of money making scheme had been involved.

So I clicked on a couple of links anyway.

Varan the Unbelievable (1958) Review

aka Daikaiju Baran

When Toho Studios was approached by an Americans network to make a giant monster TV movie, they turned to the crew who made Gojira and Rodan for the debut of a new kaiju. With a lower budget than the previous monster movies, Varan was meant to combine all the aspects of all the previous kaiju into one monster. That was either going to be biggest success yet or an epic failure. What do you mean you’ve never heard of Varan? He’s unbelievable! That much I’ll agree on…

If you have even heard of Varan, you are probably thinking of the U.S. version that came out four years after the Japanese version. According to what I’ve read, it only has fifteen minutes of footage from this release and is a mess. After watching the origininal three times in a row, I want to say that might be an improvement. Buckle up, this review is going to be a bumpy ride.

See that above? You’ll never see that on another Toho film. That was a one off marketing gimmick before they settled on Tohoscope for their widescreen movies. It was the fact that Varan the Unbelievable was the first kaiju film to take advantage of the new format that made me want to own it.

Whereas Rodan was the first in color, this lower budget film was commissioned to be in B&W by the U.S. network. A good chunk of the movie was filmed in standard 4:3 before the decision was made by Toho changing over to anamorphic widescreen for a theatrical release domestically. They ended up cropping the early footage to match the anamorphic. So if you think some of the shots vary in quality, your eyes aren’t fooling you.

Alright, enough with the background, let’s get to the story!

The best part of the movie occurs at the start, which consists of the main title flashing by in front of a scary looking statue before fading into credits scrolling over a matte painting. What’s so great about that, you wonder? The theme. Composed by Akira Ifukube it combines his typically dark sound with chanting to create a sinister sense of urgency that would have fit in a serious horror movie of the period.

Sadly that ends and the movie really begins. Since this is a story about a giant monster, we get treated to the sight of a rocket blasting off. What does it have to do with the story? Absolutely nothing. It’s there just to look cool and take advantage of the space race hoopla beginning.

Next we meet a scientist, the dramatically coiffed Professor Sugimoto (Koreya Senda), lecturing some of his assistants and the audience directly. This partial breaking of the fourth wall does not happen again, just like the rocket launch. Oh and before I forget, the subject was butterflies, I think.

A Dirty Atmosphere

The time had come around to make the annual trip to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival this past Saturday. A somewhat smaller group went on the 2013 trip and while the company was good, the festival was disappointing this time out. More on that at the end and why parents should no longer be taking kids to this event.

 

It was a rare hot day with only a few wisps of clouds in the sky in the draught stricken area. After finding our way from the unfamiliar Queen’s parking lot, we emerged near one of the outer rim theaters. An amazing increase in temperature accompanied the emergence and only the occasional breeze floated through to make things bearable.

Only problem is that dust and dirt came with those pale attempts at gusts.

We headed straight to a glassware’s shop, Ould Glass. Having gotten lost on the way up as is our tradition, we were a little late for the main attraction, caber tossing. However, a glass blowing and sculpting demonstration was announced, so in we went. While shaded in the back, it wasn’t exactly cool there with the furnace going.

More Linkbucks Connected Spam

Some more referral spam has shown up on Blogger and one provided an unexpected connection to two earlier ones. The first was reported by commenter Charlotte and arrived as 0288c729 . qqc . co which leads to Linkbucks again like a link that started with ceae2122.

So what do you get if you click on that odd string of numbers and letters?

First up is an ad telling you that you absolutely need to download a download manager. Yeah, like that won’t lead to bad things on your system. Remember kids, don’t try this at home and don’t trust strange links. Never click on anything you don’t already know and that includes things sent by trusted friends.

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) Review

When a cop is forcefully recruited into a secret government agency, he finds himself facing danger unlike anything he’s dealt with before. Even if those threats don’t kill him, he may not survive the assassination training by an eccentric ancient martial arts master. Sounds pretty serious, but the focus us more on laughs and the interaction between the leads.  The end result is a very uneven film with a uniquely goofy charm that sets it apart from your run of the mill action movie.

This movie about a rookie assassin launched into the crowded 1980’s action film glut failed to generate a box office killing and became something of a minor cult film instead. That’s appropriate since this action comedy was based on cult series of pulp novels called The Destroyer. Originally conceived as a spoof of James Bond and Bruce Lee movies, the novels veered off in another direction around the third installment when they became a very politically incorrect satire of absolutely everything and anything.

One of the fans of the series was Dick Clark of American Bandstand fame and he banded together with other producers to try to adapt the very irreverent and more than R-rated materiel into something for the masses. Hiring the famous James Bond movie director Guy Hamilton promised that the action would be well staged, but could they capture the odd style of the books? Well, there’s only one way to find out…

Asian inspired music opens the credit titles with accompanying glimpses of a very strange structure adorned with television antennae. Never explained in the film, this is a brief look at the home of a certain character from Korea built by many architects from around the world over the centuries, hence its hodgepodge appearance. It is a symbol of one of the bigger problems of the movie has: omitting explanations for the background concepts presented.

Normally I’m one for not having everything explained in a story. In fact, I find it very insulting. However, there is a minimum needed to bring people along who are unacquainted with the source material. This movie just manages to miss the required amount. Still, it is a nice “Easter egg” for fans of the novels.