Dear Twitter, that was only a 5.9 earthquake. Enough with the Fail Whale already!

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/ci14745580.html

I watched the movie twice this weekend. I really enjoyed it. It had a well-written story to go along with the CGI which is becoming rare in today’s action movies. It was good to see the face of Arnold once again. My only regret was that it was so short lived. I guess they spent as much money as the CGI budget allowed to keep Arnold’s face in the movie as long as possible.

I have noticed that this is the second movie in recent memory in which Christian Bale has been upstaged by a supporting actor. The last movie was Dark Knight in which Heath Ledger stole the show. Here, Sam Worthington, though not as overwhelming as Ledger, delivered a solid performance whereas Bale was just a lot of brooding and a gruff voice.

The closing to the movie sets the stage for more to come. I’m looking forward to it and I hope to see some of the new faces in Salvation reappear in the following sequels.

From a Reuters article:

German biologists have discovered a new species of ant they believe is the oldest on the planet.

If it’s the oldest species on the planet then it isn’t new is it?!

George Carlin, one of my favorite performers, has died.  Read the AP obituary.

Immediately after posting my six-month review of the PSP-2000 I received a trackback from a site I had never heard of before (I am NOT going to post the site’s address.  If your curious send me a message and I’ll give you the address).  I thought it was pretty strange as there was no way someone could have read the post that soon after me posting it.  I took a look at the site the trackback came from and found that the site contained no original material at all.  The site contained nearly 10,000 uncategorized posts all linking to other sites and every page had a huge advertisement for a paid file download service. 

I decided I’d let that one go and not delete the comment but a few days later I received a very similar post from a different website (again, I’ll withhold the address).  This second site didn’t contain any overly intrusive advertising other than Google’s AdWords.  The site was once again nothing but a collection of excerpts to other blogs.

I Googled “wordpress site reposts” trying to find any reporting on this practice. My first item in the search results was for a plug-in called “rePost”.  Ah, so now I’m starting to understand.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame any author or plug-in, especially rePost.  What I began to realize is that with user-friendly publishing tools like WordPress and its plug-in system it is now incredibly easy to set up a website that exists solely for the purpose of leveraging bloggers content to slap blatant affiliate network advertising in front of the viewer.

I’ve never understood what the logic is in this. These websites must work or they wouldn’t exist but who really cares to surf on over to a website that contains no original material and whose only intent is to reap the money skimmed from affiliate advertising networks and dubious subscription services? The money made can’t be that great nor can the traffic be that substantial.

This kind of comment spam is another way that spammers are getting around spam tools. These comments also devalue original content by implying through use of the trackback that some kind of positive relationship exists between the blogger with valuable original content and the site containing affiliate advertising or lame subscription services. I’ve now marked the comments from those sites as spam and removed them from the article.  I hope the other authors linked from these spam sites have done the same.