Blessing of the Hounds

Blessing of the HoundsThe blessing of the hounds is a hunting tradition that dates back to the 8th century, but here in Aiken since only 1914. We’ve lived here for 16 years and this is the first year we have attended the ceremony held annually on Thanksgiving day. One reason we finally went was our neighbor’s daughter was receiving her “colors” from the Aiken Hounds. Another was it gave the whole family something to do for a couple of hours at midday while we waited for the turkey to cook.

It was a mile or so walk from where we could park to the Memorial Gate in Hitchcock Woods where the festivities were to take place and we couldn’t have asked for a better day. The temperature was in the low 70s and the sun was shining brightly. There was even enough color left on some of the hardwoods to really enhance the setting. I think next year Donna and I will find a spot in the woods and wait for the post blessing hunt to come charging by.

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Or Bearer

Like frightened ducklings we have taken to shredding all the junk mail we receive so that identity thieves can’t get their greasy lunch hooks on our name and address. The quantity has become large enough that we now need to sort through and only shred the pages that actually has our names on them and just trash the harmless prepaid return envelopes and fake credit card looking bits of plastic for fear of overloading the industrial strength shredder at work.

Today, during a quiet moment, I was sorting through a heap of snail spam, and came upon one of those sneaky checks that they hope you will cash and unknowingly sign up for something. This one was from our friendly credit card issuer and was for the princely sum of $20. By cashing this check you would agree to be enrolled in the Payment Protector Plan at a cost of 89¢ per $100 of the ending monthly balance. I’m not sure what the heck the Payment Protector Plan is because I had already discarded the rest of the mailing, but I’m betting I don’t really need it.

What caught my eye about this particular check were the words printed right above my wife’s name, “Pay to Donna Bogardus or Bearer.” So, if I had thrown this bit in the trash and it found it’s way into the hands of a nefarious individual, he would not only have a name and address to do his worse with, but he would be paid twenty dollars for his troubles. And on top of that, we would be paying an extra couple bucks to our credit card company.

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Thanks

Thanks folks. We appreciate the thoughts…and know if you were closer would probably be like some of our co-workers from Human Resources and Accounting who showed up last night with enough food to feed the incoming family (and then some.) Tonight we expect the second wave of relations and the second wave of food from the the people who work in Donna’s department.

Through the marvel that is the Internet: Barbara Morrinson’s Online Obituary

So Long Mom, We’re Going To Miss You

Donna’s mom Barbara Morrison, who has lived with us since the spring of 2000, passed away this evening. Blogging may be light for the next few days as I help my wife and her family through this difficult time.

If you feel so moved – National Kidney Foundation

Here’s One I’ll Delete Later

After only one ride on the tandem I knew I didn’t like the seat that came on it. I tried a seat I had laying around, a Flite Titanium, but that was literally a pain in the derriere. Recently I tried the Terry Dragonfly seat off the road bike because it was so comfy there. On the tandem you are sitting a lot more than on the single bike, so what worked there didn’t translate as well to a double bike, so I broke down and bought a seat with a bit more padding from the same company – the Terry Fly CroMoly Saddle. Butt testing to begin soon.

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Are They Friendly Spam Bots?

Ever since August/September when I was pushing 10Gigs of traffic and 90% of that was referrer spam, I check my stats and raw logs every few days. Using a combination of pages equal hits and searching through the log I find the offending IP address and ban them. So far 152 IP addresses are no longer welcome. I have a couple of WordPress plugins running that are supposed to block some of this, but so far I’m not sure they are up to the task. Banning IPs is the only surefire way, but it means constant diligence is required.

Something new has popped up in the access logs, instead of requesting a GET which loads the page and consums bandwidth, there have been quite a few that are requesting a HEAD which doesn’t load the page and results in zero bandwidth usage. Are they being friendly?

Or are they just probe droids looking for pages to exploit?

I’m betting on the latter, so they are going on Santa’s Naughty list…

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Real Navy

Real Navy T
I’ve got my first design ready for the black T-shirts. A stylized battleship with the words Real Navy in white on the front. The next one will be a little harder as I’m not a real artist, but I want to get a line art drawing of a sailor in the bellbottom dress uniform, kind of like the one in a recruiting poster I’ve seen. Hmmm, wonder if I could manipulate that image…

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