Word has it that Star Trek: Enterprise is being cancelled, with the final episode airing May 13th.
This is too bad. I was just starting to enjoy it too after the writers finally wrapped up that messy ugly Delta quadrant story arc that took up the first two and a half seasons. Why don’t the Star Trek writers ever learn that time travel never works and just makes for ugly stories.
If you want to help save the show, go visit EnterpriseFans.com, EnterpriseProject.org or SaveEnterprise.com and see how you can help.
Just can’t find anything good on TV anymore. With all the so-called ‘reality show’ crap on the air now there’s just nothing worth watching anymore. It’s a good thing I have the Babylon 5 DVDs to watch. I’ll have to start working on the Stargate: SG1 and Farscape series now. Stock up before all the good TV gets drowned out by the crap.
Found on Slashdot.org.
Dealing with spam
From MT‘s ProNet comes some very good tips for dealing with spam at the webserver level.
I’d just implemented mod_security a little while ago on my server, and while it hasn’t stopped the flood of spammy referrers, it has kept a lot of them sucking up bandwidth. One thing I need to do is start keeping up with adding additional rules to mod_security. Soon I’ll have to split it out into a separate file to include in httpd.conf. And to help with creating mod_security rules is Noel Jackson’s mod_security rule generator.
The other things I’ll be experimenting with are Peter Wood’s blacklist_to_modsec script and the DSBL plugin from Brad Choate.
Wear it like a geek badge
I got one of those USB thumb drives a little while ago. Just a simple little 256 MB PNY Attaché. But it comes with a lanyard that makes it handy to carry around your neck, instead of being relegated to the bottom of your pocket to get mangled by keys or something.
Normally I don’t like to wear things around my neck, but I decided to try the lanyard with the thumb drive. Lots of other fellow computer guys around here carry thumb drives around their neck too. Having a thumb drive around your neck almost seems like some kind of geek identification device or badge. Now other things have made it onto the lanyard: my ID badge and radiation monitoring badge for starters. I’ll have to stop adding things onto it before it gets too heavy.
I’ll probably stop using it eventually because it tends to bounce around when I’m walking along, which is a little bit annoying. In the meantime, I’ll just broadcast my geekiness around my neck.
All about CANDU
The latest issue of Physics in Canada is a cool theme issue with 4 really interesting articles about the features and capabilities of CANDU‘s newest ACR-700™ reactor. The first article, The CANDU™ Reactor — Past, Present, and Future talks about the evolution of CANDU reactors and design considerations that went into the ACR-700.
Another article (that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet), ACR-700™ Reactor Physics and Fuel goes into some of the physics behind the various fuel core designs of the CANDU™ reactors.
It’s a very interesting and instructive series of articles that shows what makes the CANDU™ reactor design simple to build (relatively), easy to operate and cheap to run.
Get the stuff for the thing to give to the guy
I don’t know what it is, but lately the wife has developed a knack for being incredibly vague whenever she asks me about something. She’ll ask me things like
- “Where’s the thing?”
- “Did you do the thing for that guy?”
- “Did you send that stuff?”
and other equally vague questions. It’s really amazing how vague she can be sometimes. Usually I’m left with a totally clueless look on my face and waving my hands trying to prompt her for more information about just what it is I’m supposed to do or know.
Maybe all this med school stuff has filled up her brain and she doesn’t have room for everything else anymore.