Well, it seems that this website has been visited by Pakistani spammers. These are the people who leave irrelevant comments with links to their own sites, in the hopes of tricking people into visiting them.

Well you Pakistani spammers, I'm on to you. Unfortunately for you, I've got comment moderation turned on, so you won't see anything you try posting until I approve it...and I'm not that generous.

Subject: Rescheduling of the 2009 Men's Ice Hockey Champion Banner Ceremony
Sender: Patrick Madden
Recipient: jparker@bu.edu , mlynch@bu.edu
Copy: nrowan@bu.edu , hockey@bu.edu
Date: 16.09.2009 14:41

Dear Directors Parker and Lynch:

I just learned that BU Hockey has moved its banner raising ceremony from October 20, the first home game and traditional event for banner raisings, to October 10, a holiday weekend and exhibition game. While the article at goterriers.com explains the rationale behind this date change, the announcement comes at a late time and has not given Terriers fans enough notice for them to plan to be at the Agganis, rather than elsewhere, over a holiday weekend. I am one of the people adversely affected by this change.

Blade Runner is my all-time favorite movie. (In fact, it's about time to watch it again.) Roy Batty nails the interesting philosophical problem in his rooftop monologue, and I like the way the movie is built out from that point.

Is anybody else having troubles receiving WBCN now that it moved to 98.5 HD 2 ? My tuner is only getting 98.5 HD 1, and then the next HD station it seeks to is 100.7. Maybe they're still getting stuff moved around, so I'm not sure whether they want to hear from people who can't tune them in at the moment.

Black humor time.

This headline crossed my desk today:
U.S. sends arms to Somalia, rebels amputate limbs

Say what?

The whole article is at Reuters. While still unpleasant, the truth is a bit different than the headline!

Dear Sen. Kennedy:

Today I learned that the National Park Service/DOI is using eminent domain to procure land in Somerset County, PA, for a Flight 93 memorial, without having made a good faith negotiation with the landowners, merely because of impending paperwork deadlines.

The DOI has had the nearly 8 years since 9/11 to work on this. Yet it waited, and now the people of Somerset County are suffering the loss of their land and their homes so that a bureaucratic deadline could be met.

Yeah, the Big Red lost to Syracuse today. I watched the game on TV and was thrilled to watch as Cornell kept the lead away from Syracuse. With about 4 minutes left in the game, the score was 9-6 Cornell.

Then the final four minutes struck.

Colgate is airing a new ad campaign for its SpeedStick Pro product. "What's your pit type?" The ads proceed to describe physical characteristics of armpits, which, unless you're a teenager, you probably don't want to hear about. I submitted the following comment at their website:

SpeedStick Pro. "What's your pit type" ??? Are you marketing to 18 year-olds? I'm a guy and that's about the age I used to talk about my body in those terms. This is not an appealing ad campaign for adults, it's really a turn-off. Please can it.

This article at the New York Times caught my eye today. Yesterday was the anniversary of Duke Ellington's birthday, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by the musician's grandson, played "Take The A Train" while riding vintage NYC subway A Train cars to Queens. Pretty neat!

A few months ago, I set up a BlackBerry for a Curry College student so he could use it to get his email. This worked fine up until a few weeks ago, when BlackBerry informed the student that his account information needed to be revalidated. Revalidation failed, so I took a look at it.

All the settings looked reasonable and were as I'd left them. However, a quick look at the servers showed that they no longer accepted connections from email clients, including the POP3 service the BlackBerry had used. I thought that was odd, so I called Curry College IT to ask what was going on.