People sometimes ask me why I compile this weblog, and usually I have no answer other than saying that it’s for fun. Sometimes, that’s a good answer, sometimes, it’s not. It’s not always obvious whose fun it really is - but from all the emails I received when I had my little meltdown a couple days back it seems there are people out there who enjoy the weblog. What do you know.

As mentioned before, certain things have become quite irritating. First, traffic increased by 20 percent or so through the Evil Empire’s search engine. As you can see from the little sample above, it is not very valuable traffic (and this is just a random selection!). Plus, I don’t get my hosting for free, and I’m now getting into the regime where I might have to consider to get new hosting.

To make matters quite a bit worse, after I had to disable comments because of the scum who thinks they have to besmirch each and every possible internet forum by leaving their disgusting spam, that very same scum had started to spam my trackbacks. I spent an entire morning deleting and disabling trackback. It was a tremendeous waste of my time. If anybody misses either comments and/or trackbacks thank those spamming scumbags out there. Sad how so many aspects of modern life are totally dominated by people who are willing to ruin everybody else’s fun for their own greed.

Apparently, you can bar search engines from crawling over your site. (thanks for the info, St駱hane). It remains to be seen whether this will still do anything, given I’m dealing with Microsoft, the sheer embodiment of everything that is wrong with the internet and computers. I also sent them email and told them to remove my site from their search engine. No reaction so far - since when do they care about users?

Thanks to everybody who has sent me emails of encouragement. That has meant a lot to me. There’ll be new stuff tomorrow. In the meantime, those who aren’t sick of my own photographic efforts might enjoy a few shots done recently at Pittsburgh’s Heinz Hall - the concert hall of the local symphony.