OK, so you’ve probably been wondering where my web site went for the past couple days.

Well, to make a long story short, my hosting provider had some serious hard disk corruption on the system where my site is hosted, it was so bad that a file system check couldn’t salvage it, and (I can only assume because my domain name starts with ‘z’…) there was no automatic backup stored on their servers.

I’ve restored most of the site, but there might still be some stuff missing; if there is, just drop me a line using the e-mail link in the right margin letting me know what page is missing.

Also, as a result of this server crash, I’ve completely lost any e-mail that you might have sent over the past couple days— so if you sent me anything important, send it again now that the mail server is up and running again.

Finally…Athens, Georgia has upgraded imagery on Google Earth. It’s still not the highest resolution possible, but it’s still much better than what it used to look like!

Here’s a screen capture, just for proof:

For what it’s worth, it’s upgraded on Google Maps, too.

OK, I’m going to confess, first of all: this is all the result of my own stupidity. Now that that’s out of the way…

I had a bottle of water in my bookbag today, because it’s so easy to get dehydrated in this heat. In fact, I’ve been doing this quite often recently.

My digital camera and graphing calculator, admittedly both very old devices that were bound to stop working eventually, were also in the same bag.

I’m sure you can see what’s coming next from a mile away.

Somehow the cap on the bottle of water managed to come undone during the course of the day.

So yeah. My calculator’s screen is now too fogged up to actually be visible, and it’s likely that the board is shorted out as well. My camera seems to be under the delusion that the mode switch is set to ‘preferences’ even when it’s not, and the arrow keys move the cursor on that screen in completely random directions. Gahh! Maybe letting them dry off for a bit will make things miraculously work again, as happened with the digital clock that I managed to completely drench a couple years back.

My PowerBook, on the other hand, was in the other pocket of the bookbag. It survived, power cord and all. Yay for something not going horribly wrong.

Edited about 15 minutes later to add: The camera is miraculously working properly again. Whoa. Not bad, especially for a camera that’s almost 7 years old, heh! The calculator’s screen is still too fogged up to be legible, though.

To get between Athens, Georgia, and the Atlanta airport (which also serves as a station on Atlanta’s MARTA rail system), Greyhound is $40 round-trip, and involves a transfer that makes the trip take about 3 hours each way. There’s also a direct shuttle to the airport, but it’s $40 each way.

Just for clarification, this is for a trip that is less than 80 miles.

And no, there’s no rail connection. The state government keeps talking about it, but it seems like it’s just going to be one of those things that’s forever under deliberation.

Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit ridiculous? It really does seem to me like non-drivers are being treated somewhat unfairly here… I have no problem with paying a slight premium for the service, but it really does seem like it should be either more affordable or more efficient than that.

Just a random inquiry to readers of this blog, prompted by my investigating minor changes to the bus routes around campus:

Which system map do you think is easier to read for UGA‘s campus bus routes, last year’s version, or this year’s version? (Warning: both are PDF links to UGA’s site.)

Honestly, I find last year’s easier to read! By using one line for several routes, there’s less visual clutter; readability is further enhanced by including the route names, not just color codes, on the lines. I’ve never been a fan of using color as the sole distinguishing factor for things; once you get past a certain number of colors, things get hard to distinguish even for non-colorblind folks. Speaking of which, here’s GraphicConverter’s simulation of how the legend appears to a colorblind rider… oh, the ambiguity!

The catchphrase of the week: “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.”

No, it’s not the deranged rambling of some homicidal maniac. Rather, it’s the horribly inaccurate misinterpretation of perfectly ordinary dictation by Microsoft’s speech recognition engine.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new Egg Freckles.

(via Digg)

Yes, it’s official. Athens, Georgia, will now have bus service running off-campus until 11 PM.

More detail from this Athens Banner-Herald article (registration or BugMeNot required):

Beginning Aug. 14, Athens Transit will start a new night service that will extend hours for many of the most popular routes.

Instead of stopping the routes 1 (North Avenue), 2 (East Athens), 5 (Beechwood/Baxter), 9 (Macon Highway/Five Points), 20 (Georgia Square Mall) and 25 (Lexington Road/Gaines School) around 7 p.m., buses will continue until 11 p.m., according to Margaret Pettus, a dispatcher for Athens Transit.

Most of you probably don’t even realize how elated I was to read this. I may very well be enjoying life in Athens starting this fall. This will also make me feel a whole lot less stressed, as I actually have time to decompress in my apartment after my assistantship before I go off about town…

Seriously, do phishing scammers even try anymore? I just received an obviously counterfeit notice claiming to be from “Brian BlackWell” of the “eBay Pearl Harbour Security Departament.”

So I was trying to head over to http://www.abcfamily.com/ to see about a TV show that someone had mentioned in a forum thread. But before the page could even finish loading, I was automatically whisked away to this page, telling me that I needed to upgrade my Flash plugin, with no means of escape.

Only one problem: I can’t download a newer version of Flash from the site they’ve linked; I upgraded to version 9 the day it was made available. Nor can I download an older version; Adobe no longer has version 8 or below listed on their download site, from what I can tell. And turning off Javascript is completely useless, as all I get then is a blank page.

Aren’t web developers paid to fix these sorts of things? Flash 9’s been in beta for a while now, so it’s not like its release was a sudden revelation or anything…

A trackback spammer spammed my blog yesterday with the link text of “0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34.” The text of the spam was even less enlightening— and I quote:

Rubber stamping card Insurance resources Distance education graduate programs Ringtone software mac Weight loss tablets Background and credit check Mortgage rates us Pixies ringtone Loan tools Mortgage buying Football parlay odds Experian credit union …

Yeah, not very enlightening at all. So I just had to make an exception to my normal rule of not following spam links just to find out exactly what these spammers found so spam-worthy about the Fibonacci series. The result? A fake ‘search engine’ result leading to a bunch of blackjack-related sites. Ah, the card game also known as 21! It sort of makes sense now.

Well, that is, it would make sense if the top results on Google for ’21’ had anything to do with blackjack, which they don’t. Maybe I’m severely underestimating the tenacity of these spammers, but I seriously doubt that, even if they try as hard as they can, these spammers will ever beat Century 21 Real Estate in PageRank for that term…