Dylan Greene dot com

I found Jeff Van Bueren's experiments with the US Postal Service to be hilarious...

Here's some examples:

• $1 bill. Sealed in clear plastic, with label attached with address and postage. Days to delivery, 6.
• $20 bill. Days to delivery, 4.
• Football. Days to delivery, 6. Male postal carrier was talkative and asked recipient about the scores of various current games. Carrier noted that mail must be wrapped.
• Rose. Postage and address were attached to a card that was tied to the stem. Delivery at doorstep, 3 days, beat up but the rose bud was still attached.
• Helium balloon. The balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker; no postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees, because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk. The balloon was refused; reasons given: transportation of helium, not wrapped.

From BigBrainBoy:

Not much to be said here. This does rule out the terrifying possibility of an unkillable zombie Bin Laden though. Does anyone know how to become an "expert" for the news media? Seems like an easy job.

The Rasterbator... don't let it'sname turn you off. This free web-based tool takes your photos blows them up be poster-sized. The software makes it easy to print the photo across many pages, which you then tape to your wall.

I think Stacey, my sister,should do this with some of her cool photos.

My brother's high school wrestling team, the Hammond Golden Bears, are undefeated. The match this Saturday has been denoted Senior Day in honor of the Senior wrestlers. My brother, Jared, is one those seniors.

My family and I will be there to cheer them on, and I mightget some pictures of his match online here.

...i'm not blogging often enough.

Okay okay... I've been busy.

Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others have decided that the new best way to prevent comment spam is to use an HTML tag that will prevent Google (and other search engines) from following links that could be spam links.

That new tag works as so:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

When indexing sites, this will prevent Google and others from "following" these links. Normally following those links helps a site's PageRank, which makes those sites appear higher in search results. The theory is that if spammers aren't getting their PageRank improved, then they will stop spamming blogs. Ha!

My prediction is that this change will not prevent comment spam because of the following issues:

1. The text of the spam messages will still be indexed by search engines.
2. Humans will still see the the spam messages.
3. Humans will still be able to follow the spam links.
4. Most importantly: Spammers can still post spam messages.

In short, all this does is make life a little easier for Google. Their PageRank system, which might just be flawed, has been abused and blamed for the onslaught of comment spam. Now they have an out - an excuse to to say it's not their fault anymore. I'm all for better search results in Google (ever try to search for a specific hotel?), but their solution simply does not prevent comment spam.

What do I recommend?

1. For automated spam bots: To prevent bots from posting spam comments, I require JavaScript. When a human user clicks the Submit button, JavaScript to renames field names before the comment is submitted to the server. Fields are unique named every time the page loads, and the server will only post comments when it gets the field name it is expecting. This prevents the automated spam attacks because the software spammers are not able to predict the field names.
2. For manually entered spam comments: I have basic spam filtering mechanism similar to many email spam filters. It looks for common spam words, URLs, and topics, and prevents those messages from being posted.
3. Either way, I have a RSS feed which shows me whenever a spam comment is attempted, along with IP address and other information so I can track the progress, and watch for false positives (real comments that the system thought were spam), and easily ban IP's of known spammers.

Something important to me is that my solutions stop comment spam without requiring any extra effort from my users, Some sites now require registration or a CAPTCHA input to add a comment. I feel that this is just an unnecessary pain which prevents people many busy people adding their feedback. I also feel that the links in comments are often important enough that search engines should follow them, therefor always putting a nofollow tag will ultimately be unhelpful to those small sites that should get a higher PageRank.

And most importantly, unlike the nofollow "solution" from Google, my recommendations can actually prevent spam comments from appearing on sites, and that's what we all want, right?

Here's a bunch! There's one more group - the big well-known companies like Samsung, LG, HP, Microsoft, and Sony. Those photos will go up tomorrow night. I've added captions to tons of photos so that you can get a good idea of what we saw in Vegas. Enjoy!

As Murphy's Law would have it, I'm having trouble getting my laptop online. It worked before we left for CES, but when we got back I was unable to get online. I have another 150 photos to put online from booths such as BenQ, HP, Runco, Creative, and more.

Today we were expecting some rain but instead we're getting snow! Maybe that's why the internet connection isn't working well - I'm using a satellite internet connection which may be effected by the weather. It's also taking all day to upload the photos - upload speeds are pretty slow.

I'm uploading the photos from Bill Gate's keynote now. I'll have my commentary with the photos. We're leaving now for day 1, and I'll have photos uploaded here tonight hopefully.

CES begins tonight with a keynote from Bill Gates. He's expected to announce a new version of the Windows Mobile operating system found on most PDAs and Smartphones, the new Microsoft anti-spyware software, and perhaps a few other surprises. Rumors point to no XBOX 2 announcment just yet.

I'll be heading over there soon, but incase you need your CES fix now, here's some sites with some great information:

• Engadget.com
• Gizmodo.com
• LostRemote.com

I'll be taking a lot of photos and posting them here each night.