Eight Feet Deep

I don’t want to infer that Scooter Libby is guilty even before he has been indicted. But I thought I would share an observation. Don’t you think someone named “Scooter” might just have a hard time in the joint?

Scientists are studying ‘eight feet deep’ for signs of intelligent life.

As I have said here before, I like my little StatCounter feature not for its recording of page clicks (I’ve had it for three months and only 5,600 page visits!) It is what the tool tells me about visitors that I find the most valuable. I can tell — most of the time at least — from where a visitor hails. It lets me know if my friends are visiting, or it just confounds the hell out of me wondering who that is reading about Beaumont, Texas, from Belarus.

Over the last couple of days I noticed an unusual amount of activity coming from servers at the University of Washington in Seattle. When I say unusual, I mean a bunch of different posts are being looked at. And these visits appear to occur about once every two hours or so. When I dug a little deeper I noticed that these visits were generally less than five seconds. I finally realized that something is pretty weird here because I’m not going to have any fan/stalkers who stay less than five seconds. Or so I hope.

So I decided I would try to find out just what the heck was going on. I e-mailed the head of the Computer Science Department at University of Washington. And he put me in touch with a fellow overseeing some Web research named Dr. Steve Gribble. Steve e-mailed me back and explained that his students are trying to determine where evil content lurks on the Internet and why.

“In a nutshell, we’re studying Web content to try to analyze it for potentially malicious content, such as executables that contain spyware or Web pages that perform drive-by downloads,” Steve wrote. “To do the study, we’ve been crawling various regions of the Web (including blogs such as yours), and analyzing the content for known threats. Our goal is to figure out where in the Web the “bad stuff” is, and to analyze it to understand the diversity and nature of the threat.”

So far they are finding most sites (including mine) are safe, but adds: “there are clusters of bad things out there as well … “

It is nice to know that this blog is doing something other than just taking up cyberspace. Glad to be of help. Go Huskies! By the way, one of my favorite all-time headlines was for a basketball game between the University of Washington women and the women from Oregon. It said something like:

“Husky women stomp Lady Ducks”

“Did you know I also invented the hand?”

It took some long hours, some trial and error as well as some rapid-fire expletives, but I finally have my new operating system installed along with an updated browser. I had not envisioned this task being one akin to a visit in Hell. My vision of Hell, by the way, is being tied up with bungee cord and enduring seven straight days of dialogue between Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin about the failures of the Clinton administration.

But everything seems to be running pretty well now and I have these pretty little buttons on my Yahoo toolbar that actually seem to believe I am going to click on one sooner or later. And I may. Only 56 more hours until I’m a half-century old. I might as well live a little.

On those days when all works well with the Internet and information for which you would have waited for weeks back in the old days flows freely like ice-cold water from a mountain spring, you just can’t help but give thanks to the creator of this wonderful invention. That’s right — I’m talking about Al Gore, inventor of the Internet. Thanks Al! And thanks so much for also inventing WiFi and Meals Ready to Eat. They both came in handy during Hurricane Rita.

UPDATE: I found that I desperately needed Internet Explorer 6, which I finally was able to load after dumping some files. Now I can italicize and embolden to my heart’s content.

It is way past my bedtime but I am stumped and somewhat miffed, which is either pronounced miffed or miff-ed. Either way I am a little agitated. I installed an updated operating system this afternoon, from Windows NT4 to Windows 2000. It’s a long story why. Just trust me. When I go to my Blogger Dashboard, which is where I post these nuggets, I no longer have a toolbar. This means, I would have to go to some outside means to post photos and I would have to use, e-gods, so-called “keyboard shortcuts” to italicize, boldicize, exorcise or jazzercize my blog posting. And you know I can’t have that. It’s going to be a major pain in the ass if I don’t figure it out soon, as far as blogging goes, because I will have to use my laptop and it is just … well, we got to figure out what is wrong here. If you have a clue e-mail me at eightftdeep@hotmail.com. And if you are a healer, then please do the following:
You put your right hand in,
You put your right hand out;
You put your right hand in,
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey-Pokey,
And you turn yourself around.

That’s what it’s all about. Whatever ‘it’ is.
Sorry, even the damn keyboard shortcuts aren’t working so I am italic-less. He’p me!