Saalon Muyo

I look at what search terms got people to my site and I see something like:

cat hair mustache

Blog spam has changed a lot since the last time I let trackbacks hit my site. In the days when I used Movable Type, spam catching software was so onerous to use that I just shut the whole comment/pingback/trackback thing off and didn’t look back. After my - I think - 3rd install of Wordpress on my 3rd provider I was looking around for a stat tracking plugin and the use of it required getting a Wordpress API key. This same API key, I discovered, could be used for Akismet, a spam-catching plugin that protected you from having to moderate or delete every false pingback and comment the net could throw at you.

So I installed it and let it run. The spam I used to get on my old blog was completely unrelated to my site. Lots of the same porn/Cialis/Instant Money things that showed up on Usenet and in your e-mail box. That’s still out there, but a new, odder type of spam has appeared.

You know how when you search for something on Google, a lot of what you get are those annoying link metasites that have a snip of content from real sites along with links to them? Well, there are more of those than I’d ever imagined on subjects like health food (not so odd) and mathematics (really, really strange). A lot of these don’t even have a ton of ads on them, making me wonder why they would install a bot and Wordpress just to capture newly posted articles so they can put up things like:

Saalon Muyo placed an observative post today on “Reading is Overrated” - A Portrait of a TV Guide PodcastHere’s a quick excerpt … com crew as they provide inside scoop, offbeat opinions and answers to your questions about the latest entertainment headlines, the hottest TV shows, the newest m ovies and the biggest celebrities. … It at times infuriating, it spent too long talking about empty reality shows like Big Brother and too little time on deeper dramas like The Wire, but it was a good t ime

Le What? Obserative? Why, thank you.

Anyway, they usually get the name of the site or - sometimes - the name of me, the poster, correct. Ok, they get my online nick right, not so much my real name. Today, on the post I just put up, I got this:

Klang wrote an interesting post today on

Here’s a quick excerpt

Klang. I am Klang. Yes, there is a blank after “on”, so I guess their bot is as unsure of my post’s subject as my readers are.

Couldn’t I at least have been Kang? Or even Krang?

I killed my website for a week without realizing it was down.  Go me.  Tried to edit my .htaccess file to keep mod_rewrite from taking over a particular directory, but instead managed to break everything except that directory.

Anyway we’re back to normal, here. In other words, back to my irregular posting schedule that’s kept this place from ever having an audience of any kind.

There are things out there that move us deeply.  Films and books and poetry and music that stick with us longer than all the others.  Some of them are considered classics by almost everyone, and some are so obscure that we feel a rush when someone else has even heard of them.  We all have our own reasons for why something matters to us.  It may be because of how it made us feel,  it may be because of what it meant to an art form that we loved, or it could be a mix of both.

I want to talk about the things that matter to me.  Art is a very special illusion, created both by the author and by the audience.  They show, and we take what they’ve given us and translate it as best we can.  Sometimes we fail to figure out what the artist is trying to show us, but occasionally their work becomes larger and more important because how we, personally, view it.

This is a space for me to discuss the illusions that matter most to me.  If I’m lucky, maybe I can show you something new, or maybe show you something old through new eyes.  But mostly, I’ll get to revisit those grand illusions that make me who I am.  That would be enough.

We live in a society just begging to lose every scrap of data to its name. The internet - our entire computer culture, in fact - is becoming the sole warehouse of more and more writing, poetry and knowledge every day. A disk drive is cheaper to store and easier to access than a hundred thousand books, but it’s vulnerable to catastrophic data loss in a way that scares me.

Spill a glass of wine on a page of your book and you lose that page. Delete the wrong 100kb of data on a hard drive and lose access to the entire thing. Forever. All it takes is a few corrupt sectors due to a head crash or a magnet or a partitioning-gone-wrong and you’ve lost everything on the drive. Everything. On a small scale, it’s nothing. But when you think how fragile our storage devices have become, it makes you wonder how much of what we’ve created is going to be left after the next big disaster. What will future historians make of our blank, unreadable magnetic platters?

What got me thinking this? Why, a catastrophic data loss, of course. Sometime last week our server company went to increase the size of our BSD jail at our request. At our invoices and paid for request. The operation went bad. The jail was corrupted. No backup had been made, either by us or by the company whose box our VPS sat on. Just like that, 3 gigabytes of data were gone.

We lost everything. The last backup we had was from over a year ago. Data recovery operations are ongoing by the server company, but it look bleak. Most likely, everything we had stored on that server is gone forever. For me, that means about a year of blogging posts, some web designs I was working on and a lot of time to rebuild. For the others the loss was a little more significant.

I decided that if I was going to lose some, I would lose it all. Rather than lament the loss of a year, I would just start anew. That way, I feel like I gain some power back over my loss. It’s an illusion, but it helps. A clean slate. Shin Saalon Muyo! is born.

What this new start will mean is unlcear. I can change things up a lot if I want to, but I’m not sure what I should change. Any ideas? Anything you think should be done here? Format changes? Some new blogging topics? More photographs? Fiction? Naked skiball?

The future is wide open. Meaning I’ll probably do exactly what I did before, just without the last 3 years of posts in the archives. Welcome to my own personal Dark Age. Now with 100% less sword fighting, and 99.9% less posts.