Here’s one I won’t be trying to make: black pudding ice cream.

There’s a chance you may not know what black pudding is, in which case black pudding ice cream sounds reasonable. Before you look it up, and before I tell you, this tidbit may give you some idea how odd this is: “the firm company had experimented adding black puddings to their basic ice cream mix but found a base with mustard added made a better flavour.” They need to add mustard to their ice cream base to make the black pudding more palatable. What’s that tell you about this stuff?

The company justifies the bizarre combination by pointing out “the advent of bacon and egg flavour down south.” That’s south England, not the South of the United States where, actually, bacon and egg ice cream might be kind of popular.

Wondering what black pudding is? See for yourself at Answers.com. Not clear enough? How about a picture at Flickr? The comment sums it up.

I think this would be worse than Chef Sakai’s trout ice cream from Iron Chef America.

Maya on the rug

John Deurbrouck has a magnificent page introducing programming Photoshop via .NET. Not only does he explain the basics clearly and simply, he wrote a program to map all those four-character CharIDs (those things that litter the ScriptListener output) to their corresponding enum names in the PhotoshopTypeLibrary.PSConstants enum — you’ll be able to write much more maintainable code than just translating the output of ScriptListener as I’ve been doing out of laziness.

This is a fantastic find and encourages me to go back and play around with programming Photoshop some more.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about referral spammers and how they keep hitting my site for no benefit. I’ve recently run into another problem: on my current trend, I’m going to start hitting my monthly bandwidth cap on this account. Since I’m not interested in paying more money for more bandwidth, I started looking into things.

I discovered that the primary culprits — responsible for about two-thirds of the bytes used by this account — were bots coming to harvest email addresses. I definitely don’t want to pay any money to support that.

I made several changes on the site in the past week and it looks like I’ve delayed the bandwidth problems for a while.

• I moved all my feeds — both the main feed and the per-category RSS feeds — to FeedBurner. I set up a special set of pages just for FeedBurner’s service to access, then redirected the old pages to the Feedburner feeds with an HTTP 301. That had a big effect.
• Category pages. I also moved the category links one step away from every page. Instead of a list of the categories and their RSS feeds on the sidebar on each page, there’s just a link to the categories. I found that the robots were visiting my recent entries and following the links from those entries one level deep. My category pages are big and every request for one of those used a lot more bandwidth than a request for a normal post, or even for the main page. And it also looks like very few “real” people were using those category links.
• Blocking IP addresses. In what may be a losing battle, but which has also given me a big bandwidth savings, I’ve started to block the IP addresses of the spam robots. It seems that they’re using zombie machines that they’ve taken over, but they don’t respond with new sets of IP addresses for as much as a week after I’ve blocked the current sets, so that gives me some time and means I don’t have to go block IP addresses constantly.
• Fix 404s. For the longest time, I never bothered setting up a robots.txt file or a favicon.ico. I did a bit of math, and realized that the 404 page I was returning was bigger than a simple one-bit icon or a small text file. So now I have those two features. The bandwidth savings there will be miniscule, but it made me feel better anyway.

There are a few downsides.

• Categories. Categories are no longer automatic in dasBlog. When I create a new category, I have to go through additional steps: (1) Create the FeedBurner feed; (2) Modify the switch statement in my redirect page to handle the new category and FeedBurner feed; (3) Add the category link and RSS link to the categories page.
• IP Blacklist. As time goes on, it’s possible that I will block legitimate IP addresses once people regain control of their computers. I’m not sure how to avoid this, other than analyzing my logs to find one-off 404s from addresses that are in the blacklist and try allowing those addresses to return again. If it’s a real person, though, the chances are very good that they’ll never come back after that first block. It’s one to think about but, for now, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
• FeedBurner. I’m deeply committed to FeedBurner now. What will I do if they go under? Like Kent, I expect I would lose the bulk of my readers since I wouldn’t be able to put a redirect in place. This may require some further thinking but, again, I’m happy with their service for now.

I learned a lot about Microsoft’s excellent Log Parser although lately I’ve started to type “select div(add(sum(sc-bytes),sum(cs-bytes)),mul(1024,1024)) as MB” in my sleep….

I’ll write more about Log Parser and the basic queries I used if there’s any interest.

In the ongoing list of amazing things carried on an Xtracycle, the author of the Oil is for sissies blog just hauled 132 pounds of dog food from the pet store on his brand-new Surly-based Xtracycle. He’s got pictures.

Although I won’t be buying one of the shiny new full-frame, 13-megapixel Canon 5D cameras any time soon, I’m still glad I have resisted the temptation to purchase any reduced-image circle lenses. It means my very widest lens isn’t so wide on my 20D, but it also means that I’m not stuck with any lenses that now — definitively — are consumer grade and will depreciate accordingly.

The Fat Cyclist is a great writer. He finished the Leadville 100 for the ninth time this weekend and his description of the race is entertaining even if you don’t like endurance mountain bike racing. Even if you don’t like cycling.

There’s more than just the humor — although that’s a big part: he doesn’t spend time talking about equipment and technique. Instead, he focuses on emotion and people. He will let someone else go on and on about their fancy bike. His writing isn’t devoid of technical issues, but he only uses them to season his main points.

It’s a good lesson for me and photography. I’ve written before about the popularity of pictures of people but I probably drew the wrong conclusion. It’s no so much that the pictures are of people, but that the pictures are about people. Even pictures with no people in them.

I’ve been intrigued by competitive eating since I first heard of the diminutive Takeru Kobayashi and his feats at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.

His latest feat: 83 steamed dumplings in 8 minutes. These look like gyoza or shumai.

Another competitor intrigues me, though. She finished second in this year’s contest and she’s much smaller than “Koby”: Sonya Thomas. My favorite record of hers is hard-boiled eggs: she ate 65 in six minutes, forty seconds. Remember the scene in Cool Hand Luke when Paul Newman’s character eats 50? It takes him an hour.

Update (2005-08-14 19:20 PDT)
He ate 100 pork buns in twelve minutes today to win the overall competition.

I’ll play: J-Walk blog link experiment.

Last night, we went to Fred Meyer and used the U-Scan to check out. At the end of the transaction, it asked whether we had a Fred Meyer rewards card. We hadn’t heard about that before.

I looked it up just now, wondering whether we could have gotten any better prices. Nope — this is a rebate card. But it’s a rebate card with some pretty strict rules.

• Rebates are broken down into 13–week cycles.
• You must earn 100 or more points in a 13–week cycle to qualify for a rebate.
• Each point “costs” $5. There are a number of items that don’t qualify, too, like jewelry, fuel, prescriptions, alcohol, tobacco, postage stamps, gift cards, and lottery tickets (among others).
• If you’ve spent $500 or more that quarter, you will receive a rebate that converts each 20 points into $1.
• This rebate won’t be cash, but a coupon good for future purchases at Fred Meyer.

Provided that you spend at least $500 every 3 months at Fred Meyer, you’ll get a 1% discount on the things you purchase.

1% is reasonable, but they’ve got that minimum spending limit and amounts don’t roll over to the next quarter. Spend just $499.99 and you’re out of luck.

I think the Citibank Dividend Platinum, with a 5% cash rebate at supermarkets, drugstores, and gas stations, looks much better, even with its annual rebate cap of $300. And it’s not limited to just one store like the Fred Meyer rebate card.