Home » blogging (Page 3)

Category Archives: blogging

About That Glacier

Posted on by

Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina

I have been asked by friends about that glacier shown atop my blog page. It is the Perito Moreno Glacier in the State of Santa Cruz in Argentina. Last year at this time, Martine and I were there on our vacation. In a country full of natural beauty, Perito Moreno is one of the top attractions. It is near the city of El Calafate, from where one can take bus tours that allow one to view the glacier from a number of viewpoints, including from a boat that travels close to its edge.

The man after whom the glacier is named was a 19th century Argentinean naturalist who was the South American equivalent of John Muir. Francisco Pascasio Moreno (nicknamed Perito, or “expert”) was born in Buenos Aires in 1852 and died in 1919. He was largely responsible for the creation of several Patagonian national parks and is memorialized in the La Plata Museum of Natural History.

One of the interesting facts about the Perito Moreno Glacier, other than its massive size, is that it is one of three Andean glaciers that are still growing in size—at a time when glaciers all over the world are retreating or even disappearing. The lake that the glacier melt drains into is Lago Argentino, which is flanked on its western boundary by a number of glaciers, including the massive Upsala and the Spegazzini glaciers.

I will change the image up top eventually, but Martine and I have happy memories of our Argentina trip, and I wanted to be reminded of it every time I looked at Tarnmoor.Com.

A New Kind of Spam

Posted on by | 6 Comments

A New Kind of Spam That Caught Me Off Guard

In the last three months since I started posting at WordPress, I’ve discovered a new kind of Spam. At least WordPress labels it as Spam, and I go along with it. For every two legitimate comments I get, there are three generally favorable but wildly nonspecific comments that seem to be associated with commercial ventures on the Internet. My  guess is that it’s a plot to get a more favorable ranking for their own websites with Google.

Some few are “helpful,” such as those offering to help me get more visitors to my own little website here at Tarnmoor.Com. Curiously, my anti-malware program usually blocks their websites, so I can only assume they are helpful only in the sense that a pickpocket will attempt to lull you into a false sense of security.

So if you have some general comment of praise without mentioning any specifics to show that you’ve actually read what I’ve written, your comment may well be deleted by me as possible Spam.

It’s such a complicated world in which I have to be so ruthless with so many (over 160 to date) favorable comments completely out of the blue.

You see, I don’t really want thousands of visitors a day to my website. I have nothing to sell. I do, however, have some sort of compulsion to express myself. That’s why I posted for over a year on Blog.Com, a Portuguese blog host whose total membership could probably fit into a telephone booth. (You remember those, don’t you?)

 

Little Victories

Posted on by

Little by little, I am getting the hang of WordPress. There are a lot more design options than in Multiply, but there is also more help and a relatively logical organization of the material. That makes a big difference. The organization at Yahoo! 360 was rich, but totally cockamamie. At Blog.Com and Multiply, there wasn’t much help to be gotten; and what there was seemed more oriented toward software engineers.

The heat wave in Southern California—indeed, across much of the United States—continues unabated. I would like to be more active, but the monsoonal clouds indicate a sharp uptick in the humidity, and nights are uncomfortable. Even more so because our 60-year-old building is uninsulated, and we have no air conditioning.

Oh, well, this too shall pass.