Things I Learned Today

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Green screen! Once you have lights and a background stand, the next step is inevitable.

  • No wrinkles in the green screen!
  • Light the green screen evenly, but don’t obsess over it.
  • Hair must be glued down
  • If Photoshop annoys you, you should try GIMP. Photoshop will seem a lot better after that.
  • As you can tell from the following image, you really should know what background you’re going to put your talent into before you shoot. Otherwise you get Utahraptors with hard light hitting from above, and a victim lit softly from the side.

Jerry with Utahraptors

Are they about to kill me, or are they just admiring my shirt?

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Ubiquity Solutions: Evil or merely Overwhelmed?

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Note: Wow. This got long, and somewhat technical. For today, some of you might want to look at cute pictures of cats instead. I won’t mind.

I noticed the other day a huge rush of spam comments from ip addresses starting 108.62. I did a lookup and found that the whole block is owned by an outfit called Nobis Technology Group. Most of the addresses also mentioned Ubiquity Server Solutions. They are a massive hosting and colocation service. Basically, they supply the hardware and infrastructure, and their customers set up Web servers and whatnot.

Some of those customers (or the customers of the customers) send out a lot of spam. A truckload. In some cases the customer of a customer of a customer might have been lax and his server got hacked and turned into an unwitting spambot. In other cases the people using Ubiquity’s servers are likely institutional spammers.

Brief aside: Why does comment spam even exist in the first place? Google plays a big role there, with a number called Page Rank. Part of Page Rank (at least historically) was that more links pointing to a page make it land higher in Google searches. So, the spam comment isn’t to get readers of a blog to buy Doc Marten shoes, it’s to get that particular site to land higher in Google’s results when someone searches for them.

The thing is, Google doesn’t publish page rank numbers anymore, and they steadfastly maintain that the comment spamming actually hurts your results in a search. That hasn’t stopped many companies from promising higher sales and taking people’s money in return for smearing their name all over the Internet.

Google could go a long way toward eliminating this sort of spam by publishing page rank again, only now include the amount the rank was hurt by spamming activities. My shoe salesman above is not going to keep paying when Google shows the opposite of the desired result.

So anyway, using CloudFlare’s threat control, I blocked an entire range of ip addresses allocated to Ubiquity’s servers. Then another. I didn’t like this solution; I had no idea how many legitimate potential blog visitors I was blocking. After reading more, the answer surprised me.

The folks at Ubiquity point out that they have terms of service that prohibit using their infrastructure to spam people. When I sent them a complaint, they were professional and courteous. They asked for more specifics, then said they’d sent a complaint to the culprit. Only after they’d asked what my domain name was.

Question: Did they send a message to the culprit saying ‘stop spamming people’ or did it say ‘stop spamming that guy?’

On other blogs where people have ranted about Ubiquity, representatives of the company have responded with measured, rational responses, explaining what a huge uphill battle it is for them, and asking the community to keep sending reports when spam comes from their range. Those reports make it possible for them to put sanctions on clients who are in violation of their terms of service. It is a huge problem and not easily solved.

And yet. Other hosting companies don’t seem as bad, from where I’m sitting.

One of those responses from a Ubiquity representative threw out the argument (I’m paraphrasing from this) “While it’s theoretically possible to monitor all data to weed out the 500MB/s of spam from the 2GB/s of legitimate traffic, that would be really expensive and we wouldn’t be able to compete in this market.” My first takeaway: they think 20% of the traffic from their servers is unethical. Wow. Now, that’s reading a lot into a statement like that, so take it with a grain of salt. Also, it was in a comment to a blog post and may well have been a typo in the first place.

But still, it makes me wonder. And a request coming in to a server for data (legitimate traffic like a request to load a Web page) is fundamentally different than robots on a server sending unrequested data OUT (a high percentage of which will be spam), and sending emails (almost all of which will be spam). A small random sampling of GET and PUT messages outbound from their data centers would probably smoke out the most egregious violators pretty quickly, and not require a lot of hardware to implement. (Not sure how I feel about this from a privacy standpoint.)

Once I got the message that Ubiquity had sent their complaint to the spammer involved, I unblocked that range. Sure enough, in a few minutes more spam came through. I sent the report and back up went the blockade. In my casting around the Internet I read assertions that were not contradicted (so must be true!) that said that NO legitimate traffic would come from those IP’s anyway; they were the addresses of big servers and not IP’s that would appear when Joe User is surfing. So there’s no downside to blocking them. (I’ll put the blocked ranges in a comment below, if you want to follow suit.)

Although, as I put the blockade back up, I had a thought: If I complain about every violation, and cc Google, then the cost of NOT clamping down more effectively on the host’s clients goes up. At some point, if enough people complain enough times, the cost of fixing the problem at the source becomes less than the cost of continuing to do business they way they are now.

That goes not just for Ubiquity, but for all hosts, and for Google and the other search engines. There is no incentive for them to play nice unless we create one.

Yep, I’m proposing fighting spam with a deluge of emails, and I’m probably too lazy to do it effectively.

Of course, this blog is hosted at a data center that almost inevitably will have spammers. Do I want to pay more for my own hosting because my data center has to install a bunch of spam detectors? In my case, I’d be willing to pay a bit more to know my host is doing the right thing, but I think I’d be in the minority. That makes it really difficult for one host to unilaterally decide to take the high road. And you’d be alienating about 20% of your customers, if Ubiquity’s off-the-cuff numbers are an indication.

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CloudFlare = Awesome

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So by now you’ve probably heard of “the cloud”, but you might be vague on what the cloud actually is. That’s OK, the cloud is by nature vague. In short, it’s just a name that applies to what the Internet has been trying to do for a long time: information without location. You put a photo up in the cloud, and it’s just “out there”, not on any particular server, not in any particular data center, not in any given country. Could be there are copies of it all over the place, and when someone wants to look at the picture, The Cloud serves up the copy closest (in Internet miles) to the person who wants to see it.

This requires a lot of expensive equipment. Google and Amazon are the biggies in the cloud, but there are others as well, who, for a price, will host your data in a ‘cloudy’ way. In return, people around the world can load your stuff faster.

This humble blog is in the cloud. When you load a page here, roughly half the time the request doesn’t even reach my server (protected in a bunker somewhere in Nevada), but is instead served up from one of CloudFlare’s data centers around the globe. It’s pretty sweet, and has reduced the strain on my server (not that it’s working that hard anyway) while improving the Muddled Experience. The cost for this service? Nothing. It’s free.

I totally win.

CloudFlare also blocks a few hundred spammers each week, before my server has to go to the trouble of blocking them. They compile usage stats and provide other interesting information, and cut the load time for the blog about in half.

They’re a friendly bunch, too; when I suggested upgrades to their interface they wrote back with specific questions as well as thanks. A site they hosted was attacked from China a while back, and it brought down part of their network. They were right up front about the issue and what they were doing about it, and advised people on how to ‘de-cloud’ until the crisis was over. Not everyone was happy, but I was impressed. Soon after reading those communications I signed up.

How can they offer something like this for free? It’s the upsell, of course; they offer premium services. In addition they create a platform for other companies to sell stuff to me. Some of those services are pretty cool, too, though I haven’t dipped my toe in those waters yet (for instance, there’s a free service that checks your site now and then to see if it’s been hacked).

Overall, I can’t think of any reason NOT to use CloudFlare. Check ’em out and tell them Jerry sent you!

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Here’s an Area where I can Improve my Writing

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My buddy over at middlerage tipped me off to this article, about a book my sweetie and I agreed we’d want to read before seeing the movie: Kathryn Stockett’s ‘The Help’ Turned Down 60 Times Before Becoming a Best Seller.

Whatever comes to her now she has earned and then some. Me, I’ve been rejected exactly once this year. That’s not how you succeed as a writer.

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Kafka’s Playing Quarterback!

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Suddenly I’m an Eagles fan, just for letting me type the above.

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Ahh, Football

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I’m in a bar and apparently the preseason starts today. I’d say that this mattered not at all, but I do have this observation: On what I think was the Raiders’ first play of the first game of the preseason, there was a fight.

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OK, This is a Little Spooky

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I guess I knew this intellectually already, but reading this article really brought it home. We all know that info we post on Facebook and other social media sites is more or less public, no matter what security settings you use. The stuff just leaks out. Your birthday, gender, and zip code is enough to uniquely identify most of us in this country. Once someone has that, they can start to gather more information about you and share it with their friends.

But there’s another piece of information that most of us have shared all over the Internet, which when combined with the above, gives unscrupulous (or are they?) enterprises the ability to gather vast amounts of information about what you do even when you’re not using a computer.

What nugget of information is that? Your face. If you’ve used modern photo software, you may already have noticed that it’s getting pretty good at recognizing not just where faces are in your pictures, but whose faces they are.

Let’s say I own a big store, something like Target. I already have security cameras scattered liberally around the place. Imagine that now I can buy a list of faces in the zip codes close to my store. Suddenly I’m able to keep a record of which departments in my store each customer visits. The next time they come back, I can put a tease on a video screen as they walk in, tailored to their purchasing habits, or I can alert security if the person is a suspected shoplifter.

Of course, your friendly neighborhood government can use technology like that, too, and they already have your picture on file.

What to do about it? Realistically, nothing. The train has left the station, and there’s no calling it back. We could try to pass laws about this stuff, but they’d be pretty much impossible to enforce. You could try to scour the Internet and remove every picture in which you’re identified, but good luck with that.

The only counter-strategy I can think of off the top of my head is misinformation — tagging a whole bunch of different faces with your id, to create uncertainty over who the “real” you is. That only goes so far, however; once your face and credit card are linked at a retailer you’re done. It’s probably time to coach our children to not make the same mistake we did, instead to take a page out of Harlean’s book. She is a fiction. The Internet is no place for real people.

Coda:
The front panel of the article linked to above is about breaking the security on iPhones. It’s worth noting that while the article is correct, the same advice applies to anything protected with a password. The obvious thing missed in the article is that most people don’t put any password on their phone, rendering the rest of the warning moot. I use an Android, and my screen lock thingie has even fewer permutations than a 4-digit number. I’m not out to stop the pros; I put the lock on the phone when I read that California has ruled that searching a phone doesn’t require a warrant, even though searching a briefcase does. My lock is to stop prying during routine traffic stops. I don’t have anything to hide, but it’s important that everyone protects privacy, not just people with something to hide.

A closing note about passwords:

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I’m a Lucky Guy

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We were sitting around tonight when my sweetie said, “I want to make cookies.” And she did. And they were good.

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Mmm… Honey

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I just installed a honey pot on this site. The idea of a honey pot (or honey trap) is to create a tempting target that attracts wrongdoers, but once they put their hand in the honey pot they leave sticky fingerprints everywhere they go.

In Internet terms, the honey is a seemingly-innocent email address placed on a Web site, invisible to humans but easy for robots to find. When the spam harvesters scrape the email address off the site and use it, both the harvester and the spammer are caught and blacklisted, which reduces their ability to run robots and get their mail through.

The more people who participate, the more trouble spammers have spotting the honey pots. How can you help? Even if you don’t have control of your site or run a blog through one of the major services, you can pitch in. Go to Project Honey Pot and sign up. You can provide invisible-to-humans links to honey pots on other sites, if nothing else, and it doesn’t cost you diddley-doo.

If you click on the “swag” link in the header, you will see that they could also use a graphic designer. I imagine a spam-bear with his head stuck in a honey pot. How you communicate that it’s a spam-bear and not an ordinary bear I leave as an exercise for the visually talented.

Once Project Honey Pot compiles its list of villains and ne’er-do-wells, what happens next? Many major services use the list, and I also use a program called Bad Behavior which blocks blacklisted bots and spammers from reaching my site. Recently I added another layer called CloudFlare which is awesome enough for me to devote a separate episode to it. So, you have that to look forward to.

In the meantime, I encourage you to join the crusade to make life more difficult for those who want to use the Internet for evil.

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Impressions of Lion

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So just to be clear, even though I work for Apple I have no special access to the plans of the hardware and OS guys. If I did have access, I wouldn’t be able to post speculations like these. All this is the same guesswork you can do if you stop and look at your operating system as it evolves.

Last night I installed the latest Mac operating system (‘Lion’) on my work machine. We’ll see how that goes before I put it on anything more important. A couple of things struck me immediately, however, that I think may be indicators of where Apple is heading.

1) No scroll bars. Well, barely. There’s something scrollbar-like that appears when you move stuff around, but there’s a fundamental shift in the UI going on here. In the past you worked the thumb on the scrollbar to move the content in its window. When you worked the scroll wheel on your mouse, you were in your mind moving the scrollbar thumb. Now, in your head you grab the content of the window and move it around – which goes in the opposite direction as the scroller thumb. So the wheel on your mouse works ‘backwards’ in Lion; before you were moving the scroll thumb down, now you’re moving the content down, which moves the thumb up.

Opinion: I’m ok with this overall, but there are times when there is no indication that you can scroll. There are also cases where there’s no indication that the corner of a window can be dragged to resize the window. I’m not comfortable with designs that presuppose you know stuff.

2) Bold prediction: the magic mouse is Apple’s last major mouse. It’s a mouse/touchpad hybrid, bringing people closer to the touchpad replacement. The company that brought the mouse to the consumer will also be the first to take it away. Interestingly, the company that only put one button on its mouse will be hanging its hat on a very complicated set of finger gestures and combinations. They can do a hell of a lot, and they’re intuitive, if you already know them. (I just accidentally discovered the gesture for switching tabs in my browser — only, shit! It’s not switching tabs, it’s like using the back arrow. And there’s a bug! I almost lost this entire episode!)

Opinion: with the iPad and whatnot, multiple-finger user interfaces are here. I should have applied for a patent fifteen-plus years ago when I thought about making touch screen interfaces with actual knobs to turn and stuff like that. If I’d had this blog back then it would have shown up in the Get-Poor-Quick pages. But I didn’t, and now that invention belongs to other people. Because they built it, and I only talked about it.

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I’m Sure it’s a Coincidence

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As an employee of your favorite fruit-flavored gadget company, I find myself noticing some interesting things about the way my employer promotes itself. For instance, there are the buildings of Infinite Loop. There are signs at the entrances to the campus, but on the buildings there are no logos.

No logos on any of the other buildings Apple occupies. No logos on the big gray busses that glide up and down the freeways, taking workers to and from Cupertino. (The busses have WiFi, of course.) No logos on the shuttles to the railway stations or on the bikes you can check out to travel between buildings.

You’d never know, driving on I-280, that you were passing through a company that has more cash on hand than the Unites States.

So why wouldn’t a company as intent on spreading its brand take advantage of putting their logo on stuff they already own? I think because it would almost become a joke in iCupertino. There would be an apple on every damn thing in the city. HP used to have a big presence here, but now Apple’s new mother ship will be built on their old campus. (Business note: few places in the world will have greater demand for sandwiches and beer than the one-block radius around the new Apple campus.) Seagate’s here, and plenty of other companies, and they put up the signs. Apple just is.

But none of that is why I sat down to write this little episode. I’m watching baseball right now, and an ad for the iPad 2 came on. It’s a nice, friendly ad, and one of the little vignettes it plays is of a very small child writing his first words with his finger.

The camera moves over the iPad (2!) as the child completes the ‘n’ in ‘lion’. His penmanship is pretty good. (I know it’s a ‘he’ because he’s wearing blue.)

Of course, Lion is also the name of the operating system Apple released last week. Coincidence, I’m sure.

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An End? Really?

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Just a quick note to those who might have been waiting to start reading Allison to make sure there would be an end. I understand completely; I rail consistently about stories with no clear scope yet they expect me to join in and follow every word. And when you throw in my irregular update schedule, all the more reason to not get caught up.

I’m happy to announce that Allison in Anime: White Shadow is wrapped up in a neat little (anime-style-inscrutable) package. It reads like a not-bad first draft; there are plenty of opportunities I see looking back, but overall I feel pretty good about it.

I hope you enjoy.

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AiA: White Shadow

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The end of the first chapter!

You know, I’m not going to give a synopsis at this point. The episode is the end of chapter 1. Chapter 2 is really going to kick Seiji’s ass. So the monks have foretold. I’m glad to be done with this chapter, and reading back it’s not a bad first draft of a story. There’s lots I’d like to go back and change, but that’s not how this exercise works.

If, like me, you wait until the serial is concluded before you start reading, now is your chance to get to know Allison. I finally paid off something I set up long, long ago. It feels pretty good.

Blind! Allison fell to her knees, shaking, her stomach threatening to turn inside-out. She gasped for air, reeling and disoriented. Only moments ago, an eternity, she had been so close. Close to everything, almost one with the pattern beneath the chaos that governed the universe, the harmony of the world. Desperately she reached with her mind, tried to rejoin the communion, but found only blackness.

“Shoot them all,” she heard Lancia say.

“Allison!” Seiji’s voice, maybe. They were all going to die. Because of her. She heard the sound of guns being raised. You’d think they wouldn’t make so much noise. One of the soldiers chambered a round with a distinctive snick-snack. Funny he hadn’t thought to do that earlier.

— You could not win. Not against me.

Allison almost wept with relief to feel even a tiny fraction of White Shadow still in her mind. Don’t kill them.

— They do not matter.

Allison tried to reach through White Shadow, to use it to connect to the world of information. She could almost hear the music, almost feel The Pattern when White Shadow hammered her consciousness back into her own head. Stunned, it was seconds before she could speak, then there was nothing to say.

“Wait,” she heard Lancia say, from far away.

Seiji stared defiantly into the eyes of the woman who had interrogated him earlier. His clenched teeth almost shot of sparks, and the vein in his forehead pulsed in an X. The soldiers raised their guns and paused for a pregnant moment.

“Wait,” the interrogator said. The soldiers hesitated a moment, then lowered their weapons.

Seiji glanced over to where Allison lay curled on the floor, moaning, knocking her head against the tile with a steady rhythm. “She needs help,” he said.

Interrogator Woman looked at Allison and made a face. “I don’t think there is help for her.”

“Who are you really?” Seiji asked.

The woman laughed softly. “So quaint,” she said. “He said ‘really’. Do you have any idea what that means, little boy? Does ‘really’ even exist?”

“Who are you?”

“I am everyone.”

“You’re not me.”

“Only because I don’t want to be.”

“Yeah, right.”

Seiji blinked and found himself looking at… himself. “Yeah, right.” his other self said. He blinked again and he was facing his interrogator once more. “There is a way you can live,” she said.

“All of us?”

“… most of you.”

“Then forget it.”

“Seiji, think for a moment. Your nobility is admirable, but nothing you do can save the American. You can choose to die, or you can choose to live. Neither choice will matter to her.”

“I choose to die,” Seiji said.

“I am sorry to hear that,” she said.

“Wait,” Kenzo said.

Ruchia opened her eyes and looked into his. So deep. So expressive. So purple. “You’re not really Kenzo,” she said.

He smiled, dimples forming on each cheek. “No. But is anyone? I can still make you happy.”

“Happier than he ever would,” she allowed.

Not-Kenzo chuckled deep in his throat. “I suspect you are right.”

Ruchia felt the heat rising to her cheeks.

“I wonder if you could do me a favor,” Not-Kenzo said.

His casual delivery put Ruchia on edge. “Maybe.”

“If you are helpful, I believe I can save your life.”

“What about my friends?”

“You do not have to worry about them.”

“No, but I choose to. What about my friends?”

“Each of you will be given the chance to be useful. Those who help me will live. Live very well, in fact.”

“What is it you want?”

“There is a key,” Not-Kenzo said. “The American has it. Not a physical key, but a code of sorts. A thought.”

“You want me to get it from her.”

“You need only make her think about it. We will do the rest.”

“Why should I?”

“Beyond saving your own life? If you help it would not be necessary to kill the American as well.”

“That’s not the same as saying you wouldn’t kill her.”

“The future is indeterminate.”

“Forget it!”

“You choose to die?”

“I choose to live by my principles.”

“Wait.”

The voice was a breathy whisper in Tasuke’s ear. “Good idea,” she said. She opened her eyes and looked down the muzzles of the rifles pointed at her.

“You wish to live?”

“Yeah, I think that sounds like a pretty good idea.”

“All you have to do is—”

“No.”

“You haven’t even heard wh—”

“If it starts with ‘All I have to do is’ then I’m not interested.”

“But—”

“Forget it.”

“Very well.”

All her friends were talking at once, but not to each other. It sounded like banter, the kind that came before violence. She glanced around the room, seeing with her eyes what only minutes before had been so complete inside her own head. There was only one door, and there were a lot of men with guns between her and it.

Lancia was the key. Before she could even think she launched herself at the woman who held all their lives in her hand. She drove her shoulder into the rib cage of the woman, lifting her off the floor and then piling her hard into the cold tile. Allison rolled and put her arm around Lancia’s throat. She started to squeeze. “Let my friends go,” she said.

“Very well,” Lancia said, perfectly calm. Allison squeezed harder.

“Shoot that one,” Lancia said, gesturing at Tasuki from where she lay.

“Wait!” Allison shouted but her voice was lost in the popping of firearms being discharged in a closed space. She couldn’t hear the screams of her friends as Tasuki’s chest exploded in a fountain of blood. The skinny girl convulsed and dropped to the floor.

Allison tightened her grip, wanting nothing more than to kill Lancia, no matter the consequences. At least keep her from saying anything else.

“Now that one,” Lancia said, this time pointing at Ruchia.

A bullet caught Ruchia in the throat, another in the forehead, and several in the torso. She fell and lay still.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Allison screamed. “No more! Please!” She didn’t have the strength to strangle her adversary anymore. She relaxed her grip but Lancia made no effort to rise. They lay in a tangle on the floor.

“You know what you must do,” Lancia said.

“No!” Seiji shouted. “Don’t give her anything! Damn—”

Lancia made a gesture and the soldiers cut down Seiji mid-curse, blood and gore coating the wall behind him. Allison was out of words. She just stared at the bodies of her friends and wept.

“You may as well shoot me, too,” Kaneda said.

“You belong to me,” Lancia said. She sighed. “Allison, I had hoped to be friends. Or at least partners. But that will never happen now.” She rolled away from Allison. “Shoot her,” she said.

“Noooo!” Kaneda shouted, even as the soldiers trained their weapons on Allison with a clatter. He threw himself on top of Allison as they opened fire, holding her, shielding her with his body. He jerked and twitched as the metal tore through his body, his face inches from hers. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. “In your arms,” he whispered, and died.

“Such a waste,” Lancia said. She looked at the captain of the soldiers. “Finish the job.”

Allison closed her eyes but she couldn’t erase the image of her friends lying dead around her. Her fault. Her doing. The bullet that took her life couldn’t come soon enough.

Only, this wasn’t her fault. She didn’t make White Shadow. She didn’t enslave the city. She didn’t give the order to shoot innocent kids. Anger stirred in her breast and with it the will to act. She opened her eyes and watched as the finger of a soldier pulled at his trigger with impossible slowness. She reached outward with her mind and found a tendril, a connection that led to White Shadow, a link it was using to watch her.

A bullet emerged from the barrel of the gun in a rippling cloud of vapor, and began its irrevocable journey to her heart. No stopping it. No getting out of the way. She was already dead.

Nothing to lose. She threw herself through the connection and right into White Shadow’s virtual lap.

—Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.

Around her, almost within reach, was what she had once had. The world. Beyond that lay a new world, enticing, limitless. The Computer. White Shadow had not yet taken that power. It was waiting for something.

From far away Allison felt the bullet press into her flesh. Someone else’s flesh. She looked at White Shadow and smiled. “Reset,” she said.

Allison Crenshaw walked up the nearly deserted street toward her new school. She felt awkward in her uniform; the skirt seemed shorter on her than it did on the other girls. She walked alone, clutching her books to her chest, practicing her Japanese under her breath.

“Hey, watch out!” Allison turned just in time to see the kid on the skateboard before he crashed into her. She fell, books flying, conscious of her short skirt. She felt like she should have seen him coming.

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Amazon Links Restored

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Once more you can support Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked ideas when you shop at Amazon. Just start your shopping adventure by clicking the link in the sidebar, and while nothing else changes for you, a slice of the money you pay will make its way to the Secret Labs, located for the purpose of this exercise in New Mexico.

I hope so, anyway; I haven’t actually tested the links.

Shop and enjoy!

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Pinup Lifestyle Contest Entry

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The theme for this month’s contest is “Red, White, and Blue.” Harlean (who is a fiction) and I didn’t have a chance to do a shoot specifically for the contest, but she went back into the archives and found a shot from the days of yore and gussied it up for this contest.

If you’d like to vote for us, we’d really appreciate it! The deadline is tonight, but just what time that means is anybody’s guess. Don’t wait another minute!

While you’re there, you have four other votes to spend, and there are some worthy entries. If you insist on voting only for ones that are on theme (olive drab is now part of red, white and blue it seems), that limits your options quite a bit, however, and if disrespecting the flag while trying to appear patriotic bothers you, then options are limited yet more. Even so, there are a few nice pics, so quit wasting you time here and go waste your time over there.

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