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Another blog picked up the Ormanda thread and has some discussion of that and some of the other turtles names by school children in Georgia:
http://www.margaret-marks.com/Transblawg/archives/000863.html
And yet another person (Ulrich Bubeck) has just felt it necessary to point out to me that Ormanda is not a German word. (Get a life!)
It's worth noting that, linguistically correct or not, Ormanda is now online!
Sorry, this has absolutely nothing to do with turtles. Well, unless you count the fact that it has to do with how I connect to the internet and thus how I do all things related to SEATURTLE.ORG...
This might be a good time to point out the blatantly obvious... the fact that I have done a very poor job of documenting a turtler's move (my own). After the initial couple of posts I just got swamped with all the hither and thither of making a long distance move (with a family and a house full of stuff) happen.
One of the things that you have to do when moving is get all of your utilities and services turned off in your old location, and on in the new. This has all gone flawlessly so far, except for the company that handled my internet connection. That would be DSL.net. They have offered nothing but good service until the day I called to cancel. We went through the whole process, account number, old address, new address, date to end service... and then hit a snag. They couldn't just do it over the phone. Jeez, they should do it from their website, they are an INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER after all!!!!! But no, I had to write them a letter, on company letterhead, or send a fax with my request for cancellation and the reason therewith. Then my service would be officially cancelled 30 days after they received the letter (or fax). They should have been able to cancel my service on the phone, they certainly do not need 30 days (or a letter!). Yet another craven attempt by a large, faceless corporation to extract even more money from their customers.
This is of course not the only time this has happened to me. My adult life is riddled with examples of companies employing similar tactics to maximize their profit. Up to now I have usually just whined about it to friends and family, sometimes gotten rude with the customer service rep on the phone (or in front of me), threatened to write letters, but of course usually end up doing nothing about it.
This time I've just had enough. Plus it's absolutely stupid that a company would use such a weak excuse for taking my money, in this day and age, and from a tech company no less. What follows is the paragraph that I tacked on to the end of my cancellation letter to DSL.net.
And of course taking advantage of my position and this website I have now posted my complaint to the World-wide Web.
So for anyone that might be interested, I find that I cannot recommend DSL.net service to anyone until their money-grubbing ways change. And if you do have their service and need to cancel, I suggest letting them know at least 30 days in advance :)
I am pleased to announce that the Sea Turtle Image Library on SEATURTLE.ORG reached a milestone last night. This post, by Hector Barrios-Garrido, was the 1000th image posted to the image library:
In all the image library holds just under 300 MB of images and has received nearly 300,000 visits.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has contributed photos and other graphics to the image library. It has been a resounding success! Images from the library have been used in everything from other websites, to news publications, magazines, and a wide range of educational initiatives. A few authors have even been compensated by the end-user for the use of their photos.
If you have images that might be of interest to the sea turtle community, please consider submitting them to the Sea Turtle Image Library. The following categories are currently available for posting:
Disease and Pathology
Satellite Tracking
Africa
Species (Hawksbill, Green, Black, Leatherback, Ridley, Loggerhead, Flatback)
Techniques (Measuring, Tagging, Necropsy, Education, Nest Protection, Capture, Rehabilitation)
Threats (Fisheries, Pollution, Habitat Degradation, Predation)
Turtlers
Sea Turtle Supplies and Equipment
Maps and Charts
Sea Turtle Symposium
Additional categories can be added by request or as needed.
As if the complaints weren't bad enough, it appears that a great many German spammers have now found seaturtle.org.
Probably because it appeared in Der Spiegel and other German news outlets. So now not only am I getting the usual dose of spam, but I am getting a bunch of new spam in German. Woo-hoo!
Btw, I am a big fan of SpamAssassin. If your service provider doesn't already use it, ask for it by name. It is the new default spam filter for all mail coming into the seaturtle.org server (and all of the domains hosted therein).
Each incoming message is analyzed by spamassassin and gets a score. The higher the score the more likely the message is spam. I have it set up so that any messages with a very high number are automatically directed to the bit bucket. Those that are in between get redirected to a special mailbox so that I can check them to make sure that nothing non-spammy is getting caught. Those with lower scores just go on through to the user as usual.
I recently discovered the Bayesian filtering option in spamassasin and it works wonders. You basically save examples of messages that are spam and not-spam and use it to "train" spamassassin to recognize the difference between the two. I used to get 100 or more spam messages a day. Now I am down to a handful, and those are usually only getting through because they are new types of spam. For a point of reference, I was out of town for the last week or so and so messages built up in the spam trap for about 7 days. When I emptied it out this morning there were more than 650 messages in it (no false positives!!!). That doesn't include all the messages with really high scores that were automatically deleted, I'm extrapolating here, but possibly another 3000+ messages in just one week!!! ( that's for all seaturtle.org mail accounts, not just me :)
It's nice to have access to (free!) tools like spamassassin, but what a pain!
SEATURTLE.ORG set a new record this past Tuesday with more than 56,000 hits in a 24 hours period. For a bit of reference, if that happened every day we'd get more than 20 MILLION hits a year. As it is we got 2.4 million hits last year and Tuesday's total was about 3x higher than the previous record day.
Unfortunately, all of the news is not good...
The reason for all of the hits is, unfortunately, less than desirable.
First a little background. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources is planning to satellite track 12 loggerhead turtles this summer, and Mark Dodd, the state sea turtle coordinator for GA-DNR, had arranged with me for the tracks to appear on seaturtle.org. To publicize their tracking effort the State held a naming contest, in which children in grades K-5 in Georgia would submit names for the turtles to be representative of the countries participating in the G8 Summit, which is wrapping up today, roughly coincident with the release of the satellite tracked turtles.
So a couple of weeks ago GA-DNR announced the results of the contest and the names that would be given to the turtles.
So far so good.
Until Tuesday...
Apparently the German magazine Der Spiegel picked up on the story and they reported on it on their website Tuesday morning. My German language skills are pretty poor, but from the online translation I ran it appears that their report was less than flattering,
The short of it is that they apparently took exception to the turtle name selected to represent Germany. "Ormanda", which the press release from Georgia said means "of the sea" in German. I personally have no idea if that's right or not, but the Der Spiegel article said that it wasn't a German word, citing encyclopedic databases and local linguists, and that the word was in fact Turkish and meant "of the forest". The story was then picked up by other German outlets that let to a flood of hits on the website Tuesday morning.
In any case, it was nice to see that the author of the original story consulted a linguist, but it would have been nice if they had actually contacted some one associated with the project or naming contest and asked them about how the name was selected. They obviously did not and apparently drew all of their material from the original press release. They also did not contact me, although they linked to seaturtle.org and noted that "Ormanda" was not yet on the tracking site and suggested perhaps that she had gone off to Turkey (ha ha). If they had tried to contact me I could have explained why "Ormanda" was not yet on the site (They are still in the process of tagging turtles).
Odd side note, babynamesworld.com says that "Ormanda" is German and means "of the sea", although I certainly wouldn't consider a baby name website to be an authority on the German language. Most of the links that come up when you search Google for the term "Ormanda" do appear to lead to Turkish sites.
Anyway, the kicker was that a few disgruntled German readers decided to complain to me, as seaturtle.org was the only reference provided. Most complaints were relatively tame, but one gentleman (I use the term loosely) was nice enough to point out that Americans are stupid because "YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO TELL THE KINDS A GERMAM NAME OR CORRECT THEM". He also pointed out that:
"American People killing people in Iraq
The Atom bomb was from you
You bomb every ......... country you don't like as Iraq, Vietnam, Somalia ...."
Not sure what that has to do with naming turtles or turtle tracking, but you never know. Nice of him to point that out, and I'll get right on taking care of those issues. The real irony I suppose is that he complained about the education of American school children, in this case improperly translating a German word, in extremely broken English ("Sorry what do you learn them in school?"). I suppose if he had sent it in German the complaint would have been lost on me. But if he's going to complain about a bunch of second graders messing up a German word, then he probably should have worked on his English grammar a little harder :)
In any case, I hope that at least some of the new visitors to the site enjoyed the satellite tracks and the information provided and that all of those hits were not for naught. And despite any errors or mistakes that were made, I hope that most people can take joy in knowing that a new found interest was instilled in thousands of children in the conservation and protection of sea turtles through the efforts of the State of Georgia and their Department of Natural Resources.
There is a new vile and insidious disease spreading through the web...
Comment Spam
If you haven't run into it yet, count yourself lucky. Essentially these are all of the little messages advertising popular drugs, pornography, and any number of other things that get posted to online bulletin boards, mailing lists and weblogs.
There are a multitude of online forums and mailing lists that have gone fallow because their members could not cope and were overrun with comment spam. Those of you on the CTURTLE listserv may recall earlier this year when some person or persons started posting offensive material to the list. The list did not shut down, but the list managers were forced to switch to moderated mode, which requires significantly more time to manage than an unmoderated list. So aside from the pure offensive nature of the material, a certain amount of functionality is lost, and more time (which equals money) is required to keep things going.
Why are people doing this? It's unlikely that they think this is an effective method of advertising (at least directly). Most likely they do it to increase the rank of their web links in many of the large search engines. For example, when you run a search on google the results are returned in particular order, which is partially a function of the number of times each returned link appears on other web sites.
For example, if you do a search for "sea turtle" on google, you will get a list of sea turtle related websites with seaturtle.org about 5 links down. Given that seaturtle.org has more sea turtle content than probably any other site in the world (the MTN alone has 2,162 pages of pure, unadulterated sea turtle info; seaturtle.org as a whole consists of more than 5,400 pages), this might seem like a surprising result. However, for a variety of reasons, the sites listed above seaturtle.org probably have more "other" sites linking to them. Perhaps I am not doing as good a job of marketing seaturtle.org as I should?
OK, so why am I writing about comment spam now? Comment spam has been an intermittent problem on the weblogs on seaturtle.org since they first launched. Fortunately there are a number of utilities available that help keep an eye out for and deal with the spam comments. Unfortunately it's not so easy to block them altogether. With the proper tools it takes me just a minute or two to flush bad comments out once I identify them. Either way, unless you are one of the blog authors, hopefully you have never noticed these comments because I get rid of them as fast as I can.
So, this weekend some industrious scoundrel successfully posted several hundred spam comments in a matter of a few minutes using some automated software. And as far as I am concerned, the people that write the software that enables this sort of thing are even worse scum than those that actually send out the spam. Normally I might consider something like that to be the price of doing business on the internet, but most of these posts included links to porn sites. Particularly offensive given that there are quite a few minors that use seaturtle.org. Not only is what these people are doing just plain wrong (it takes away from the time I have to develop new content for seaturtle.org), it is also offensive, and probably illegal (or should be).
Be that as it may, I would like to apologize to all of the weblog authors on seaturtle.org who put up with this kind of garbage. I hope you will continue to blog and continue to keep your comments open. I feel very strongly about keeping the seaturtle.org weblogs open to comments (even though the sea turtle community doesn't seem to post many). 1) closing comments is essentially giving in to the scum of the web and, 2) free discussion and exchange of ideas is one of the beauties of the weblogs. To this end, I have upgraded the spam filters and added a new authentication step to the process of posting comments. That should at least keep out the mass postings. As with e-mail spam, it is likely impossible to keep it all out. Every time you come up with something to block them, the spammers come up with new tricks to get around your blocks. Honest netizens are left to play catch-up with those that would abuse the free and open nature of the internet for their own personal gain.
Finally, a note to all comment spammers. If you post to this site you better make sure that you cover your tracks. If you do not, I WILL IDENTIFY YOU and I WILL REPORT YOU TO ALL APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES, including but not limited to your ISP, your local police and the FBI. You have been warned.