My blog and all of sumoc.com will be offline for several days starting Friday Aug 20th. I'm moving the server to a new location and it's going to be a relatively slow transition. If this is sad news to you, you should really get out more...

Significant parts of Conyers Ga are being evacuated due to a huge fire at the Biolab chemical plant and distribution center located there. An area of at least a mile around the plant has been evacuated, and reports indicate that the plume of smoke can be seen from as far away as Atlanta (45 miles away). I-20 has been closed in both directions by the plant and I've seen reports of the fire on both CNN Headline News and Fox News Channel. So far no-one has been reported injured aside from some smoke inhalation injuries. This news is of particular interest because I did ColdFusion programming work for Biolab for the better part of 2002, including working on some warehouse management portions of their ERP system. I'm still good friends with most of the folks I worked with there and I hope that everything will turn out ok for the company and its employees.

A local San Diego ISP, Aplus.net has recently been caught red handed hijacking some 17,000 or so pages that belong to hosting customers and adding content at the bottom of each page in an attempt to trick Google into ranking Aplus.net higher for a few key search terms. Not only are they adding content, but they are cloaking their actions so that only Google sees the modified page. However unethical this may be, it looks like it's working for now - they are the highest ranked result for the terms they used. It's only a matter of time before Google finds this and bans them completely from it's search index. Worse, Aplus.net may not be the only victim if Google decides that all the sites hosted by Aplus.net should be banned. I can't imagine anyone at any company *ever* thinking that this is ok. At best it's unethical. At worst they are committing the crime of copyright infringement on each and every one of their customers by modifying implicitly copyrighted content.

And now I have one too. This blog will generally be technical in nature, but will definitely have random non-technical things sprinkled throughout. Enjoy!