About yesterday’s NBA action — Nothing surprising happened in Dallas, New Jersey, or Sacramento. As expected, the Sacramento/Utah series looks like it’ll be the most enjoyable series of the playoffs. As far as I’m concerned, watching those two teams play each other for a minimum of four games justifies the seven-game first round. I would not be surprised if Byron Scott went to his players before that first game and pointed out that if they don’t go a long way into the playoffs this year, Jason Kidd will be playing elsewhere next season. ...

Speaking of indie RPGs, there are eight interesting games here. They were all written in 24 hours flat. Some of ‘em work, some of ‘em don’t, I think they’re all interesting experiments. We really need to schedule a regular indie gaming night, maybe monthly.

US comes out against ridding the Middle East of WMDs. Film at 11. Yeah, I’m simplifying. But not much. Syria introduced a Security Council resolution that would require all Middle Eastern countries to rid themselves of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The US said “No, no, the time isn’t right.” That means, of course, “We don’t want to make Israel give up their nuclear weapons.” I have to grudgingly admire the acumen of Syria. Not only did they make the US object to a positive resolution, they nudged us into admitting that the Security Council matters after all. Odd; I could have sworn Bush said that the Security Council would be irrelevant if it didn’t vote to allow us to invade Iraq. Why do we care what resolutions Syria introduces? ...

The Hugo nominations are out. Pretty classy field this year. I’d have to choose The Scar for best novel, but it’s a close call over Bones of the Earth, and I kind of think the latter will win. Michael Swanwick has three other nominations — could be a very good year for him. Oddly, the Sci Fi Wire list (original) is different. They have “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (by Ted Chiang) in the Best Novelette category instead of “Madonna of the Maquiladora”, by Gregory Frost. Normally I’d believe Locus, but Ted Chiang not getting nominated seems so unlikely.

I didn’t think much about the Johnny Cash cover of “Hurt” (Quicktime video) when I heard about it. I figured it’d be a kind of novelty thing, like most of the aging star covering once-edgy alternative music songs are. OK, I was wrong. It’s amazing. Go watch the video. Wow.

What I’m thinking is this: a vast, ancient elven empire, called simply the Empire, that dominates the western half of the continent. The elves are neutral, shading towards a kind of practical lawful evil, but only a little way. Just a dark grey. The only exception to the elven domination in this part of the continent is a northwestern peninsula, which is populated by a resolute kingdom of mountain dwarves. Underneath the peninsula, there’s a kingdom of drow which survives with assistance from the Empire. The drow kingdom is a cult of personality, worshipping the Living Presence of their goddess. The Living Presence tells lies about his kingdom’s power, and his people believe him. The mountain dwarves would like to reclaim the tunnels and caverns, and they could probably manage the drow on their own, but the Empire? No way. ...

Heh. I was speculating earlier today that the Iraqi National Museum looting might have been pro art thieves. Through sheer luck, it looks like I was right. Someone should tell those Marines to redo their sign in Arabic, but I’m glad they’re awake now. The FBI is on the job (original), too. Right reactions, even if we got the initial actions wrong.

A lot of people are saying that Michael Jordan had the best year ever for a 40 year old NBA player, and I guess I gotta agree with that. Look at these numbers: .483 from the field, .363 from three point range, .826 from the stripe, 7.7 assists and 1.7 steals per game in a mere 27.7 minutes… Oh, sorry. That’s John Stockton at 40 (original). OK, OK. Shooting .462 from the field, with 7.8 rebounds per game, 4.7 assists, and 20.6 points per game, it’s… damn it. Karl Malone (original). ...

I might as well make some bad predictions about the NBA playoffs, right? First Round Spurs over the Suns, because rookies can only lift you so far. Kings over the Jazz, because… well, it should be obvious. The Kings are hungry. Mavs over the Trailblazers, cause the Trailblazers just can’t handle the playoffs. Lakers over the Timberwolves, because the Lakers have enough talent to get past the first round. Pistons over the Magic, despite Ben Wallace being out. The Magic are nowhere this year. ...

This guy popped up in my referer logs the other day, and it turns out that he actually links back to an old post of mine. I’ve changed my opinion a bit since then, after I realized that it’s fairly trivial to write a script that validates referers. All need to you do is grab the page listed as a referer and check to see if it really contains a link back to your site. It’s only a first level technique — there are ways around it — but it would certainly catch what Joel is doing. Thus, while Joel says there’s nothing that can be done about his technique… he’s wrong. Admittedly, I haven’t integrated my script with my general purpose log analysis scripts but in the cases where I have noticed referer spam I just update my config file and tell the scripts to ignore those referers. I stuck my script in after the cut. It runs over an active log file, tosses out referers it’s seen before, validates new referers as per the technique above, and emails me a note when it sees a valid new referer. It will not work out of the box on your server, but it should be kind of clear what needs to be updated if you’re a perl coder. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.