Rojo is a web based feed aggregator. Their bot requests my blog’s feed multiple times a day, and there is something fishy about the whole thing.

The user agent for each request looks like these:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; Rojo 1.0; http://www.rojo.com/corporate/help/agg/; Aggregating on behalf of 10 subscriber(s) online at http://www.rojo.com/?feed-id=2704248) Gecko/20021130

If I view the first link to their help page, I get an error message. I’m guessing that they’ve redone their URL structure without bothering to update the bot, and without putting in sensible redirects.

If vanity takes hold and I try viewing the second link to see if I can learn more about these 10 subscribers of mine who use Rojo, I end up viewing what appears to be their undifferentiated home page, rather than the page they construct from my feed.

So, what’s going on here, are they just sloppy and haven’t updated their bot to reflect the new URL structure they are using, or are they deliberately baiting me to check out their site with inflated claims of my readership?

My gut tell’s me it’s the former. But when I manually search out the page for Geekfun on their site, it reports that Geekfun only has 1 subscriber, not 10 as their crawler claims, which makes me think they are up to no good.

It doesn’t make me want to do them any favors, so I’ve pulled the subscribe with rojo link off my sidebar so I don’t risk sending them any of my over-ample traffic.

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I upgraded the theme on this site to “K2 0.9.1”:http://getk2.com.  It fixes various bits of wonkyness I noticed in 0.9, including:

• Permalinks for the “asides” that show up in the links section of the home page now point to the correct item
• Page titles that include apostrophes are now encoded properly in the “title” attribute of the links to the entry.

I’ve also noticed a bit of new wonkyness, but it hasn’t been repeatable.

I like the features that the K2 theme adds.  I’ll be interested to see what sorts of “skins” other people end up building on the infrastructure it provides.

Perhaps this entire blog makes the point well enough on it’s own, but I’ll just belabor the point with this post by stating flatly: I can’t write.

I grind my teeth to chalk trying to find some sharp expression of my muddle of thoughts. Simple e-mails take hours and then need to marinate overnight before cooking, and even then, the results are bland with the texture of overcooked meal and undercooked gristle.

A few years back I realized that iPod hard disks would likely outgrow people’s music collections, removing a big driver of people trading up to larger iPods.  I figured that Apple would have to find some way to use up more disk space in order to keep driving upgrades.  Video fills hard disks, but as John Gruber points out, it also makes people eager for larger screen sizes and better battery life.  Apple has at least a few more years of heavy upgrade business ahead of them.

Daring Fireball: Showtime: The New iPods
In the same way that storage capacities have grown over time, so too will screen sizes. And when larger-screened video-playing iPods do ship in 2007 or 2008, it doesn’t prove fools who reported that they were going to ship last year or this year right.

Lots of conservative bloggers are all over “rumors” that Al Qaeda is going to use nuclear weapons (or is it “nucular,” “nuculear?”) against US targets at the start of Ramadan.

A lot of thoughtful comments on the matter, like jake341 on Little Green Shitballs Footballs, who offers this brilliant insight:

sure hope not, but, if they do, good! That will be just the excuse to finish this thing once and for all.

Reading more of the comments confirms that a significant portion of the commenters on Little Green Footballs are actually so batshit insane that they think that unloading a bunch of nukes into the middle east and “nuking it to glass,” will secure the United States and solve the problem of islamic terrorism.

Personally, I’m not too concerned with these particular rumors. I’m much more worried about the rumors I’ve been hearing. Space aliens are set to invade the earth next week. They’ll all be wearing our skins like wetsuits before Al Qaeda, or anyone else, has the chance to use any nukes.