Moko the friendly dolphin has become so friendly she has
taken to bringing swimmers fish - but she has been receiving some
unfriendly treatment in return.

The three-year-old bottlenose dolphin has made Mahia Beach
her home for more than 18 months, and has become a familiar sight
socialising with swimmers and boaties.

Many a bodyboard, crayfish buoy and rugby ball have been taken out
to sea, never to be seen again, as the cheeky dolphin continues to play
on her own.

Others had been on the receiving end of Moko's generosity, Conservation Department programme manager Jamie Quirk said.

"She has actually been bringing fish to people. People have had
kahawai and gurnard brought to them and some lucky people have had her
bring them seahorses," he said.

Lately, however, some people have been "roughhousing" with Moko,
scarring her skin with scratches caused by jewellery and sharp
fingernails.

"We are a bit concerned that some people are getting into rough play
with her - they jump on her back or grab her dorsal fin," said DoC
Wairoa field officer supervisor Malcolm Smith.

"She can play rough right back - she's a big, powerful animal, she probably weighs 150 kilograms. She could damage someone."

Mr Smith said Moko appeared to be well-fed and healthy, despite all the human attention.

Mahia resident Bill Shortt has been watching Moko's movements since she arrived in the area at Easter 2007.

"Moko is getting tamer than ever," he said. "It's really amusing.
She comes right in to the shore now, into only a few feet of water, to
play with the children."

“ When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.

I work for about 10 minutes a day for Google. I don't get paid for this work, but I figure at my normal rate they owe me about $3000 by now. I'm not the only one working unpaid for Google - most people who own websites work for them too.

You see Google created a thing called page-rank. A large part of this is made up from how many incoming links your website has. So spammers and their bots visit as many other sites as possible and leave inane messages on message boards and in comments sections with a link to their site in order to cheat the system. This is akin to tagging or mindless graffiti, except that in this case they are rewarded for it by Google. The first thing I have to do each morning is go through the comments left overnight and delete pretty much every single one of them. By the time I have done this I have had enough of this site and can't be bothered posting anything.

So I've changed the site up to a beta version with moderation for the comments - from now on all comments require approval from me. I will allow pretty much anything, as I always have, even if it's to slag me off, however the one thing I will not tolerate is spam links.

And like the taggers in my neighbourhood, if I met one of these spammers who wreck my site and everyone else's, I'd like to smash their face with a baseball bat.

I agree with the sentiment presented on this page (although for anyone in the know I prefer Sensation Black over Sensation White).

Do not buy anything from SupercheapPC, aka Supercheappc.biz, aka Super Cheap PC aka Super Cheap Computers Limited. I made the mistake of buying from them a few times, but never again. Not only did they deliver what I didn't want, they conveniently have lost the returned item (claiming it never turned up, but will not respond to an enquiry by the Post Office), and won't even refund me the difference between the item I paid for and the item they delivered. I will be taking these wankers to court. They may be cheap, but if something goes wrong with either the product or the order you may be spending the extra $30 (plus your time) to sue these retards.

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Millionaires24.com is offering email for US$399/month.

Here is my response:

I was going to sign up for your exclusive email service, as my security demands are high. However I notice that your log-in page does not even use SSL. Since I suspect you are Luddites out for a quick buck, I will explain that not using SSL means is that the username and password are sent over the network for everybody to view in plain text format.
Also, since you claim to use the "highest security standard", which is clearly a false claim, I will be reporting you to the appropriate authorities.

Nine out of 10 affluent families will lose their wealth by the end of the third generation.

Harry Whittington, the man shot by Vice President Dick Cheney last weekend, has at last left his hospital bed to apologise for his misdeed.

My family and I are deeply sorry for all that vice president Cheney has had to go through this past week. We send our love and respect to them as they deal with situations that are much more serious than what we’ve had this week. And we hope that he will continue to come to Texas and seek the relaxation that he deserves.

A man in Siberia was sentenced to 4 years labour after being hit from behind by a politicians vehicle.

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More than half the British population does not fully accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey.

Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science lessons.

The survey was conducted by Ipsos MORI for the BBC's Horizon series.

Its latest programme, A War on Science, looks into the attempt to introduce intelligent design into science classes in the US.

Over 2000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:

* 22% chose creationism
* 17% opted for intelligent design
* 48% selected evolution theory
* and the rest did not know.

I've been enjoying Richard Dawkin's series on the God Delusion. It seems the first world is in danger of slipping back into the dark ages with superstitious beliefs such as Christianity being taken literally by a larger segment of the population.

It seems the camera business is evolving rapidly at the moment. Nikon have decided to drop film cameras altogether and stick with only digital cameras, and Konika Minolta are leaving the camera market altogether.

This is a real shame - I love my 35mm Minolta SLR, and have been watching and waiting to see what DSLRs they'd bring to the market - at the moment the have a good DSLR that takes lenses from their film cameras and feature image stabalisation, however are only 5.1 megapixels.

Now that that would seem to be all they will ever offer I think I'll have to move with the pack to Canon.

"Maori" brand cigarettes have been on sale in Israel, causing offense to the Maori community in New Zealand, especially as 31% of Maori deaths are attributable to smoking.

Manufacturer Philip Morris International says it regrets causing offense.

The company says the packaging was displayed on a limited number of packets of the company's L and M cigarette brand and the packaging is no longer actively on the market in Israel or any other country.

Philip Morris says the intention of the packaging was to communicate the brand's open minded acceptance of cultural diversity.

Philip Morris are perhaps considering replacing them with Jew Cigarettes, with the advertising slogan "Smoke a Jew."

Since the death penalty is mandatory for drug smuggling in Singapore, no matter how you cooperate once caught, I recommend to smugglers to try and escape at the moment they are detected. Use any means necessary, and resist by all means. There is no point in surrendering quietly.

I hadn't checked the site statistics for about 6 weeks, and was amazed to find the number of visitors had increased almost tenfold. However these visitors aren't genuine - they are referrer bots. Even though I've removed the site statistics page these scum bags spam "hits" on sites in order to be featured in the "most referrals" section of websites, and by extension increase their ranking with Google.

The problem is they eat up a ton of bandwidth - over 5GB worth in the last few weeks, bandwidth which I pay for.

So I've implemented a more robust system which should redirect most of this scum to a "forbidden" 403 error page, and this reduce bandwidth. I don't expect the problem will decrease however, as like email spam they don't really care whether they make a "hit" or not since they're not paying for it.

I can see a time in the future whereby there will need to be a trust/verification system in order to use the internet as the levels of traffic generated by these criminals escalates beyond simple email spamming and website referrer spam.

Update 21/11/05: I've managed to cut traffic by about 90%, saving a ton of bandwidth - even though I've used 180MB just in "Error 403" pages alone!

The alligator has some foreign competition at the top of the Everglades food chain, and the results of the struggle are horror-movie messy. A 13-foot Burmese python recently burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole.

"It means nothing in the Everglades is safe from pythons, a top-down predator," said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor.

Over the years, many pythons have been abandoned in the Everglades by pet owners. It is unknown how many pythons are competing with the thousands of alligators in the Everglades, but at least 150 have been captured in the past two years, said Joe Wasilewski, a wildlife biologist and crocodile tracker.