Checking on my site's daily statistics the other day, it was to my surprise to find external links to Odds&Ends through comment boxes of a Spanish blog, Japanese blog and a couple of anti-John Kerry political blogs. Now, here's the interesting bits: I know nary a single Spanish word, hardly any Japanese save Honda, Nintendo and the like and am of the opinion that it makes no difference whether victory goes to Kerry/Edwards or Bush/Cheney.

I can only assume that somebody had mistakenly commented on those blogs under the delusion that they run Odds&Ends. Not having the courage to own up to his/her comments, it makes sense to assume too that the comments weren't exactly decent. I've no idea what stunt that somebody was trying to pull off, but the Real Ruler of Odds&Ends hopes that the identity thief drops dead this very instant and burns in hell for all eternality had he/she set out to tarnish the good name of the sacred land of Odds&Ends.

Sorry about the rambling, but there's this other thing I'm pissed off about. If you've read my about page, you're aware of the fact that I'm OK with you guys using my photos provided you adhere to these rules. What I'm not OK with is hotlinking, the sneaky act of using images hosted on Odds&Ends on other sites. I have a couple of gigs of bandwidth to spare but I forsee a troubling problem down the road should I turn a blind eye to the bandwidth thieves out there. Most of my photos border on the 100KB mark. Say, that 100KB photo gets hotlinked on another site and that site underservedly receives 1000 hits per day, that's 100MB of bandwidth lost. Taking it further, say 10 photos are hotlinked; you do the math. After defering to my host, I got down to working on my .htaccess file and seeing the wonders .htaccess can do, I'm since a .htaccess neophyte. Take that, bandwidth robbers!

Also, I've recently installed MT-blacklist to clean up my comment boxes so that you, my beloved visitor, do not get unsolicited invites to buy viagra, cialis and porn. Another win for Odds&Ends; down with spammers! With Jay Allen's wonderful MovableType plugin, I can block keywords and phrases I think inappropriate, something along the line of Odds&Ends sucks is doable. Nah, I don't believe in censorship; you're entitled to your opinions anyway.