When I first heard the story of a fraud being perpetrated using a "horseback ride" I started blogging about it. I went in search of other sources online and found newspapers pointed to a previous scam that was similar to the current version. When I contacted those papers they stood by the stories they had written and didn't do anything about the evidence they'd been duped. It was then I thought that this scam should end now. It should never be repeated. It should not be possible for anybody to not know about the fraud or the scam artist behind it. A comment here this weekend suggests it has worked, at least once. A great day for blogging.

Waking up listening to Weekend Edition Sunday is one of the best parts of the weekend. There are the features like the weekly puzzle with Will Short and there are some of the best stories on radio. This Sunday was no exception. A story talked about the possibility of finding locally grown foods and one couple's year-long experiment of eating a local diet. It started, as so many things do, as a necessity to put together a good meal from the locally available resources and turned into an exploration of the follies of the global food supply chain.

Recent stories about the pet food recall have pointed out some of the problems with getting food from the lowest bidder. Free marketeers will boldly proclaim that if we just leave the market alone it will correct the problem. Ultimately they are correct. The question is are we willing to pay the price? When the market is left to correct this situation on its own it will be a brutal correction. There won't be a simple soft landing and awareness of the need to change. Rather there will be a catastrophic failure of the supply chain and there will be thousands of people starving when the market makes the folly known.

When I started developing websites, blogs and online tools more than I decade ago the value of log files hit me right away. Because these could be useful someday they have followed me around for some time. Google recently made some changes that enhanced their already great Google Analytics product.

There are without a doubt alternatives but each of these involves running and managing additional programs on the server. Another advantage is the way Google Analytics works with Google AdSense (see affiliate link below) which helps keep this site's hosting bill paid for. Along with the realization that the log files from sites that have been inactive for years aren't ever really going to be very useful. The sites that were online in 1995 to compete with them are just a different lot and there's little hat can't be better judged by a couple of weeks of Google Analytics to look at the sites.