I know that 2009 was a rough year for many, but let’s hope things continue to pick up in 2010. Hopefully you all got to spend some time with friend and family before the end of the calendar year (and some rest as well!). All the best in the upcoming year.

I bought a hybrid bike (hybrids are somewhere between mountain bikes and street bikes, according to my limited understanding of cycling) two weeks ago which has been great — I haven’t had a chance to take it out too much, but I’m looking forward to finally being able to ride around the city. I was looking forward to taking my bike out to Toronto Island, but unfortunately for me there’s a strike here in Toronto, which also means no ferry service to the island.

Thanks for reading, I hope all my readers in the northern hemisphere are enjoying their summer.

Thanks to everyone who has commented on this blog (whether it’s on a new post or an older post), and I hope to keep getting some of the great comments that people have left. I hope closing comments on old posts will not hamper any discussion or dialogue that this site has enjoyed for the past few years.

The site is divided into predictions and bets about how the world will turn out, everything from whether machine intelligence will pass the Turing test to whether the universe will eventually stop expanding.

Anyone can predict anything, and any prediction can become a bet when it is challenged. There are a clear set of rules for each bet, and each side of the bet must clearly describe their logic and reasoning for believing that things will turn out a particular way.

Take a look around the site — there are some really interesting bets. One of my favourites is a bet on whether the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the Earth.

As part of my new responsibilities, I’m in Nashville, Tennessee for the week. I’m pretty blown away by how friendly everyone is in this city — very nice. I’ll be back in Toronto tomorrow after my last day here.

Of course as soon as I did the upgrade, I neglected to copy some files over (totally my fault), and there was a bit of a panicked “oh no, what did I do now” moment. This should just be a reminder to me that I need to back up my content much more often than I actually do (I think after I write this post, I’m going to just schedule an automatic backup to an empty Gmail account — that should do the trick).

This also got me a bit paranoid about WordPress security. After a bit of searching around, I came across a great plugin called Login Lockdown that will actually lock people out of your account if they try to log in too many times (in my case, I’m the only user of my blog, so I don’t want anyone else logging in at all).

There are various other measures you can take to secure WordPress (i.e. don’t make your password ’123′ or the name of your dog), but they’re really too numerous for me to list them all here. In case you’re also worried about the security of your WordPress install, I’d highly suggest checking out the WordPress Security Scan plugin. And don’t forget to keep your WordPress version up to date.

I know there are at least a few comments that got caught in the filter — so if you anyone who has written a comment would like to write another one, I’ll make sure it gets posted to the site this time. And my apologies for your comment not getting posted the first time.

It seemed to be mostly comments with links in them that got caught in the filter, as Akismet is a little overanxious about those types of comments (although I also accidentally hit the delete button when I meant to press ‘next’ to see the next page of spammed comments). Again, if anyone’s comment is not showing up — please feel free to write another comment and I’ll ensure it gets on the site. Thanks!

I’m really finding it hard to believe that I started this site in 2006 (I’ve never really wanted to call this site a blog, since I don’t really feel like I’m ‘logging’ anything).  I didn’t really think I had it in me to write a few hundred posts (that are, suprisingly enough, somewhat all on-topic).

While I haven’t had as much time to devote to this site as I would’ve liked near the end of 2008, I’m looking forward to getting back to business in 2009. I’ve got a few ideas for some improvements to the site as well, so look for those over the next few months.

I’ve also been working on some other projects which I’m hoping to get around to launching officially within that ‘next few months’ timeframe — but as we all know, life can be unpredictable. My priority is to get a few improvements going on this site before launching into new stuff. But enough rambling — happy 2009 and I hope it’s been good to you so far.

Things seemed to have calmed down somewhat now, and I’m really hoping they’re going to stay that way. It was very frustrating not having access to any sites — and most of the time I wasn’t even able to get in to delete comment spam.

So if you noticed some odd behaviour here over the past few days, it was most likely because of the attack on the server. If you notice anything else going wrong (I’ve taken some measures to hopefully prevent this from happening again), just drop me a line and let me know. Thanks for sticking it out with me through this attack.

While the photos are currently showing up a little weird, due to the fact that they’re two different sizes, I’m hoping to fix that so that they all show up properly in the sidebar thumbnail preview. Also, if you refresh the page, you’ll see a new batch of photos every time.

Also, if you’re looking for more cool images to look at (or interesting stuff to read), check out my friend Greg MacGregor’s site at rewinder.ca — where you can also spend some time admiring his simple, lots-of-whitespace design.

UPDATE: The weird sizing that was happening with the image previews should now be fixed. I have yet to do any testing in Internet Explorer, but things are looking better in Firefox anyway.