Sturgeon’s Law Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.
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When I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I would be buying gas next week and it would probably be $3.50 a gallon, I was half right. Down to about a quarter of a tank tonight on the way home from the MMC monthly meeting, I stopped and filled up at $3.499 a gallon. There were a couple of gas stations that were advertising $3.199, but I guess that was what they were selling it for when they had it, both places had bags over the pump nozzles in the internationally know signal for “I’m Out of Gas, But Come In and Buy a 6-Pack of Beer, You’ll Feel Better.”
After one misdirected envelope, the second arrived today with my Calvin & Hobbes sticker. I put it on the bumper, snapped one picture and took it off. There were three reasons for this; 1) it was larger than we expected, 2) silver, while not bad, seemed kind of blah and 3) I placed it too low on the bumper and with too much of a slant. So back to the sticker guy I go with a request for another sticker that will be in dark yellow and 5″ tall instead of six. Maybe the first one won’t get lost in the mail and I can get this in a week instead of two.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Continue reading Half Right & All Wrong
Those of you who pay close attention to this blog (and if you do, please look in the yellow pages under Mental Health Professionals for some help) know that Donna and I lived in New Orleans for a while in the middle 80s. Once I left the Navy we choose New Orleans for a couple of reasons, one of which was because she grew up there we would both be eligible for in state tuition while we attended college on the GI Bill. The other reason was that Donna’s dad had recently passed away and her youngest brother was still a teenager, so we felt if we moved back in with mom and brother it might be a stabling influence on young Scott.
When Donna’s family moved to New Orleans in the 60’s they bought a 4 bedroom, 1–1/2 bath split level home in the Lakeview section of town. It was near Lake Ponchatrain, you couldn’t actually see the lake unless you could climb to the very top of the two massive live oaks that shaded the house, but it was also only a short bus ride to downtown.
We stuck around long enough to see Scott graduate high school, but the economy had turned sour and jobs grew scarce, so Donna and I moved up to NJ. Not long after that, Donna’s younger sister convinced mom and Scott to sell the house and move out to Seattle with her.
Below are a couple of small images showing the northern section of New Orleans before and after Katrina. The before came from Google Maps and the little pointer shows where we lived. The second is from part of a larger high resolution satellite image from Digital Globe. You can download both before and after images from their page by clicking on the Hurricane Katrina Imagery link in the upper left. They are approximately 4000 x 4500 pixels and are 3 or 4 megabytes in size.
Before:
After:
The dark greenish blue shows the areas that are underwater. One of the levees that broke, the 17th Street Canal one, is on the left of the image where the light turns to dark. The actual breach point is about parallel with the marker and is less than a mile from the house. Most assuredly Donna’s childhood home is a total loss.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Today’s highlight was washing the house. Brush on the Simple Green and wash off. All I did was the front, sides and back will have to wait for another day.
While I was getting around the front door I decided to do the small brick porch and the three steps. That wasn’t so bad, but my problem came while cleaning the bottom step, I accidentally sprayed the end of the sidewalk. Well, now I was stuck doing the whole sidewalk. Took about an hour. You can bet that I was extra careful at the other end of the sidewalk that I didn’t hit any of the driveway. We have a two car wide driveway and it is about 50 foot long, that sucker would have taken about 12 hours to do.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
 Although we have quite a bit of warm weather left to come our way, it has finally cooled enough so that mornings will let us go for a hike in the woods again. So for the first time in a couple months we went for a hike in Hitchcock Woods. This picture is very similar to June’s shot except for the angle of the sun, so we are going to call this July and August’s photo and will try and get back for a September one later this month. Looking southwest at the corner of Mr. Fletcher’s Ride and an unnamed path about 1/2 mile in from our usual entry point.
Because the FRS are playing two teams this week from the top two TV markets in the country national sports coverage will be heavy for the next week. The Angels from the left coast are in Boston for a three game set mid week and Wednesday night’s contest will be ESPN. ESPN will also show Friday’s game from the House That Ruth Built. Fox has the Sox — Yankees tilt listed for Saturday broadcast, but I may not see that as they also list the Braves — Nationals and they try to regionalize their coverage.
As a bonus it looks like ESPN is going to show tomorrow’s contest between the White Sox and the Red Sox which is a make-up from a rained out August 14th game. I thought I heard one of the FRS’s broadcasters say last week sometime that Chicago was thinking of forfeiting the game because they didn’t want to fly into Boston, play a game and then have to fly back home on what was supposed to be an off day.
So I’m either in for an exciting TV week or a very disappointing one. I’ll let you know.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
A couple of years after we moved to Aiken we joined the local bicycle club, oddly enough, named the Aiken Bicycle Club. We were quite active for about ten years and then when health issues curtailed our cycling we slowly drifted out of the Club.
When we first joined the club we were riding our 10 year old 12-speed touring bicycles. Mountain biking was just starting to really blossom in popularity and some of the Club members starting buying these bikes and heading off to the local trails. We soon joined the fray, bringing our bike total to four, two touring road bikes and two mountain bikes.
As we improved our cycling, we went on longer and faster rides with the club. We now needed some newer, lighter road bikes to keep pace. One of the fellows who was a regular speedster on the twice weekly bike store rides was upgrading to a high dollar carbon fiber Kestrel and offered to sell me his CF/Aluminum combo Giant bike, I jumped. After some shopping we bought Donna a nice new Bridgestone road bike. Our Stable of 2-wheeled vehicles was now six in number.
Towards the end of 1994 our bicycling madness peaked, we spent nearly $3,000 on a Santana Sovereign aluminum tandem (the price has gone up a bit in the last 12 years.) Part of the reason we went into tandeming was peer pressure, two other couples in the club had these bicycles built for two. One were long time duo riders, but when the second couple bought a Burley Rock ‘n Roll and told us how much they enjoyed it, we took the plunge. We got a credit card application in the mail with some super low interest or something and for our wedding anniversary present to ourselves we made a trip to Atlanta, test drove one for all of a couple hundred yards and bought the thing. Donna loved the tandem. She just had to pedal and enjoy the scenery, none of that pesky shifting or braking to worry about. We did have a blast with it, on club rides with regular folks it was like driving an 18-wheeler amongst cars. Downhill we blasted at speeds unrivaled, but uphill we were hauled right back in.
While I enjoyed the tandem I really missed the single bike. As the captain of a tandem it is your job to let the stoker know about bumps, when you were shifting, when you wanted to coast, brake, etc, and I had a hard time with all that. I was so used to riding on a bike by myself, I would just do without thinking, which would draw the ire of the stoker. About that time my prostate problems arose where it was uncomfortable to ride for long or I would feel bad for days afterward, so riding slowed to a trickle. I convinced Donna to sell the tandem, we got about 2/3rds of what we paid for it after riding it for a year and a half. She was more sorry to see it go than I.
About 4 years ago we ran into the couple from the Club and asked them if they still rode their Burley. They said no not really, so Donna asked if they would sell it to us. “No,” they replied, “we are going to get back into it.” We understood perfectly, from a high of riding about 3,000 miles a year we had fallen to 300 miles if we were lucky and still had 6 bikes between the two of us.
Fast forward two more years and we had at least sold off the least used of the 6, the mountain bikes. We asked our selves, should we sell the commuting bikes as they were just collecting dust in the garage, but said, “No, we are going to get back into it.”
Fast forward two more years to last last Friday, I get an email from the Burley owner, did I still want to buy it? Sure, what do you want for it? He said he’d take the $400 I offered him 4 years ago. Today our anniversary present to ourselves for this year showed up in the driveway:
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Haven’t said much about spam recently. Levels at work have really sunk, for a while there I was down to the teens in junk received and one day I actually got into single digits! But the last two weeks it has climbed back up a bit and has leveled out around 35 a day. Today I actually had a couple of ‘em slip through the net.
Here is what the email looks like:
Here is how they did it:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Courier>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;">Ul<BR>Xa<BR>Me<BR>Ce<BR>Le<BR><B>Ci
</B><BR><B>Vi</B><BR>Am<BR><B>Va</B><BR>Pr</DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;">tr<BR>na<BR>ri<BR>le<BR>vi<BR><B>al
</B><BR><B>ag</B><BR>bi<BR><B>li</B><BR>op</DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;">am<BR>x<BR>dia<BR>brex<BR>tra<BR><B>is
</B><BR><B>ra</B><BR>en<BR><B>um</B><BR>ecia</DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;"><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR> $1<BR> $3
<BR><BR> $3<BR></DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;"><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>.21<BR>.33<BR>
<BR>.75<BR></DIV>
<DIV style="CLEAR: both"> </DIV>
<DIV><A href="http://www.spamsucks.com">http://www.spamsucks.com
</A></DIV></FONT></DIV></B></B></BODY></HTML>
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Within the last month two of the blogs I regularly read and are linked to the side there have commented on Bill Waterson and unauthorized Calvin stickers. If they read my blog they would know that I have commissioned a vinyl decal place I found on the web to make me a Calvin & Hobbes sticker for my car. Have they stopped reading my blog because of this? If not, are they aiding and abetting a known criminal? Or is their only real objection that they found the image of Calvin peeing on “insert object” offensive?
I scanned the image I’m having made into a sticker from a C&H collection book I bought. The fellow that is making the sticker for me feels as if I have commissioned a piece of art from him. Is this sticker fair use for me? Is it art? Is it a tribute to my favorite cartoon characters?
My local newspaper just started carrying Calvin & Hobbes on the funny pages again. Not new stuff, but 20 year old strips. C & H will only be running from now until December the announcing article said. It is mainly a way to help sell Mr. Waterson’s new book, The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, a $150 set of books that reprints ever strip that ever appeared in the newspaper over it’s 10 year run. To make room for adding Calvin & Hobbes the paper stopped running Shoe daily and a couple of other smaller comics on Sunday. I sure hope Mr. Waterson is compensating the authors of the strips he is misplacing in this self-promotion scheme…
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
I have unsubscribed from the mailing lists of the three photography memes I have participated in regularly for about the last two years. At first they were exciting, they gave me something to do with the digital camera. But recently they have become tiring for me, how many times can you shoot “Yellow”? Yeah, I know, there are about a thousand ways to picture yellow, but only if you are really into photography.
For me it was always something I toyed with, never real serious. I took a bunch of photography courses in college and I’ve read a bunch of books on the subject too, so I know how to take a good photograph, but I don’t spend the time doing it to actually get them. I usually end up with a bunch of snapshots and from what I’ve seen on the web, there are too many snapshots out there already.
When I first got into blogging I stumbled onto CD Swaps and I did that for awhile, but I stopped. Then I did the photography thing, but that is over now. What is the next thing I’ll get “into”? Suggestions welcome.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Why do short work weeks seem so long?
So far this week the FRS are one and one in televised games, but tonight is the one that really matters, Red Sox vs. Yankees in the Bronx.
From a tidbit in this morning’s paper:
3 Downtown Events To Close Streets Saturday
1) Sept. 11 Memorial March
2) Southeast Clown Association Parade
3) Walk for Autism
There is a very tasteless joke in there somewhere…
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Donna and I took a nice short 8.5 mile bike ride this morning. The sun was just clearing the trees when we started and it was actually cool. Made a stop at the bagel place for breakfast and then pedaled home on the busiest road in town (because it was so early there was no traffic to speak of, but hours later it was clogged with shoppers.)
So what am I doing with all my free time now that I’m not doing those photo memes? Not coming up with quality blog posts that’s for sure. I had a great one earlier, but didn’t write down a hint, so I would remember it now that I’m actually sitting in front of the PC. It was kick-ass too! Better than yesterday’s post!
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Well, the FRS managed one out of three at the Stadium and ended up the weekend with a 3 game lead in the East. There are 20 games left to go in the season, so it is not over by a long shot, but the Sox are probably happy with their position right now. Of course us die-hard fans just know that a collapse is coming, I can feel it, a 2 game lead over the Yankees entering the final weekend of the season and needing to win just one game against the Bronx Bombers to clinch and they get swept at home. To make matters worse it will be on a Mark Bellhorn homer and Alan Embree will pitch a masterful 2 innings of relief to finish the game.
Although dead since 1986, I fully expect it to actually be Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch the way Bob Sheppard the Yankee Stadium public address announcer says, “Ladies and gentlemen, Kate Smith.”
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
For the ultimate Red Sox fan. You can now buy a 18″ x 9″ rectangle of grass from last year’s championship season for a mere $150. I’m sure the careful gardener could rip up his existing lawn, break up the piece into say 1″ square bits and nurture this into an entire yard full of fabled Fenway turf. I’d have bought some with my birthday money, but they won’t ship. The only way to get your grass is to show up at Fenway Park Gate B at 9:00 AM on Saturday, September 24th and that is too long a drive.
Fenway Championship Sod Sale
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
The designated IT guy at work had to buy and install a DVD drive in his PC yesterday. When our main IT folks speced out the PCs they just went with CDRWs and the other day they sent him a ghost image for repairing a PC and it was on a DVD…
Inside the box with the drive was a card for 10 free music downloads from Connect.com. He is not a music guy, so he gave it to me today.
First you needed to go to sony.com/card and activate the card. After choosing a username (your email) and a password, the second page requesting information was huge, I looked to see if I actually had to do this, seeing as step two was go to www.connect.com and register there too. From what I could read, activating was an optional step, but reccomended for security reasons. Forget that, I wasn’t ever putting money on there or using it again after my 10 free.
Off to connect.com where you have to download some software (good thing my buddy didn’t try this with his dial-up account, there was about 20Megs worth.) After installation, you then have to create an account. Another username and password. Page two starts right off with wanting credit card info. Hold it. Once again this is a one time thing, a search of the FAQ nets the way to enter the free music card without a CC.
Once I was in I went searching for my 10 songs. Hmmm. The card is worth $9.90 (10 times 99 cents) and each album seems to cost $9.99. Finally found something that I liked that had 10 songs on it. If I bought the whole album it was $9.99, but if I bought the ten songs one at a time, $9.90.
Cecilio & Kapono — Elua
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291
Part of my birthday largess arrived today, memory and hard drive fresh from Amazon.com. First thing I did was add the second 512M stick, bringing my RAM total to 1024 Megabytes. This made a small performance increase in some tasks. I’m sure once I get the larger HD in there it will improve even more as I only have a little over 3% empty on the C: Drive. Hard drive swapping is going to be major surgery because I want to start from scratch with a clean install of Windows instead of just mirroring the current drive over.
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I received this joke at work via email and it had the following preface: This has been nominated for best email of 2005. The following is a telephone exchange between a hotel guest and room-service, at a hotel in Asia, which was recorded and published in the Far East Economic Review.
The bit about “best email of 2005″ got me thinking, sounded to chain letterish to me. Enter “Ruin sorbees” in Google and got 1,320 hits, all referring to this joke. Some postings were dated in 1999 and one even mentions this making the rounds in 1997… The joke is pretty much word for word (if that is what you could call them), but the lead-ins differ slightly. Each one references it being published in the Far Eastern Economic Review, but search there for the same term gives zero results. A check of my usual myth-busting sites has no mention of this at all. I suspect it may be even older than that because it seems a little too unpolitically correct even for 1997. Anyway here you go…
(To get the full effect, this should be read aloud.)
Room Service (RS): Morny. Ruin sorbees.
Guest (G): Sorry, I thought I dialed room-service.
RS: Rye. Ruin sorbees. Morny! Jewish to odor sunteen?
G: Uh, yes, I’d like some bacon and eggs.
RS: Ow july den?
G: What?
RS: Ow july den — fry, boy, pooch?
G: Oh, the eggs! How do I like ‘em? Scrambled please.
RS: Ow july dee baychem — crease?
G: Crisp will be fine.
RS: Hokay. An san toes?
G: What?
RS: San toes. July san toes?
G: I don’t think so.
RS: No? Judo one toes?
G: I feel really bad about this,but I don’t know what ‘judo one toes’ means.
RS: Toes! Toes! Why jew don juan toes? Ow bow singlish mopping we boter?
G: English muffin! I’ve got it! You were saying ‘Toast.’ Fine. Yes, an English muffin will be fine.
RS: We boter?
G: No, just put the boter on the side.
RS: Wad?
G: I mean butter — just put it on the side.
RS: Copy?
G: Sorry?
RS: Copy…tea…mill?
G: Yes. Coffee please, and that’s all.
RS: One minnie. Ass ruin torino fee, strangle ache, crease baychem, tossy singlish mopping we boter and honey sigh, and copy…rye??
G: Whatever you say.
RS: Tend jew berry mud.
G: You’re welcome.
Come back Sunday night to hear of our daring exploits at Deal’s Gap. It is supposed to be a MMC event, but there are only 2 cars going. That is not a *Club*, it is just a couple of Miatas driving down the same road at the same time…
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Somewhere in eastern Tennessee today the odometer changed from 27999 to 28000…
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Been back most of the day, but I’m just now back computing. Installed the second half of my birthday present to myself this afternoon. I’ve got the basics loaded back on the fresh new hard drive, so I’ve still got a lot of software left to install. Those will happen when there is a requirement to use them.
While XP installed I went out and washed the car. It was quite dirty because at least 50% of the roads we traveled this weekend were wet.
Sorry if something is misspelled something, haven’t put that in yet…
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299
Wasn’t for me. A non-computer literate person at work was given a iPod Shuffle for his birthday a couple weeks ago. He asked me today to take some music CDs and put them on the iPod. Took a lot longer than it should, maybe because I’m not an Apple guy. I had to load iTunes and it went on willy-nilly installing and littering my task tray and desktop with Apple icons. I figured out how to load the burnt MP3s to the library, no problem, but couldn’t get them on the iPod. Every time I plugged in the iPod it would say, “Updating iPod, don’t disconnect.” But nothing was put on the player and I did have the little square in front of the song checked. I did say yes to something erased the poor fellows existing music though, so I had to get something back on there…
All the options I wanted seemed to be grayed out or missing. Where was the menu item that said load these songs to the iPod? Turns out you have to click on the little iPod thing on the left side and drag and drop the files on it.
Now that I’ve done it the “hard” way, I’m going to see if I can do it the easy way — using a freeware program called Shuffler. Then I can unload iTunes from my PC.
How do you keep those ear bud cords from getting tangled? Seems like every time I put them down I have to spend the next couple minutes untangling them.
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While trying to swap out the secondary drive on the PC with the former main HD I discovered that my Dell will not finish booting to a DOS disk if there is a USB card reader plugged into a USB port. Stumped me for about an hour. Tried 48,000 permutations of jumper settings on both drives and which connector on which drive and in a fit of desperation power cables to the drives.
(Before you ask, I needed to to boot to a DOS disk so I could unpartition my old 30G HD and make it one big back-up drive.)
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We recently had a city council election here in Aiken where there were 4 people running for the two open At-Large spots. It was really a Republican primary, but seeing as there were no Democrats interested in the offices, it turned out to be the actual election and every registered voter was eligible to vote. The hot button issue in the election was the unchecked growth in the city, particularly the south side.
As it shook out, the four candidates became aligned into two groups of two, one pair for limiting the growth some what and one pair for encouraging all the growth possible. As usual, quite a few front yards sprouted campaign signs and every lawn that had signs, had them in pairs representing one group or the other.
Usually when a candidate wins an election, the people who had signs up for the winner leave their signs up proudly. It could be to let us know how smart they are for backing a winner or it could be just rubbing the losing supporter’s noses in it. Heck, there are still a few Bush-Chenney bumper stickers on local cars…
How it happened I’ll never know, especially if the sign groupings were actually representative of the voting intent, but in the election, one candidate from each group won a seat. Within a couple of days after the election, 99.99% of the campaign signs were gone. I guess no one felt like admitting they were a half assed political prognosticator.
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A Red Sox loss and a Yankee win last night put the FRS into their usual American League Eastern Division spot, 2nd place. The past couple of years that was still OK because they had a good enough record to get into the playoffs via the Wildcard route. This year that may not be the case because the Cleavland Indians have a better record than the Red Sox and if the season ended today the BoSox players could break out the fishing gear.
It is not over by a long shot (I tell myself), there are still 10 games to play in the season and ten games ago the Red Sox were in 1st place by 4 games. A turn around is possible, we only trail the Yanks by a 1/2 game and Cleavland’s hold on the Wildcard is only 1 game…
But the long-time Boston fan in me is absolutely positive we are out of the playoffs now though. A co-worker brought me in his copy of the DVD Fever Pitch and I figured what better way to drown my sorrows than to watch a romantic comedy movie that uses the Red Sox’s glory year as a backdrop. Well, it was a nice thought, but I left the movie on my desk…
The FRS have an night off, so their is no game on the radio to listen to, so I guess I will have to make do with listening to the Baltimore broadcast of the Orioles-Yankees game and rooting for the birds.
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And aren’t going to get it late, meaning tonight. Last night’s rooting for the Baltimore Orioles didn’t work out so well, they still lost to the Damn Yankees, which placed the Red Sox a full game behind in the East. I’m hoping the O’s don’t get my wishes for a win a day late, because they are playing the FRS right now.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299
I’m seriously thinking about giving this up. Why you ask? I’ve let the bastards get me down, that’s why?
This morning I was greeted with another “The domain mr-miata.net has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit. Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.” emails. Between yesterday and the first third of today over 5–1/2 Gigs of bandwidth was sucked up by referrer spam from porno sites trying to increase their page rankings by leaving their demon seed behind. That is more than half of my alloted 10 Gigs a month transfer limit.
So I spent an hour or so going through the raw access logs and adding about 20 IP addresses to the deny list. I did this a month ago and now they are back with doubled efforts. For now I seem to have quelled the tide again, but next month they’ll be back, probably with again double the IPs…
Maybe if I tried a different blogging software. I have used Greymatter and Pivot before, don’t remember about GM, but pivot suffered from referrer spam too. I could step backwards and return to blogger, nah, probably not that option. WordPress…maybe. Time to learn another templating system…I don’t know
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299
In an effort to foil the referrer spammers who who eating my bandwidth like kudzu covering southern roadside, I pulled the plug on the Movable Type blog and fired up this WordPress site one directory over. Word Press has a couple of referrer spam countermeasures that I hope will help. For now all those who try and hit the old site will get a 404. Take that to your Google Ranking store sucka!
I saved all my old posts and everything, but I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll get around to reposting them. For now my plan is to turn the root entry of the site into a spot with links to my Miata related stuff, photos, mods, to transitions, etc. and this will be the usual drivel about my boring life. I just know that writing something down everyday has become too much of a part of my life to just stop doing it.
Hence this “new and improved” blog. It will be plain for a while until I figure out how to shape these templates to my liking.
 Spent a few hours yesterday setting up the tandem.
I installed new tires and tubes to replace the 10 year old ones that came on the bike. They were in surprisingly good shape, but why take chances on the possibility of failure due to dry rot when barreling down a hill at 50MPH!
Wrapped the stoker’s handle bars with some new tape. The old stuff was dried out and not very comfortable. I bought enough to do the captains bars too, but didn’t use the second roll. The captain’s handle bar tape was in better shape, just a little faded and it was the same kind as the new stuff I bought, so the setup matched already. Now we have a spare set of tape for any future needs.
Next I installed the cycle computer for the stoker. There was an old Vetta already mounted on the captain’s bars, but my stoker likes to have her own, so she can see how far, fast and long we are riding. One of the joys of tandeming is pedaling like mad down a hill and reaching crazy fast speeds. The stoker cycle computer keeps the captain from having to answer, “How fast we going now?” questions every 15 seconds during descents…
Next I changed out the captain’s saddle from an older Vetta that was there with a newer fangled Flite Titanium with the cutout in the middle for the comfort of your private bits. I then took some measurements off the road bike and duplicated them on the tandem for the captain.
For the stoker on this bike you really can’t do that for handlebar reach, otherwise the handle bars would be in the middle of the captain’s thighs. But sitting a little more upright is not a problem on the back of a tandem, in fact Donna said she even enjoys it more there. Setting up the seat to pedal distance is still important. After our short ride of a couple a weeks ago Donna mentioned that she felt too low, like the seat needed to be higher. When I measured Donna’s road bike and compared it to the tandem they were already really close, hmmm, confusing. Until I realized that the softride beam gives when you sit on it to preload it. Loosened the pivot bolt and pulled up the beam a couple of inches. Not scientific, but a start. On the next ride we see how it feels. It is a one allen bolt adjustment, so I’ll pack the appropriate wrench and we can adjust mid ride if necessary.
This morning we headed out for ride to check and see how well I got it set up. Things went great for the first mile. Then a loud pop came from the back of the bike. I thought her foot had popped out of the pedal, but Donna said no, it felt like under seat. We stopped and dismounted. The seat felt secure but seemed to be leaning a little. When I looked under neath I could see why. One side of the seat clamp was broken. Oh well. We rode carefully back the mile in which we came and parked the tandem. All dressed for a ride we pulled down the single bikes and went for a short 12 mile ride north east of town.
NBC has moved The West Wing to Sunday nights at 9:00PM. It is going to be nice once again to have a definitive ending to the weekend. Everything that needs to be done, will be done a few minutes before 9:00PM, so when the show starts it can have my undivided attention for an hour, then at 10:00PM when it is over, preparations for bed can commence.
The last TV show that came on Sunday’s at 9 that I used to watch was The X-Files and I miss it as much for it’s role as a closer as I did for the stories. I know it is a little early, but I gotta go get a good seat on the couch…
Ignore my last post. West Wing was on tonight at 8:00PM. When I finally got myself comfortable on the couch and surfed my way to NBC the show was just going off.
This sucks on so many levels. One, 8:00PM is too early to wrap up the day. Two, I missed the season premiere. Three, now I don’t feel like watching the show at all any more. Four, how could I have missed the start time?
For the first time in almost a month* I had to put the top up in anger. We actually had rain this afternoon. Light rain for about a couple of hours, but it started just about quitting time, so I had to pull the boot and drive around like a regular car for a while.
* I’m not counting the Gap weekend because we normally put the top up for overnight hotel stays…
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 300
…the bad news is we sing off key!
For my birthday we went to Outback for dinner tonight. Like good people we split an order of babyback ribs and just ordered a second salad instead of ordering two entrées. Like bad people we ordered coconut shrimp for an appetizer. To make up for that transgression we declined desert. But we got on anyway. On the way in Donna whispered to the hostess that it was my birthday, so a cadre of wait staff came over and serenaded me and handed me a ice cream sundae (with two spoons.) Donna knows that I hate this kind of thing, but I forgive her, at least she didn’t get them to decorate the conference room with black streamers and balloons at work and get the whole front office to give me those horrible over-the-hill gag gifts that take up a section of Spenser Gift stores…
All I want for a present is an FRS victory in tonight’s game against Toronto. They won this afternoon’s make-up for last night’s rain out already, keeping them tied with the Damn Yankees. These two rivals are locked in a tie for first place with seven games to go in the season. This weekend they play three games head to head that will more than likely decide who is going to the playoffs. Doesn’t get any better than this…
As you can see by the bottom of this page I managed to do a little importing, all the previous Mr. Fletcher’s Ride photos are now a part of the new blog. Even with the heroic measures taken, I overran my bandwidth limit and when I got home this afternoon, the web site was locked. I emailed the web host and he promptly upped my limit, so I’m back online. Hopefully next month I will get no where near my alloted 10Gig.
Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 303
A Scotsman, an Englishman and a Newfoundlander were sitting in a bar in Toronto. The view was fantastic, the beer excellent, and the food exceptional.
“As good as this is,” said the Scotsman, “I still prefer the pubs back home. In Glasgow, there’s a wee place called McTavish’s. The landlord goes out of his way for the locals. When you buy four drinks, he will buy the fifth drink for you.”
“Well, Angus,” said the Englishman, “At my local in London, the Red Lion, the barman will buy you your third drink after you buy the first two.”
“Ahhh, dat’s nothin’,” said the Newfie. “Back home in Sin Jahn’s there’s the Codfish Bar. The moment you set foot in the place, they’ll buy you a drink, then another, all the drinks you like, actually. Then, when you’ve had enough drinks, they’ll take you upstairs and see dat you get laid, all on the house!”
The Englishman and Scotsman immediately shout down the Newfie’s claims, but he swears every word is true. “Well,” said the Englishman, still suspicious. “Did this actually happen to you?”
“Not me meself, personally, no,” admitted the Newf. “But it did happen to me sister quite a few times.”
You’ll notice below that the top went up and then down today even though it didn’t rain nor did I wash the car.
Because I’m ever the southern gentleman, I always remove my hat when dining. Last night when we went out to eat at Outback instead of taking my very rare Red Sox World Champions ball cap inside and chancing losing it, I tossed it back in the car. Because it looked like it might rain while we were inside the restaurant, I put the convertible top up. The hat landed on the parcel shelf behind the seats. When we finished eating, the sky was clear enough so that we could drop the top for the trip home.
Tonight when I had to run out to drop of some dry cleaning, I went to grab my hat, it wasn’t there. Then I remembered. Before I backed out of the garage, I removed the boot and raised the top, so I could now remove my nicely pressed flat hat. Top went back down, boot went back on and with a quick bend of the brim, stuck the hat on my head and drove on my errand. Good thing that it was an unstructured cap…
Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 305
Well, so far this I am 0 for 2 in watching the TV shows I want to watch. First, I missed Sunday’s “West Wing” premiere and last night I missed the “Best of the Beatles” on PBS.
I read the article in the paper a week ago about the show that said it was going to be on 9/28 at 10:00 PM. I made a mental note to watch it. Some one at work who knew I was a Beatles fan handed me a copy of the article in case I missed it. Knowing PBS can be wonky with their scheduling and that I have access on cable to both the SC and GA channels I went to the PBS website to check the times and dates they were going to show the program. Both confirmed the paper’s 10:00PM start on the 28th. As an extra precaution against losing this info out of my sieve-like brain I subscribed to their handy email reminder thing.
Sure enough when I got home from work yesterday there was my reminder email. At about 10 minutes ’til ten I shut off the FRS radio broadcast (mercifully I might add, as they were losing 7 — 2 to the Blue Jays) and made my way into the living room. Flipped over to the clearer of the two PBS channels and waited. They were running a thing about Pop Music as it related to the protest movement and it was fairly entertaining. At 10 o’clock I waited for it to end, but it didn’t. Huh? Checked the other station and they were both in lock step showing the same show. I watched for about 15 minutes thinking maybe they were running late or something, but the protest music kept right on coming.
Plodded back to the PC and checked the PBS website and lo and behold the Beatles show ran from 8 to 9:00PM. Shit! Opened the reminder email back up and it said the show started at 8. I guess I should have read it more carefully…
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 305
Tried this evening to get the gravatars back. It worked fine in MT, but I couldn’t get the WordPress plugin to work right for me. I tried several different parameters for the plugin, but it wouldn’t work consistently, so I pulled it from the comments area.
They have this rating system so that some people can use more provocative images if they want and bloggers can choose not to show them. First I left any rating out of the plugin and it would show one person’s image but not another’s. So I cut and pasted the example into my template with it’s “R” parameter and the gravatars shown would change. Then I plugged in “X” and different ones would show. Keep in mind that everyone of the gravatars used by my comment posters are innocuous at best. Making matters worse was when I tried jockeying the size while keeping the rating the same, different ones would show than with just the rating. One combination caused no gravatars to show. At one point I would get a brief wink of the image before the square would turn black…
Sorry commenters, but you will just have to live with seeing your name there.
Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 305
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