Gone

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:
lakeview before

After:
lakeview 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.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291

Half Right & All Wrong

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.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291

It’s 1973 All Over Again

I filled up with gas last Thursday and the price was $2.63 a gallon. (The Emperor uses premium, so those are the prices I’m quoting.) This morning on the way to work, at one of the stations we pass, I noticed that the price had jumped to $2.89. Twenty-six cents in 6 days. Yikes. On the way home, the price was now $3.04 and there were short lines at the pumps.

After I got home I put on my Rollerblades for for my bi-nightly skate. On the 3 mile loop I pass somewhat near 2 gas stations. At one the price was the same $3.04 and the cars were 8 to 10 deep along the shoulder waiting to fill up. At the other gas station I couldn’t see if there were lines, but they had pulled the prices off their sign. Probably didn’t have enough threes.

I still have a half a tank in the Miata, so I can go another week before I *have to* get gas. This is a two edged sword though, by next week there shouldn’t be any lines, but the price will probably be $3.50 a gallon.

9:30PM Update: Went out for ice cream and made a quick gas station tour. Passed 8 stations and 6 had premium for $3.19. Two still had $3.04, both were Shell stations, one of which was the 8-10 car line before, now with no line at all. The station with no price earlier now said $3.19.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291

I Feel A Little Like Jimmy Carter

No, I haven’t taken up peanut farming. Nor am I thinking of running for President. But like Jimmy admitted in his famous Playboy interview, I have lusted in my heart.

The object of my lust is not another woman, but another car. That’s right, I want one of the new Miatas…er, MX-5s. I can’t explain it. I think the car I’m driving is a much nicer looking automobile, inside and out. I have got it modified to near perfection for my liking. Sure they have made some improvements in the new car, but none are real compelling. Actually there are a few things that I don’t like at all about the new car, yet still I wish I could get one. It must be giving off pheromones that are stimulating chemical receptors in my brain.

This will just have to be my cross to bear, because unless I win the lotto (and I better buy a ticket if that is to happen), I certainly can’t afford a new car.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291

That Ought To Slow Them Down A Bit

When I got up this morning there was still a few IP addresses sucking bandwidth that I had to deny. Figuring that new ones would keep popping up and that they were all loading the page /archives/miatatude I figured a good way to keep them from doing that was to just rename that category in MT. Miatatude became Miata Tude around 10:00AM and so far today’s bandwidth usage has been 96.19 M compared to 417.46 MB yesterday and 963.85 MB on Saturday.

One problem though, I’ve killed my Radio Paradise recently played list. Cover me, I’m going back into Cpanel…fixed it. I had denied the IP that the feed comes from.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 287

Truck Drivin’ Man

Donna’s next oldest brother changed careers a few months back. Used to program AS400s but after this last layoff and an unsuccessful job hunt in west-by-god-texas he went to tractor trailer drivin’ school and now roams the country driving a big rig.

A few weeks back he was passing this way and we made plans to go meet him somewhere, but the truck he was driving broke down in No-town, Alabama and we missed.

Yesterday he called and said that he had a load of carpets going to Laurens, SC (just a hop, skip and a jump from us) for Monday and would be spending the night at a truck stop somewhere in the upstate of SC. Donna managed to convince him to come closer to us than he originally planned, so we met him this evening for dinner near a Pilot Truckstop in Clinton.

Think stereotypical truck driver and Steve fits the picture (at least to me.) Sorry I didn’t take the digital camera. Donna’s mom brought her film point and shoot, so in about six months we’ll see the results. He drives for Covenant Transport and he has given us a link that will tell you where the truck is at any given moment, trouble is you have to have the current truck number he is driving, which we don’t. They have about 2,000 trucks so it would be pretty hard to luck onto his. I know one of the trucks he used to drive is in Washington state right now: Click Locate A Tractor and enter truck number 9617.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 285

Help A Noobie Out

This morning I got an email telling me that I was getting close to exceeding my bandwidth for the month. Interesting, that’s never happened before. So I checked my stats and sure enough I’ve served up 8.6 Gigs out of my 10 alloted.

Things were running about normal until the 23rd of the month and then usage quadrupled. Normally I was using between 150-200MB a day when all of a sudden it jumped to over 900MB. Visits and hits stayed pretty much the same, but pages went way up. The biggest page served was “/archives/ miatatude/” which is automatically generated when requested.

Further delving into the stats, a lot of external links had web addresses with names like: http://phentermine.us.tt – http://phentermine.dnc.pl – http://phentermine.rocken.de – http://phentermine.220v.org – http://party-poker.dnc.pl – http://www.cialis.wczasy.com – http://hgh.dnc.pl – http://hydrocodone.dnc.pl- http://www.rape.wczasy.com

Next I looked in the raw access logs and found a bunch of entries that looked like this: 210.0.200.2 – – [26/Aug/2005:00:00:08 -0500] “GET /archives/miatatude/ HTTP/1.0” 200 26131 “http://phentermine.us.tt” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7” and 148.244.150.58 – – [26/Aug/2005:00:02:00 -0500] “GET /archives/miatatude/ HTTP/1.0” 200 1723287 “http://phentermine.rocken.de” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7”

I did some reading up on deciphering that mumbo-jumbo and what is really strange is that both those requests are for the same web page, but for one a lot more info is returned, but the big question is what is going on here? I found like the top ten IP addresses doing this requesting and denied them access so they will get a 403 instead content. What really worries me is this looks a lot like comment spam roaches, you squash one and several more crawl out from the base boards. Am I going to have to check my logs daily and ban IPs until I close every one?