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?

Whatever.

Free to a good home, one MGW Gripper Shift Knob painted Garnet Red. I’ll even toss in the extra gripper ring because it might be easier to surgically remove the current one, than try and pry it off. Paypal me $3 for postage and I’ll priority mail right to your home.

Vacuumed the car and then removed the week’s accumulated dirty using some Quik Detailer because this afternoon was the MMC’s showing at the Sno-Cap Drive-In’s 41st anniversary.

Yellow Sandwich

That and this week’s photo meme pictures came from the party. Through the magic that is MT’s editable Authored On data field, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday’s pictures were posted before the event.

I found someone to make my Calvin & Hobbes sticker and he mailed it late last week. Not here yet. I hope that they didn’t take a detour in time on their way here and were eaten by a T-rex.

Birthday present update: Window tinting is off the list, just doesn’t make sense for me. Rear lip spoiler is fading fast. Current front runner is a mild computer upgrade. This Dell was purchased in March of 2003 and while it 2.53Ghz processor is plenty strong enough for what I use it for, I’m thinking bumping the RAM from 512M to 1024M and getting a faster and bigger hard drive might be a nice thing. Hey, afterall I spend more time in the seat in front of the PC than I do in the driver’s seat of the Miata.

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

Damn That Was Nice

Today was our half day off Friday and we had no real plans, but ended up having a nice ol’ time. Originally we intended to go to lunch at Ferando’s for a calzone in downtown, but once we stepped out in to the parking lot at 11:30 a course of action was set. With the temps in the low 80’s with probably 60% humidity and the sun shining in a bright blue sky, we knew the weather called for a drive.

In true synchronicity, we both thought Maurice’s BBQ. So we drove 50 miles of two lane back roads one way to eat lunch instead of the original 3 miles. $2.67 a gallon gas be damned.

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

I Wanted So Much To Like This Knob

Several years back the MMC visited a local manufacturer that was making aluminum bits for the Miata. I bought their shift knob, hand brake lever handle and a cigarette lighter that was engraved to read “EJECT.” Their shift knob was shaped sort of like a toy top or tornado and had a nice rubber grip in the middle.

MGW Gripper Knob

I liked the rubber grip as it stayed cool in summer and warm in winter. Plus the combo of black and silver was a nice touch in the black interior. I just couldn’t get used to the flat top, so I bought the much beloved in the Miata.net community Voodoo shift knob.

Voodoo

I’d like to say I’ve never looked back, but I have. After a summer of cooking my palm on the solid ball of aluminum I wanted to incorporate the rubber piece from the MGW knob into the Voodoo. So I machined a horizontal groove into the voodoo that was the same size as the MGW gripper knob and melded to the two together. It came out just as I envisioned it, but I didn’t like the feel. Never got used to it and ordered a new Voodoo knob to replace the one I ruined. While I was at it I ordered the matching ebrake handle too. So now the only remaining item from the first trio of items is the EJECT lighter.

Last week while cleaning out a drawer at work and found the MGW gripper knob sans the grip. MGW is out of the Miata parts business, but still makes stuff for other cars, so I emailed them and asked if I could get a rubber gripper still. $5 and a replacement is yours they replied. While I waited for the postman, I decided to paint the aluminum Garnet Red. Three coats of red and two of clear and it looked pretty good. Yesterday a box came in the mail with not one, but two gripper rings. They had changed the mold so that there was now a key in the rubber to match a groove that must have gone in later knobs to prevent the ring from turning, so I had to dremel that out before I could put it on. Only taking out one little chip mounting the gripper I installed the knob in the car. I knew right away I had created another failed mod. I left it on for the day, but tonight it came back out and the Voodoo went back on. Still didn’t like the flat top and the red looked out of place in the interior because there was no other red to balance it out. It’ll make a nice looking paperweight…

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

Calvin Hates Fall Too!

I’m beginning to think that Bill Watterson was modeling Calvin after me. I hate Sundays, Calvin hates Sundays too. I hate fall, Calvin hates fall too. I was going to post an image of the cartoon here, but the quality was already iffy and shrinking it to fit made it illegible, so you just have to look at a pop-up.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 284

Upgradation

Last Friday this web site went off line for several hours. I checked someone else who who uses the same host and his site was up when mine was down. Well, We Are The Cips met the same fate as Mr-Miata a day later. Tom decided to open a help ticket (something I couldn’t do, as that feature was down at the same time as I was) and here is a synopsis of of it went:

Monday 8/15 at 11:59am – I open the ticket with the following:
What happened this weekend? According to Intersteer, my site was down from Saturday 8/13 2:09pm to Sunday 8/14 10:09am. I also received an email from another customer that their site was down as well. Also what is going on with the forums? I went there first looking for information and they are not up. Thanks.

Monday 8/15 at 12:51pm – Their reply and they closed the ticket.
Hi,
The site wearethecips.com is loading normal now without any problem and our NOC Engineers are monitoring the log files for your site downtime and update you once we received information for them.
Thanks,
Support Team.

There were a few more entries back and forth that I will not bore you with but the gist of each one was they would close the ticket with no explanation of the down time and I would reopen in. Below is my last entry and their reply.

Sunday 8/21 at 3:10am (I couldn’t sleep)
Why do you keep closing this ticket. No one has answered my question. What was the reason for the down time last Saturday (8/13/2005).
Thanks.
Tom

Sunday 8/21 at 4:27am (Cut and pasted right from the ticket)
Hi,
We had some upgradation done on the server due to which there was a downtime and everything is back to normal. You will definitely be intimated if there is any hereafter.
Kind Regards,

I echo Tom’s sentiment in his last email to me, “Let’s
hope there is no more upgradation in the near future.”

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 281

Glad I Listened

At our lunchtime walk around the company parking lot, my wife suggested putting the top up. I thought for a minute, trying to rationalize a no answer, because after all it was only a 40% chance, but decided to take off the cockpit cover and raise the roof.

Even under the opaque cockpit cover, the interior bits I had to touch to put the top up would blister skin if held too long. They would be literally red hot at 4:00 PM if the top went up and it didn’t rain.

I’m glad I listened, the thunder started by 1:30 and the skies opened at 2 o’clock. And while the intensity had waned, it was still raining at quitting time. If I hadn’t put up the top I would have had to bail out the interior.

And I didn’t have to worry about the interior temperature, to keep the windows from fogging I turned on the AC and actually had to turn the knob halfway to hot, so as not to get it too cold in the car. The bank sign on the way home said 76 or about 25 degrees cooler than it did last Friday at the same time.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 278