Miatatude

The Sky Is Falling!

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 Land Of The Twisties

Deals Gap

Started down, went up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 294

Goin’ Gappin’

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…

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

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

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?