Miatatude

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?

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

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

Choices, Choices, Choices

The budget has been announced for Glorification Of The Annivesary Of My Nascency.

Barbossa: There be a lot of long words in there, mister. We’re naught but humble pirates. What is it that you mean?

Donna has allowed me to spend $200 as I see fit for my birthday.

I have a couple of ideas that I’d like, but I’m not sure I want them bad enough to pull the trigger.

Item 1) Bronze tint on the Miata’s windows. Upside – keeps the interior cooler on sunny days. Downside – On 99.9% of all sunny days the top is down thereby negating any tinting. The top is only up a lot in the winter when the tinting isn’t needed.

Item 2) Rear lip spoiler. Upside – generates increased downforce at triple digit speeds and being non-OEM ensures some individuality. Downside – not so sure it won’t enhance the very thing I’m trying to disguise, the little duck tail hump on the trunklid.

I’m open for suggestions.

For those of you who would to get me a little something, but can’t afford either of the above two items, more cost friendly items can be found on my Amazon Wishlist.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 275