Rants

0 for 2

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

Ooops

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?

Death of a Weblog?

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

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

Come On Baby, Boot!

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.)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

iPod = Easy?

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.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

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

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