Month: August 2005

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?

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