Donna’s mom Barbara Morrison, who has lived with us since the spring of 2000, passed away this evening. Blogging may be light for the next few days as I help my wife and her family through this difficult time.
If you feel so moved – National Kidney Foundation
After only one ride on the tandem I knew I didn’t like the seat that came on it. I tried a seat I had laying around, a Flite Titanium, but that was literally a pain in the derriere. Recently I tried the Terry Dragonfly seat off the road bike because it was so comfy there. On the tandem you are sitting a lot more than on the single bike, so what worked there didn’t translate as well to a double bike, so I broke down and bought a seat with a bit more padding from the same company – the Terry Fly CroMoly Saddle. Butt testing to begin soon.
Ever since August/September when I was pushing 10Gigs of traffic and 90% of that was referrer spam, I check my stats and raw logs every few days. Using a combination of pages equal hits and searching through the log I find the offending IP address and ban them. So far 152 IP addresses are no longer welcome. I have a couple of WordPress plugins running that are supposed to block some of this, but so far I’m not sure they are up to the task. Banning IPs is the only surefire way, but it means constant diligence is required.
Something new has popped up in the access logs, instead of requesting a GET which loads the page and consums bandwidth, there have been quite a few that are requesting a HEAD which doesn’t load the page and results in zero bandwidth usage. Are they being friendly?
Or are they just probe droids looking for pages to exploit?
I’m betting on the latter, so they are going on Santa’s Naughty list…
I’ve got my first design ready for the black T-shirts. A stylized battleship with the words Real Navy in white on the front. The next one will be a little harder as I’m not a real artist, but I want to get a line art drawing of a sailor in the bellbottom dress uniform, kind of like the one in a recruiting poster I’ve seen. Hmmm, wonder if I could manipulate that image…
Finally imported the last of the posts from Brian’s Early Blogging Days, AKA The Reader’s Digest Condensed 2002.
Started with one blog on Blogspot using Blogger in January of 2002 and one became two shortly thereafter. Moved to MT and piggybacked the 2 blogs on my Barndoor Fan Club web space. Two became three with the addition of a photoblog. Moved to my very own domain and then swapped to Pivot for blogging software. Combined all three blogs into one and moved back to MT. Jumped ship to WordPress in an attempt to eliminate referrer spam and here we are.
As threatened, I have created a gallery of the photos I am using on my 2006 Miata Calendar. Added one for this year’s images and added back some to replace the missing from regular Miata gallery. Take a look by clicking on the links on the right under Photos.
Either sometime last night or early this morning the Emperor passed the 31k mark. I’m betting it was yesterday sometime as the odo tonight, when I noticed it, read 31038.
I have narrowed down all the Miata photos I have taken in the last year to the 20 finalists for the 2006 calendar. I need 13, one for each month and then one for the cover page. I’ll probably create a separate gallery for the calendar. While I’m at it I might do a gallery for the 2005 photos too. The seven also-rans from 2006 and the ones already in the Miata gallery that aren’t in the ’05 calendar will still fill the regular Miata Gallery well enough. I wonder if the PHP gallery software I’m using allows subdirectories?
Guess I might never know. I just clicked on the automatically generated link on each gallery page that is supposed to take you to the author’s web site and he hasn’t renewed his web hosting agreement. I guess now is the time to try the enhanced version that I downloaded a while back. At least that web site is still up.
Donna and I went out for breakfast this morning to our usual spot, the New Moon Cafe, but instead of the usual bike ride to get there we took the Miata. The weather around here has been perfect for convertible ownership and as a consequence also perfect for dining outside. We sat at a little table and read the local paper while waiting for breakfast. When I looked up across the street I noticed that someone had parked a Splash Green Miata right next to our car. I was pretty merciless when describing my distaste for this color when I had one as a loaner back on October 6th & 7th of 2003 (and a few other later posts too.) I’m thinking the word is out among Splash Green owners to park near me whenever they get a chance, just to torment me.
Speaking of perfect convertible weather, the word is out amongst all members of the topless fraternity on that too. Well over 90% of ‘verts I saw this weekend had their tops down, even the BMWs & Sebrings.