Rants

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

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?

Upgradation

Last Friday this web site went off line for several hours. I checked someone else who who uses the same host and his site was up when mine was down. Well, We Are The Cips met the same fate as Mr-Miata a day later. Tom decided to open a help ticket (something I couldn’t do, as that feature was down at the same time as I was) and here is a synopsis of of it went:

Monday 8/15 at 11:59am – I open the ticket with the following:
What happened this weekend? According to Intersteer, my site was down from Saturday 8/13 2:09pm to Sunday 8/14 10:09am. I also received an email from another customer that their site was down as well. Also what is going on with the forums? I went there first looking for information and they are not up. Thanks.

Monday 8/15 at 12:51pm – Their reply and they closed the ticket.
Hi,
The site wearethecips.com is loading normal now without any problem and our NOC Engineers are monitoring the log files for your site downtime and update you once we received information for them.
Thanks,
Support Team.

There were a few more entries back and forth that I will not bore you with but the gist of each one was they would close the ticket with no explanation of the down time and I would reopen in. Below is my last entry and their reply.

Sunday 8/21 at 3:10am (I couldn’t sleep)
Why do you keep closing this ticket. No one has answered my question. What was the reason for the down time last Saturday (8/13/2005).
Thanks.
Tom

Sunday 8/21 at 4:27am (Cut and pasted right from the ticket)
Hi,
We had some upgradation done on the server due to which there was a downtime and everything is back to normal. You will definitely be intimated if there is any hereafter.
Kind Regards,

I echo Tom’s sentiment in his last email to me, “Let’s
hope there is no more upgradation in the near future.”

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 281

Forced Night Off

Almost.

When I got home from work there was no new email at any of the mr-miata.net accounts. Strange. Especially seeing as I had sent an email from work to one of them. Clicked on Send and Receive All in OE and got nothing. Checked for this web page, 404. Tried to connect via FTP, couldn’t find site. Checked the web host’s forum for a maintenance update announcement, their site was 404 too. Not good. Checked the web host’s parent site (he is just a reseller) and it was alive, at least that is a good sign.

I hope this wasn’t a repeat of my ThatHostingCompany fiasco. After they disappeared with mastersmiataclub.com I swore I would never let the web host register the domain name for me, but here I was again, seduced by the low cost, right in the same pickle again. Wait a minute, that reminds me, a fellow THC exile is also using the same host (ssWebHost.com) maybe I’ll check his site. It appears fine. That’s strange, maybe it is a random hard drive crash and I’m on the wrong platter.

I don’t know how long I was down, last time I looked was last night, but mr-miata.net was back online at around 9:30 tonight. First thing I did was do a back up of the “Life of Brian.” I was long overdue, last one was March.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 271

Bike Afternoon (sort of)

Two weekends ago before we went for our little bike ride I noticed that there was a slight wobble in the rear wheel. Living dangerously I broke out the spoke wrench and gave 3 or 4 spokes around a full turn. Loosened two and tightened two depending on which direction I needed to pull the rim. I got most of the blip out, but after our ride the wobble was back. Time for a professional. Last Thursday I dropped off the wheel at the local bike shop and when the mechanic went to put the wheel on the truing stand, she noticed my problem right off, the rim was cracked at one of the spoke holes and the nipple was puling through.

We had to order a new rim, so she said give her a week. This afternoon we went and picked up my newly rebuilt wheel. She was just finishing up the job when we arrived, putting the tire tire back on and pumping it full of air. We were planning on a late afternoon bike ride, but I had a few hours so I just put the wheel in the garage. The rains came this afternoon, so riding was out, but I went out to put the wheel on the bike because Plan B would be an early morning ride on Sunday. The tire as flat.

I pulled out a patch kit from a cabinet and the rubber cement for applying the patches was long evaporated. Donna has some glueless patches in the seat bag of her bike, I could use them. I found the hole easy enough and applied the patch. Pumped up the tire and mounted on the bike. A couple hours later I checked the tire, flat again. We never did have good luck with those glueless patches. We may head out and get a patch kit tonight or forget about the bike ride tomorrow and go for a hike in Hitchcock Woods.