Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - August 1999

The Movie Theatre

A couple of new Theatres - Sonia versus Greg

Check out the entire list of Theatres

Movies added this month.

Newsgroups - NewsThumbs

I added something to the NewsThumbs search. Now, when Sandra comes back from a search, as well as giving a link to each file she found, she also offers you a ZIP file to download. This is all the files, or the first 100 files, the second 100, and so on. Since 100 files is likely to be 10 mb or so, that's more than enough for a download!

Another new thing. The most popular newsgroup that people access is, as you'd expect, alt.amazon-women.admirers. So I've done a special thing for that group. I've taken about a year's worth of pictures, deleted the porno-spams and other junk, de-duplicated it, and sorted the pictures into alphabetical order. You wouldn't believe how much work it was to make it nice and tidy like that. And I told Greta to make thumbnails for them all, to make access easier. You can see The AAWA Archive and browse through

I added a dozen or so new Newsgroups that people had asked for. Apart from that, the only new stuff was a zillion more pictures.

Servers

I had a couple of problems in July. The first was a thunderstorm (Thor being playful again), which took out my ISDN line, so I could only access the site with a dial-up. British Telecom took four days to repair the line. That wouldn't make any difference to members, because my servers aren't here, they're in New York and Washington. During that time, I was preparing lots of new Galleries for upload later.

But while I wasn't looking at the site much, the thing on Newsthumbs that makes ZIP files for download, decided to start creating monster temporary files. This filled up the disk, which caused Newsthumbs to stop updating for a day, and it also caused a problem with the password system. I made this self-repairing in case it breaks, but without any space on the drive, it couldn't self-repair on Mary, so newsthumb access was out for nearly an hour.

So, now I've told Narella to check for these monster temporary files once per hour, and get rid of them.

By the way ... to all those AOL users who have set up their email to block emails coming in from outside AOL - if you email me (or anyone else) you won't get an answer, because you blocked it.

Web site backups

Someone asked me about backups for the web site. You think I trust a computer to go on working for ever? Well, it works like this.

Joan is the main server, in New York. Joan has the Library, the Galleries, the Movie Theatres and a lot of the other stuff. If anything happens to Joan, or anything happens to the internet link to the building she's in, or if New York is attacked by a 60 foot gorilla and all services are out, then the web site switches to Diana in Washington - different computer and locality, same web site. I also have a copy of all the data here in England on hard disk, and also on tape.

For the NewsThumbs, there is currently no backup. If Mary goes down, all the last four months of NewsThumbs is gone, I just don't have a way of backing up 100 gigabytes of data, with another gigabyte or two arriving each day. But I can quickly switch to a new server and the flow of new NewsThumbs will continue. I'm working on getting a backup for Mary.

Messages and Chat are on Freya. If Freya goes down, I have a copy of the archives, but the most recent messages will be lost.

Nancy is the audio; Freya is the backup for Nancy.

So, you can see. The things that are most important, have very strong backups, including the ability to survive an attack by a 60 foot gorilla on New York. And don't tell me that can't happen, I saw it in a movie.

The Shopping Mall

Caught in the Act, a new video from Kasie Cavanough.

Using your credit card on the internet

Before I started running this web site, I didn't really know very much about credit cards. All I knew was, you show it to the waiter, and that pays your restaurant bill. Or petrol (gasoline). Or clothes, whatever. But now I use it a lot on the internet. You probably do too.

It is, in fact, very safe to use your credit card on the internet. Of course, it isn't safe doing business with dishonest companies. That's true whether they're trading over the internet, by phone, or any other way. Could your credit card number be somehow "intercepted" or "hacked"? Very unlikely. If someone wants to steal credit card numbers, they'd go down the mall and look over a few shoulders as the credit cards were being run. Or root through restaurant dustbins for sales slips. If you give your credit card using a Secure Server, the chance of it being intercepted drops to practically nothing.

But there's a few useful tips I can give you.

1. When you get your monthly credit card statement, check each item. If there's anything you don't recognise, ask your bank to find out what it is. If there's expenditures you're certain that you or a family member did not make, tell the bank that.
2. If you join a web site, find out how to cancel before you join. And make sure you know whether the billing is one-off, or recurring. And write the cancellation instructions down (or print them out) together with your user-id and password. Also, if they have a surface mail address, write that down, or print it out. You'll need that if you no longer have access to the internet, and want to cancel.
3. Don't rely on your computer being able to remember important things for you. Computers stop working, hard disks crash, and Internet Explorer sometimes forgets all your passwords. Unless you have it on *paper*, you can't be sure you have it.
4. Before you send an email to someone, check that your email address works, and that you know what it is. If you send an email that just says "Please cancel", and you do it from an email address that is different from the one you gave when you signed up, they won't know who you are. They'll probably email you back; if your return email address doesn't work, then you might think you've cancelled, but there's no way they can know who to cancel.
5. If you're on AOL, and you choose the option that stops you getting email messages from the internet, and then you write to someone, then they can't reply to you. Also, if you're using a normal ISP, and you set your email so that the reply address is wrong, any replies will go astray, and you'll wonder why everyone is so rude and never answers you.
6. If you try to cancel a recurring billing by cancelling the credit card, chances are that won't work. For some reason, the banks helpfully re-open the card when they get another billing. And you will get more billings, because if you cancel a card, no-one tells the people billing you that the card is cancelled, so they go on billing. You can spend months closing and re-closing the same account.
7. When you buy hardware over the internet, check a few different vendor sites. I've found that sometimes the same thing on one web site is 50% more expensive than on another. Many vendors give free carriage to orders over the web.
8. When you buy books, CDs or videos on the internet, check the shipping/handling costs. These are sometimes quite large compared to the price of the goods, and you might shop around for a better deal on that.
9. When you buy software over the internet, you'll download a file, then they'll send you a key to unlock it. Put this key somewhere very safe, you'll need it again if you change computers, or if you need to replace your hard disk.
10. Internet email isn't reliable. You only have to make a small mistake, and the email won't get there. I've recently seen people write to valkyrie@valkyrie.com, to valkyrie@thevlakyrie.com, valkyrie@thevalkryie.com. In the first case, there is a computer somewhere called valkyrie.com, but it isn't me. In the second and third cases, the email goes heaven knows where. If you write to someone and they don't reply, you should consider the possibility that you made some small mistake addressing it.

The Clubhouse

A new Message Board (and a Gallery update) for Gisele Sass. Also for smoking ...

The Games Room

Nothing new.

In the Chatroom

Thanks to Tex Biceps again for doing the newsletter, and a special thanks for his efforts this month, in getting the Tattler ready 10 days early, so I could get my pre-vacation arrangements in place.

The Coffee Lounge Tattler

"All the chat that's fit to print..."

News

1. Battle of the sexes
2. LOVE & DEMUSCLIN'
3. A "HUGE" meeting
4. The new Valkyrie
5. The New Schmoo Review, by Dr. Sigmunds Biceps PhD
6. Coffee Lounge Spotlight: boomer

Send questions and comments to TexBB@aol.com...........

You might like to read Tex's stories.

Chatter of the month

The Grinch ate the data :-(

On the Message Boards

I added a message board for Gisele Sass, who was Favourite FBB of the month last month.

Mavis keeps a running total of who are the most frequent posters, and which message boards are most used. I told her to include messages from non-members in the count for the most-used board. That's the main reason why the Session Economics board ("deposit") has roared into the lead, being more popular than the next two boards put together! Go see what all the discussion is about.

Sponsorships

Nicole Bass is no longer with WWF.

Back Page

At the end of July, I'm going away for a couple of weeks. The web site should still run fine (fingers crossed). And there will even be updates. But if you send me an email, you'll just get an automated response.

So, a short newsletter this month (it had to be either shorter than usual, or a week or so late).

I did an Altavista search for something, and most of the hits were on my web site. Altavista has indexed the message board archives, and the chatroom archives!

I checked the site statistics. that Sandra counts up each night. Early in May, we passed the million picture count! And in June, we roared past a million and a half.

At the end of July 1999, there were about 177,000 pictures (7.9 gigabytes), 12.1 gigabytes of video, 3200 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about twenty gigabytes. In addition, there's NewsThumbs, which is another 1,337,000 pictures in 109 gigabytes and two million text files, a total of 116 gigabytes.

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