Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - April 2001
A hard man is good to beat
Galleries added this month.
Connor McCloud has his own Bookshelf now. He writes about (fairly friendly) mixed wrestling. Also Jed, who specialises in murder most foul.
Stories added this month.
Tenderheart has his own bookshelf now.
Nothing new.
There's a new Theatre; Sonia vs Kelly and Sonia vs LPD
Movies added this month.
In December 2000, I launched "Project Upgrade". The idea was, I'll make my own servers. That way, I'll use quality components where quality is important (ethernet cards, hard disks); by buying components instead of computers, I pay wholesale prices instead of retail, and I don't get useless extras that cost money (for example, my servers don't have monitors, or high spec graphics cards).
My design was like this. I'll have big boxes as data stores (I call these the "Valkyrie Mark Two" design). These have 650 gb of disk. But how do you back up such a lot of data? Tape isn't the way. So I have two of these where one is used, like twins, and if one stops working, I can switch over to using the other one. I can build those big computers for about $4000 now, and the small ones for about $1000.
I wanted to take the burden of serving browsers, off those big boxes, so they could concentrate on handling the data. So, I have smaller boxes (the "Valkyrie Mark Three" design) as front-ends. You talk to the Mark Three, the Mark Three gets the data from the Mark Two, and passes it over to your browser. If a Mark Two goes down for any reason, I tell the Mark Tree to talk to its twin. If a Mark Three goes down, because they're so small and data-free, they're very quick and easy to replace.
So in December and January, I was designing, building and testing these. In January and February, I was shipping them to the USA, and getting them ready for use, with more testing. And now, in March, they're coming on-stream.
Lots of action on Freya. I moved from Freya 1 on to Freya 2, as part of "Project Upgrade". But then I found that Freya 2 was hanging, it happened a few times, and that meant that the Message Boards were out of action.
So I moved it again. The Message Boards and a few other bits are now on Freya 3, and all the stuff I'm hosting for other people, is on Hilda, which is Freya 2 in disguise. Hopefully the lighter load will mean that Hilda won't hang so often. And Hilda will get replaced, anyway.
I also retired vtv01, (the Valkyrie Channel and Listen with Diana). I asked Naomi (a Mark Two) to take that on (you can still talk to vtv01 and get a reply) as an extra duty from being the backup for Joan. Naomi is intended to take over from Joan eventually, so this will be a useful introduction. Tilly (a Mark Three) is acting as receptionist for Naomi, so you don't ever talk to Naomi direct; you talk to Tilly, who gets from Naomi, the stuff that you browse.
And Ethel has gone. You never saw Ethel. But Ethel was a very key player. Ethel used to make all the thumbnails, the Bookshelves, check the links, make the movie pages, and all that sort of thing. Every night, the whole web site gets rebuilt, and then it's uploaded to Joan, and it was Ethel who did the rebuilding. But Ethel was running low on disk space, so now Clara, with three times the space (280 gb), as taken on that duty. Clara is one of the dual-processor machines I was building last year. So was Ethel, actually. Ethel will return, though. I added a couple of the big 47 gb drives that Vanessa used last year, and now Ethel has 250 gb, and will be used as a backup for Clara.
On 23rd March, we had a power cut at the Maryland site. My battery backups (UPSes) kept the servers going for 45 minutes, but the power cut lasted hours. I've ordered a small petrol generator (hurrah for Honda), so we can start that up if a power cut seems to be a long one. But if a power cut is long and large enough, the problem might be that the people upstream of my servers are down, in which case I'm off the net anyway. That's one of the reasons why I have servers at three locations; Maryland, New York and England.
I've found a way to cram 12 cheap 80gb drives into a single computer. This means I can now build 1-terabyte of disk space (1000 gigabytes) and a gigabyte of memory for around $5000. I'm calling this the Valkyrie Mark Four, and I'm building the first one right now. Actually, it's 969 gigabytes, but a terabyte sounds better! No, I'm not selling them, I'm just making this one for the web site.
Major changes here!
Kirty has been running since July 2000, and you've been accessing the Newsthumbs via Oprah (you talk to Oprah, Oprah talks to Kirty and gets what you requested). But in December of 2000, I started my big Project Upgrade, and now it's online, as of March 30th.
To access Newsthumbs, you talk to Uschi (you can call her vnews, although she'll also answer if you call her Oprah). Uschi is one of my small Mark Three boxes, with lots of power but not much disk. She talks to two of my big Mark Two boxes, Penny and Lorna. Penny has the current news, January 2001 to now, and Lorna has July 2000 to March 2001 (moved from Kirty). To get the news dated July 2000 to March 2001, you talk to vnews05. And the older news (February 2000 to September 2000) is still available via vnews04. If this sounds complicated, don't worry. All you have to do is go to the Newsgroups Magic Carpet and click on things.
One big advantage of doing things this new way, is that Penny is twinned with Rosie, so if anything dire happens to Penny, I just tell Uschi to get the news data from Rosie instead. Then, while Rosie carries on, I fix the problem with Penny. There's probably some computer science geek-term for what I'm doing here, but I have no idea what it is.
When I moved the data from Kirty to Lorna, I also dealt with the problem of bad links; each link got checked, and I remade the thumbnails for the places where there were missing stuff. Because I had a disk crash a month or so ago, and that lost about 10% of the data on the Newsthumbs.
This meant a lot of computation, of course; I had five processors grinding away for several days on this. But it means that now, when you click on a link, you won't get the frustrating "Not available".
Project Upgrade isn't complete yet - I'll let you know more as it happpens.
There's a new video in the Kasie Cavanaugh shop, "Tag Team Tussles". And there's a 90-minute video of Sonia Fernandes in the Diana the Valkyrie Video Shop, which is actually three videos on one tape.
I've awarded Spam-of-the-Month to this effort. They succeeded in indexing 3427 text pages out of the 13000 on the main site, not counting the 12 million in Newsthumbs. And they'll give me repeat service for only $995 per year.
I omitted a whole bunch of stuff in the middle of the spam.
Hello, We have indexed 3,427 pages from your website at http://www.thevalkyrie.com/ In a matter of minutes, your users can be searching your site, and you can be analyzing what your users are looking for, all without installing any software or hardware. To prove that search enabling your web site can help you generate more business and reduce your costs, we are providing free searching and search analysis. After you add searching to your site, you can use your Internet browser to analyze search traffic on your Web site and intranet. wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble This search service is free for 30 days. After that, you can choose to continue the search service for an annual fee of as little as $995 per year. Click http://www.searchexpress.com/spidprod.htm for more information. wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble wibble
No thanks. I already have search engines on the site, plus I can look at the logs to see what pages get accessed the most.
So can you. Look at the Top Twenty
We currently have seven running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana and Peggy Schoolcraft.
Peggy competed at the Arnold (Ms International), coming in at ninth place.
Christine won her Pro card this month! Here's a picture of her winning the event that got her the IFBB Pro card.
Andrulla is aiming to use her Ms Olympia title to progress her career. She's looking at writing for magazines, sponsorships, maybe even a book. She's in LA right now, trying to make stuff happen.
Peanut butter cookies
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 cup peanut butter
2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
Cream butter and sugars, add eggs, vanilla and peanut butter and mix well. Mix in dry ingredients. Let dough stand 15 minutes. Roll into balls the size of walnuts. Place 3" apart on lightly greased baking sheet. With flour dipped fork, flatten dough criss-cross fashion to 3 to 4 inches in diameter. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes, or until lightly browned. Let cool slightly before removing from baking sheet.
Oatmeal cookies
1 cup butter
1 1/4 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 tbs milk
2 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups oats (quick or old fashioned)
one 12 oz pack semi-sweet chocolate pieces
(or 1 cup raisins)
1 cup chopped nuts
Heat oven to 375 degrees. Beat together margarine (butter) and sugars until creamy. Add eggs, milk and vanilla.......beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda and salt......mix well. Stir in oats, chocolate pieces and nuts...mix well. Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 9 to 10 minutes. Cool one minute on cookie sheet, then remove to wire rack. Makes about 5 dozen
gaily
A lot of what is on the net is free. So are there millions of generous people, donating their time and equipment for free for idealistic reasons? Er ... no. It's mostly about money, as usual.
There's four main ways of funding a web site.
1. No funding. You spend your time, you spend some money for equipment and web space, and you do it for fun. Most of the sites on the web are small sites done purely for fun. Some of the best sites are like that. There's even some very large sites done this way.
2. For sale. You're selling videos, or computers, or books. The web site leads to additional sales, so it's worth putting the man-hours and money into making a site.
3. For support. You're selling computers, or vegetable seeds, or bicycles. People keep phoning you up with questions; wanting support, asking about product features. It's cheaper to pay to have a web site, than to pay people to answer the phones.
4. Subscriptions. The people who get the benefit from the web site, pay the web site maker a regular subscription. That's what I do, of course.
5. Advertising. This is sometimes called "sponsorship", because advertising is a negative word. The idea is that you put up adverts for other people, and they pay for the advertising. Many radio and TV channels are funded that way.
But there's a change going on, on the net. You will have heard of all the dotcom companies going under. One major result of this, is that the gold rush is over. There are no longer zillions of eager investors willing to pour money into dotcom startups. Since that money is no longer flowing into the net, some of the flows downstream of the dotcoms are drying up too.
The startup dotcoms were spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising, and so there was a big flow of money into existing web sites, via payments for advertising. Now that this flow has dried, the money that a web site can earn via advertising, is sharply reduced.
There's two excellent free sites; the one run by Armfan and the World of Muscle. Free means that they're free to people using them. Armfan and CP have to pay to keep their sites running, and the revenue that goes into that payment, comes from the advertising that they carry.
Both sites (and probably every other such site on the net) have recently had a significant reduction in ad revenue, without any reduction in their costs. Although those two sites are still going strong, there must be many other sites that have folded because of this.
A noticable example, is Deja News. They started as a Usenet archive, branched out to become a "community" site, moved on into a shopping site, and recently were forced to close. Fortunately, they've been taken over by Google.
There will be more such closures. The drying-up of the inflow in investment money will have a major impact right round the net. The whole net is ringing like a hard-struck bell from this blow, and the reverberations will continue for a long time.
And as well as closures, there will be a tightening-up. For example, it used to be possible to give the URL of a picture on a Geocities site, and people could click on a link and see the picture. But Geocities is ad-funded, and this bypasses the adverts. If you don't see the adverts, Geocities don't get the revenue to support their service.
So now, if you give a link to a Geocities site, you should give the link to the entire page that the picture is on, not just to the picture. Otherwise, people won't be able to load it. And I'd guess that other free servers will do the same sort of things (possibly they already have). It's fairly easy to do, you just look at where the browser came from, and if it didn't come from a Geocities page, you don't show the picture.
By Wessex Man
NEW YORK, April 1st -- Sondra Faas is a vibrantly busty New York State wrestler with ripe vascular muscles who's been pumping iron for 12 years. And she makes her pitch very simply. "I'm as sensual as I am tough," she told me in a candid interview.
Unlike many female bodybuilders Sondra finds her muscular physique usually draws positive vibes from ordinary mortals. "A lot of people love it. They are surprised a muscular woman can still look feminine.
"I'm also very sensual, so it makes for a good combination of strength, toughness and sensuality. Most people stop and stare or make a good comment. Not too many are negative."
Anyone who has seen her pumped 15-1/2 inch biceps and the ripped muscle separations in her 23 inch quads will know what she means by sensuality. She's only a pocket Venus, just 5 ft tall, but she can bench 245 lbs and leg press 1,000 lbs. She weighs in at 126-130 lbs in contest condition and around 145 off season.
Sondra had lost her tape measure before our interview, so her prominent chest details remained something of a mystery. "I looked for my tape measure and I can't find it. I know have to get 38 in a bra," she explained.
At a glance you can see that her bodybuilder pecs and riotous boobs account for her chest thrust in about equal proportions. But the boobs compel the eye -- the questing radar antennae of her punchy virile nature.
HOW SONDRA GOT INTO WEIGHTS
Sondra is very up front in presenting her various roles as a club dancer and specialist in wrestling and muscle worship. But she's quite discrete about how she got there.
She says she grew up in two N.Y. state communities, Newburg and Wappingerfalls. Her early athletic life involved playing football, basketball and softball, often with neighbourhood boys. She began weight training in High School though at that stage a family member created objections.
Later she found a book on Cory Everson who became a role model, along with Lenda Murray and Denise Massino. "I never had a trainer. I trained myself," she added.
I asked if she was still striving to add more muscle inches, or whether she's reached the maximum definition which her genes and bone structure will allow. The reply was brief. "I would like my hamstrings to grow, and calves. And I still train my arms hard, just like everything else."
This was a fair answer. Sondra's vascular muscularity does not extend to her smooth calves. As many female bodybuilders realise the calf muscles can be hugely resistant to even the heaviest training. Andrulla Blanchette, the light weight Ms Olympia in 2000, has been working on her calves for years. Finally Andrulla has made serious calf progress, much needed in view of her world class quad development.
CONTEST JUDGING GENERATES CONFUSION
We talked about Sondra's contest record and competing plans. "I took the overall twice in the Bodyrock Classic, I was 2nd in the Atlantic States in '97 and 5th place in the Junior Nationals in '97. I'll be competing in the Amateur Grand Prix in NYC on June 2nd and in the USA in Las Vegas in July, " she reported.
We also looked at the way things are shaping in contest judging criteria. I asked if the new emphasis on the lighter Fitness physique as opposed to the ultra-muscular bodybuilder profile was affecting her plans.
"I like the fact that they (the judges) are looking at the smaller girls. I'm kinda in between myself, but on the more muscular side.
"The thing is the new criteria are not consistent. They said I was too big at the Jan Tana, and if I was any harder I would have taken last place. And at the Nationals they said I was too soft.
"It's hard to tell what they want. I thought they were supposed to look at the overall package, such as hair, nails, face, overall appearance. But all they saw (in me) in the amateur part of the Jan Tana was a 5 ft tall heavy weight. They seemed to want me to be a middle weight."
Ms FAAS THRIVES ON HER BUSINESS
But it's clear that Sondra's client business is equally important to her. "I do muscle worship, light to fantasy wrestling and more. You can e-mail me on sondra@sfaas.com for more info."
"I have the use of the gym Body Max on Rt 82 in Hopewell Junction, NY, after hours. I have use of the aerobics room with floor mats for wrestling, as well as full use of the weight room."
"I'm not dancing at the clubs right now, but I do in sessions along with lap dances (strictly dancing only) if requested. The gym is nice, clean and heated, and has a stereo for dances..... The gym is about one hour from Manhattan in upstate New York or I can tavel to you (in NYC and neighbouring counties)
Member | Posts |
| gaily304 | 6417 |
| jabb6328 | 4848 |
| ginny2442 | 4023 |
| lpdorman69 | 3091 |
| tre1313 | 2975 |
| 007tko | 2582 |
| mit19237 | 2364 |
| rainer0000 | 1840 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 1733 |
| thenomad | 1650 |
| gee1407 | 1522 |
| envallc | 1509 |
| mike1965 | 1476 |
| Blast222 | 1409 |
| Saka.Goddess | 1342 |
| pan314 | 1293 |
| stretch412 | 1272 |
| dgt321 | 1229 |
| tex666 | 1124 |
| 00bigbas00 | 1093 |
Gaily retains her rightful place as Top Chatter, with Ginny and Jabber trailing. You'll find Gaily there most mornings as she gets ready to start her day.
I added a "Total Messages this month" counter, it's at the top of the main message board page. There were 5107 posts in March 2001.
There's a new message Board, "He said/She said".
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| TIM's regular news bulletins on the state of the stock market have propelled the Politics board up in the rankings. | And it's Jabber again, by a mile. |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board, and the number of times that a posting is read. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
Most listed Board of the month |
Most read Board of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| TomNine is almost off the top ten! Fistman has taken over as the Main Man. | The Grinch got the stats. |
The duck's back! Jemima returned. This time, I've set up a duck cam
You can't see much. To be more exact - you can't see *anything*. The camera is about 30 inches from her nest, pointed straight down. She's hidden her eggs under some dead leaves, and the ferns hide the whole thing. You might, if you're lucky, catch her arriving or leaving, that's the way we found her nest.
I'm not too fond of banner ads at the tops of pages, but I've noticed that they're spreading. Now you have to skip over them in the middle of reading a page. Where will it all end? Surely not like this
91% of people don't believe what they read on the web. 84% don't believe newspapers. I find this difficult to believe. Oh well, I guess there's 9% of people who still believe in the Tooth Fairy.
Actually, I think discovering that they lied to you about the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, is good training for later life.
And if you thought that the Fufme was a neat idea, how about controlling sextoys over the internet, from CyberDildonics.
Also released on the first of this month, is LZIP, a lossy compression system. It works in the same way that the JPG and MPG compression schemes work; it achieves huge amounts of data compression by discarding unimportant parts of the data. They claim that you can get your files down to 15% or 10% of their original size - or even less!
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of March 2001, there were about 335,000 pictures (16.7 gigabytes), 45 gigabytes of video, 4500 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 62 gigabytes.
There's now three newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| Latest | 1.6 | 97 | 2.4 | 6 | 4 | 103 |
| Older | 8.0 | 471 | 11.6 | 29 | 19.6 | 545 |
| Oldest | 7.4 | 497 | 11.2 | 25 | 18.7 | 522 |
| Total | 17.6 | 1065 | 25.2 | 60 | 42.3 | 1170 |
On Oprah, the Newsthumbs server, there's the NewsThumbs, which is another 8.0 million pictures in 446 gigabytes and 11.5 million text files, a total of 475 gigabytes. Plus another 7.5 million pictures on the older NewsThumbs server
