Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - August 2001

A hard man is good to beat

July

Hot hot hot. It reached 90 degrees here, that's 32 centigrade. For England, that's hot hot hot. I spent some time out by the duckpond, but the heat sent me to shelter under a nearby ash tree.

Did you know, if you sit under an ash tree, every time the wind blows, the ash tree dumps on you? All the dead leaves, bits of seed pod, dried up flowers, and other junk that it no longer wants. There's pigeons in that tree too, I see them sometimes. Fortunately, they kept themselves to themselves.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

New Bookshelves, for Kickfan, Pardo, The Counselor and Near-Fatal Neville. And a new Springville story from John Davis, more on the nuns of St Hildas, a new Valerafon story, and the debut of Tom Adams' "Black Widow Diary".

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new.

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Shopping Mall

New this month - Taste of Honey, from Kasie Cavanaugh, and a whole bunch of Builtmore videos in the Maxine Legroom series. If you like legs, you'll like Maxine Legroom videos.

Servers

We had a bit of an outage on July 18. Here's the reason, quoted from the service provider's email.

On July 18, 2001, at 15:43 EDT Netaxs lost NYC-DC OC3 due to the massive fiber cut caused by the train derailment in a tunnel around Baltimore. The derailment caused what is currently believed to be chemical fire. This situation is preventing repair crews from repairing damaged fiber.

Apparently it was a freight train, and no-one got hurt. We were only out for an hour or so.

Bunny is currently under test; Bunny is the first Valkyrie Mark 2.5, with 1218 gigabytes of disk space. I've increased the storage, because Maxtor are now shipping 100 gb drives, for $280, so I can put 12 of those in for $3360. These 1.2 terabyte servers are still costing under $5000.

Yenta's re-education is going well. I summoned her back from Maryland to England for re-education and rehabilitation. I found one drive that was failing intermittently, and took that out, and I replaced a cable. Now I've got Yenta under continuous test, with no failures so far. I'll boost her up to 1200gb, so she can be the backup for Bunny.

Abbie (Yenta's replacement) is loading up with data from Xenia nicely. If all goes well, then Abbie will never get used. It's only if Xenia has a failure, that Abbie will be brought online.

British Telecom have promised to install my ADSL in August. Since I have a T3 in New York, a T3 in Maryland and a Megastream in the UK, why do I need a puny (by comparison) ADSL? The answer is cost. The ADSL is only 1/4 megabit, but the cost is a fraction of the cost of the other lines. So, the more I can funnel down the ADSL, the lower my costs will be. But this doesn't just mean economy. It might mean that I can do things in ways that I couldn't do before, because it was too expensive. Fingers crossed!

Here's the email that I send back to people whose computers have sent me that virus that encloses a file, and asks for your advice on the enclosed file. Everyone in our little part of cyberspace seems to be getting dozens of these emails, and a few people (Sheila Burgess, Helen Von Mott for example) have infected themselves.

Your computer just sent me a file that means that you have the SirCam virus. If you go here, you'll find something to remove it.

http://www.sarc.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sircam.worm@mm.html

I've has a dozen or so of these sent to me, Sonia Fernandes was getting dozens, and I've heard from other people in our particular corner of cyberspace that they've been getting lots.

Cameras

Another Mavica has been bought and gotten into the hands of an experienced photographer. And videos made using the DV camcorder have started to come out of Boston - Sonia vs Kandor is the first of those (you can buy that video from Sonia Fernandes).

And there's now a camera out in California, looking for good athletic events to take pictures at.

The Newsgroups

I'm starting to see days with 75,000 pictures per day. On June 30 and July 2, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica had over 10,000 pictures per day! I wonder - is anyone actually looking at all those? That would be a full time job! If you spent, say, five seconds per picture, that's 14 hours.

The time it takes to make the contact sheets is in proportion to how many have to be made, of course. So we're now looking at 12 or more hours before it's finished. Since this is started at midnight EST each day, that means that the newsthumbs are ready at 12 noon EST or later.

Could I use a faster computer? Probably. I'm currently using a box with two Pentium CPUs, so that one CPU is pulling in the data and detaching the attachments, while the other one is busily calculating the contact sheets. These are both Pentium 866 processors, and I could increase those to Pentium 1000, but that wouldn't really have much effect, 15% or less. Once dual-Athlon motherboards are a bit more available, I'm thinking of switching to dual 1.5GHz Athlons; that should be about twice as fast as the current systems. And I'm keeping an eye out for suitable dual-Pentium 4 motherboards.

This is only going to get worse. Unless, of course, you think that an increasing number of pictures per day isn't "worse", it's "better".

Spam of the Month

I'll start off with something that surely everyone wants...

Amazing septic tank product 

If your home is served by a septic system, you will be able to receive
invaluable information on how to eliminate pump outs, maintain the
system properly and cure problems such as backups, wet spots, odor, etc.

Well, how did I manage before? I can't imagine.

Even better - here's how to make ten million dollars with five minutes work.

I am a banker ( Manager of Equitorial Trust Bank Ltd)during our end of the year
records, I came across a foreigner contractor who has an account with this
bank, and he has not appear before the bank to claim or withdraw/deposit his
money since over three years ago, I  have made an advert both newspaper and
radio, but the information I had was that this man named Mr. xxxxxx from Jordan
has died here in Nigeria, and I and my two other top officials in this bank has
made all effort to look for the Mr. xxxxxx xxxxxxx next of kin to come and
claim this money before it will go to the bank treasury but nobody show face to
claim this money. This money worth $30,260,000.00 (Thirty Million Twenty-Six
thousand United States Dollars) the name of his next of kin we saw in the file
here is xxxxx xxxxxxx and we have made alot of advert both local and
international for this man to come and claim this money but up-to-date, he has
not shown face.

I and another 2 top officials who know much about this money has agreed to look
for a foreigner who will come or send an application letter to the table of the
Banks President inorder to claim the fund as the next of kin to Mr. xxxxxx
xxxxxxx, so that we can transfer this money to his account within 24 working
hour.

I will use my office to secure you all the necessary certificate to cover this
money in your name if you reply me your interest in this business, and I have
to assure you that the business is 100% risk free if you keep everything within
yourself without disclose to anybody no matter how is the person to you.

To this, I need your bank account information, private phone number to enable
me reach you easily. And out of the total amount mentioned, we have agree to
give you 30% of the total amount fo providing yourself as the next of kin to
Mr. xxxxxx xxxxxxx and put 5% for expenses that might come up during the course
of the
transfer.

I will be much grateful if you get to me immediately since the bank is ready to
take this money to their treasury account and we don't want it in that way.

Actually, this is a very old scam, which used to be done by post. How does it work? Well, an unscrupulous person who has your bank account number, can write a check on your account. Banks rarely bother to verify signatures, nor do they care whether the check is from one of their checkbooks or not. Consider "online checks" for example.

Sponsorships

New sponsorship! Michelle Tuggle, based in Hawaii, who competed in the NPC Nationals in Vegas in July. She came second in the Heavyweight class, well done Michelle!

We currently have ten running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan and Michelle Tuggle.

We're also putting some sponsorship money into the Jan Tana and the Women's Stength Extravaganza (WSE)

Also, we're sponsoring Annie Rivieccio to the WSE. Be sure to say "Hello" to Annie if you see her there.

Want to be a Valkyrie?

Go get these cups or these Valkyrie cups

Then add this helmet for $6 or this better helmet or this de luxe helmet

Or, if you don't have braids, this rather plastic-looking helmet

And the rest is just chain mail (optional), leather jackets (easier) and robes.

Understanding the Internet - "It doesn't work"

I get this email sometimes. "It doesn't work, please fix it." There's a clear implication here that something on my side is broken, and even a glance will tell me what is wrong. And then I should fix it.

The problem with this assumption, is that the internet is a big and complex thing, and when you aren't getting the results you were hoping for, the problem could be almost anywhere. I usually check the thing, see that it seems to work fine for me, then email back and ask for more detail about the problem. If you do report a technical problem, you should say what it is you tried to do, what you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened. "I tried to look at the picture of Jane Doe, but when I clicked on the link in the Gallery, my computer gave me a message 'Illegal operation'". Or whatever. Sure, you can email me with "It doesn't work", but unless I'm in the middle of a problem so big that it's affecting the whole site, I won't know what doesn't work, and I'll email you back to ask for more details. It's quicker if I get those details in the first place.

1. What you tried to do
2. What you expected to happen
3. What actually did happen, and what error message you saw

If you just repeat to me "I tried everything and it still didn't work", then you haven't actually told me anything I can use to trace the problem (which might be on my server, my ISP, your ISP or your computer).

After I've looked into the problem, I'll often come back with a test that I'd like you to make (I can't make it myself, because it might need to be made from your computer). Or I might have a possible fix for you to try. Most people, of course, do the test or try the fix. But I'm always surprised when occasionally someone argues with me "That fix won't work because ...". Possibly I don't know as much as they do about computers in general, but I'm sure I've had more experience in sorting out problems using my web site than anyone else.

I've recently had a problem with a couple of ISPs. Erols is one, Freeserve is another. I think I have the same problem with a group of ISPs in Australia. Freeserve is a free ISP in the UK, and it's very, very popular. It's free (they take a cut out of your phone bill) and naturally, they want to minimise costs.

Every megabyte shipped across from the US to the UK costs a lot of money (likewise across the Pacific Ocean link). Well, actually not very much per megabyte, but a couple of million people browsing each night means an awful lot of megabytes get shipped. So Freeserve have a bunch of BIG servers to store the data that people access, so that if someone asks for a page or file that someone else just asked for, they don't have to ship it across the Atlantic a second time. This idea is called "caching". Computers can be very cheap - I'm building servers for Newsthumbs storing over a terabyte, for $5000.

Trouble is, something goes wrong with their cache, and when you try to access some sites via Freeserve, they claim that the page can't be found.

I've found a neat way to deal with this. I thought, suppose instead of surfing via the ISP with the problem, you surf indirectly via another server? So I tried Safeweb, and if you go to my web site via Safeweb, you might well find that this works. It works well enough for you to be able to show the ISP that the site is working fine, and the ISP needs to fix a problem. You might also use Safeweb for visiting the site, until your ISP does fix it.

The other side of people telling me "there's a problem" but not telling me what it is, is that many people (I think) suffer in silence with a problem, and don't email me. I know this, because occasionally one of them will post about their problem to a newsgroup or message board that I happen to read.

Please. If you have a problem accessing my site, email me. Obviously I can't always fix the problem, but I'll have a serious try to, because if you can't access my site, then you can't be a member, whether the problem is on my side or yours. And as you can imagine, I have a *lot* of experience now in fixing problems of access. Most problems (once I have a clear idea of what the problem is) can be cleared up with one email from me.

The Clubhouse

New Message Boards: Amanda J is a bodybuilder, and Rugman is hosting a board all about real encounters. There's also a new message board for people who persistently and maliciously mispost to the wrong boards. I hope I don't have to use this!

In the Chatroom

LPD has arrived at Gaily's place, and she's got him Gainful Employment. Apparently, Chicagoans can understand the accent spoken by Swamp Snakes, and he's making himself useful.

Shyguy popped back for a flying visit, just to say hello.

There seems to be an increase in umemployment. Socrates announced that he was now available for hire, Rob has left his job with an ISP (he resigned, working on a help desk can really be very wearing). And CaptainCorc is still jobless; if anyone has an opening for an accomplished singer of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, you'll find him in the chatroom most days.

Chatter of the month

Gaily's back as Chatter Alpha. But Tom, Julia, Jabber and Ginny aren't far behind.

On the Message Boards

Back Page

Want to set up a web site? Go to Adult Webmaster School and learn how. It sounds pretty good for $140

Want to insult someone's mother but don't know how? Check out Google (my favourite search engine, because it's the best) for "Yo Momma" jokes. Google is just a lot better at finding good and relevant pages to pretty much any enquiry you do.

I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.

At the end of July 2001, there were about 389,000 pictures (20 gigabytes), 55 gigabytes of video, 4900 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 76 gigabytes.

On Vnews, the Current Newsthumbs server, there's the NewsThumbs, which is 8.5 million pictures in 600 gigabytes and 13 million text files, a total of 632 gigabytes.

Newsthumbs is now sixty million files!

There's now three newsthumbs servers.

server	Million pictures	gigabytes	Million Text files	gigabytes	Million total files	gigabytes
Latest	8.5	600	13	30	22.0	632
Older	7.7	471	11.6	29	19.6	545
Oldest	7.5	497	11.2	25	18.7	522
Total	23.8	1568	35.8	84	60.3	1699

To the Magic Carpet