Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - April 2002
A hard man is good to beat
The daffodils that screamed the onset of March, were resting by the end of the month. The duck is back! She's laid eight eggs so far, more to come. And there's two drakes boasting around the pond.
Galleries added this month.
Something new - a story also told in a comic. PizzaGirl is a new Superheroine. PizzaGirl will bring the pie, through rain or snow - at least, she'll try. Story by Diana the Valkyrie, artwork by Robert Adam Morrison.
Stories added this month.
A new story from me - PizzaGirl.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
New videos from Utopia! About a dozen new videos from Utopia Entertainment, go check out the descriptions.
Also two new videos from Kasie Cavanaugh, "Endangered Species" and "Sexy When Wet"
And a whole new shop, the Nude Wrestling Videos shop!
I've noticed that quite a few of the free email services are moving to pay services. And I hear that the quality of some of them is poor. Especially, I hear people get loads of spam.
So I decided that I can do that. All members get access to my new service, which I'm calling StoneColdMail.. It's a web-based email system, just like the others. But there's a major difference. If you create a folder called "spam", then my despammer kicks into action. Then, everything that it thinks looks like spam, is put into the spam folder (you can still read it as per normal, it you want to).
You get an email address like this: Fred@StoneColdMail.com (instead of Fred, it would use your membership login). You can start using it any time; you don't need to sign up again.
Another reason for using it - because this is a service to members, I don't have to sell advertising to pay for it. So, there's no pop-up windows, no flashing banners, nothing. Just your email.
You can use it via your browser in the usual way, and you can access your email from anywhere in the world; pop into an internet cafe and you can do your StoneColdMail. Or you can tell StoneColdMail to forward anything it gets, to one of your other email addresses. Or you can use your usual mail program (Outlook or whatever) to do your email.
Why did I call it StoneColdMail? Well, I wanted a cool name, and you don't get any cooler than stone cold.
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
Yenta's been playing up; crashing and showing disk errors. Yenta is the backup to Sarah, the main Newsthumbs server. You haven't noticed this problem, because Sarah's been performing flawlessly, so the backup wasn't needed.
But I feel nervous about Yenta. And my whole strategy calls for a backup for each computer. So I've built a replacement called Wendy, with the same specifications as Sarah, I'm calling her Wendy. And Yenta will eventually come back to Valkyrie Central for re-education, if she keeps playing up. Wendy is now at Watford, running as a backup. I feel better having two backups to an important server.
I've been loading up Unity, the 1.9 terabyte server, and she's been working well. So I built another just like her, Tegan. I'm hoping that Unity and Tegan, between them, can replace Judy, Xenia, Penny, Rosie, Abbie and Bunny. That's six 5U sized computers, 30U in size, replaced by two 2U boxes.
Xenia has already been re-educated. Her motherboard is in Wendy, four of her drives are in Yaffa, eight more are in Xanth. All that's left of Xenia is an empty case, which I'll use some time in the future, I guess. Let that be a lesson for all recalcitrant computers everywhere.
One big problem with Unity and Tegan. When I power up, there's about a 50% chance that the 12 big drives all come alive properly. I think it's a software problem, and I guess it'll get fixed one day. And it's good enough to use here, where I can see what's going on. But I'm not going to send a computer in that condition to any other site.
But on March 9, I had a bit of a disaster. I switched on my bank of four VCRs (which I use for video duplication), and the RCD breaker tripped, plunging the whole house into darkness. Worse - the UPSes that are supposed to run the computers when I lose power, shut themselves off. I had 25 crashed computers to bring back online. And, of course, that isn't supposed to happen.
I have tested each UPS before, by pulling the power to it. And they worked. So I don't know why they didn't work this time. I'm going to buy some more UPSes, maybe I've overloaded them. And I think I know why the RCD breaker tripped, I think I overloaded the little 240/120 voltage converter I have, that I use to power the NTSC VCRs. Or maybe it's just leaking a bit. I'll get a new one, and make it a rather big one. 650 VA instead of 100. Plus, I'll give it it's own RCD.
With the UPSes, my best guess is that I've loaded each UPS too heavily. They're supposed to handle 1400 VA, which is about 950 watts, and I think I've got more like 1200 watts on them. How did this happen? Whell, these UPSes have a load indicator at the front panel, and I've been assuming that it works. Well, it doesn't. It shows that the UPS is on 25% load no matter what the actual load is. Humph!
I scouted around, and I've found a 600 VA UPS, quite small, very cheap (£35, that's about $50). I ordered one of those, and it looks good. For the price, it looks extremely good. So I bought four more; hopefully that means I won't be overloading the main UPSes now.
And I bought an Athlon 2000+ XP. Actually, they run at 1.67 GHZ, the "2000" is a marketing gimmick. I'm planning to rebuild my central file server around that. I have a nice fast 18 gb SCSI drive I'll use for things that I want fast access to, a fairly fast 36 gb SCSI drive for a scratch area, and I'll recycle drives from other computers, to give me the main storage area for files for the web site, I'll have about 640 gigabytes there (current usage is about 250). Irene and Ethel will become the backups for this, Clara will go into the pool of unused computers, and Zelda will probably go out of use, Zelda crashes too often (I think because the processor is wobbly in the socket).
When Fiona (who did the data for the main site) screwed up, I switched to Lorna, her backup. No problem. Then I reformatted Fiona, and copied the data back from Lorna. It was at that point, that I discovered that Lorna couldn't carry the load of both running the web site, and the very fast copy to Fiona. Hmmm. Maybe I could slow down the copy? But I have another idea. So I've build Yaffa, and Yaffa will be yet another copy of the main web site, located at Watford. So, if one of Fiona or Lorna goes down in future, I can rebuild the data on the one that failed by copying from a server that isn't carrying the web site load. Yaffa is the first of a new design, that puts 320 gb in a 1U (1 3/4 inch high) box.
And there's a new server, just for StoneColdMail.
With the future of Energis (they run the building where my servers in Watford sit) being a bit uncertain, I've also looked around to see what I can do if they go down. And I've had a couple of offers, and the cost isn't too far above what I'm currently paying. So, if the worst comes to the worst, I can scoot down to Watford with a small truck, load up a quarter ton of computers, and drop them at a new place, probably in London. In the East End of London. Where I originally came from. I reckon the whole move can be done in one day, if I'm willing to have Newsthumbs down for a few hours. Two days if I want Newsthumbs to run continuously throughout. I don't have to decide on that just yet. Hopefully, it won't be necessary at all, and Energis will survive..
Tre got a D30, he's starting to learn how to use it. Boomer will be getting the CD Mavica. The reason for upgrading Tre, is so that he can take pictures of fitness routines. The problem of course, is that they move so fast!
No changes.
This proven discovery has even been reported on by the New England Journal of Medicine.
And now also, by Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter. But I wonder whether the NEJM was
untarnished praise or major slag-off?
I give you my word as an honest person, this is NOT another internet scam!
... but you don't give your name, and you have an email address in China ... and honest people
don't usually mention that they're honest, it isn't necessary.
Fax Marketing System
1 Million fax numbers & fax broadcasting software
Gulp. I hope you don't have my fax number!
We currently have several running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan and the Iron Valkyrie.
We're also sponsoring individual events, and funding athletes to go to events with grant dollars.
We're also doing free hosting and free bandwidth for many of our sponsored women. Bandwidth can mount up to a large bill when you're running a popular web site.
We're sponsoring Roseanne Blackburn to go to the Canadian West Naturals. Roseanne plans to turn pro in the sport of boxing sometime in the latter part of 2001. Check out her Galleries on this web site.
We're sponsoring Kathy Connors to the USA in Vegas this July.
The Valkyrie Playoffs, second contest. We did an audition, and you can see the pictures of the sixteen women that we shot. And now the fun starts, because you can vote for your favourite (members only). And it's worth voting, because A) the winner of the vote gets a full fee-paid still and video shoot ($$$ in her hands), and B) we get a lot more pictures of her on the web site.
Voting continued till March 31; the winner was Trina.
The booth that we had at the Arnold was a great success. People came from all over to hang out there, we had a curling competition (Tre's idea) and Fistman and Boomer set up a studio in their hotel suite, and did a lot of shooting. Gaily and LPD were there (they first met at the Arnold, and that led to their marriage) and TKO had his encounter with Sheila. There's some painful pictures of that.
The sponsorship of Peggy Schoolcraft now includes running her pay site on one of my servers, thus saving her the cost of hosting and web mastering, while giving her site a fast server with Valkyrie-type security (her site went down because it got attacked).
The Internet is not just for people who live in London. There's also people from Brighton, from South-West England, from Skegness (it's so bracing) - even from as far afield as Scotland! That's why, when people ask me what part of the country I come from, I have to start off by telling them I'm in England, otherwise they might assume that when I say the South-East, I mean the southeast of Scotland (i.e., Edinburgh).
We're even starting to get people from outside the British Isles on the Internet. These people are foreigners, of course, and you have to speak to them very loudly so that they will understand. THAT'S WHY SOME PEOPLE USE CAPITAL LETTERS ALL THE TIME, you never know when the person you're addressing is a foreigner.
Sometimes, you can tell you're dealing with a foreigner by the way they can't spell words like "colour" and "organise". Sometimes the email address is the give-away. If someone has .fr or .de at the end of their address, then they're foreigners from Europe. .ca is foreigners from California, of course, and anyone wearing tartan knitted polyester trousers is from the USA.
One important thing about foreigners, is that many of them don't actually realise that they're foreign. They think they're Dutch, or Icelandic, or whatever. You have to take this into consideration when you talk to them. Plus, sometimes they don't realise that there's countries other than theirs. It's funny talking with an Icelander who can't find London on his map of Iceland.
When dealing with foreigners, do not discuss religion or politics. Many of them don't follow politics closely enough to know who Mo Mowlem is, let alone John "two-jags" Prescott, so we have an unfair advantage over them. Some of them barely know who is the leader of the Tory party. Come to think of it, I don't either. Maggie was a hard act to follow. And religion is a no-no, because many foreigners take religion seriously, plus many of them don't have gay or child-molesting bishops to talk about. The safest subject, is sport.
When discussing sport, the most important thing is don't ever mention which sport you're discussing. The advantage of that, is that everyone can join in. To discuss sport, you don't actually need to know anything about it, because a sports discussion is just a succession of unsupported opinions. So, if someone opines that the Grimbletown Rats will win 3-0, it's a perfectly valid opinion to suggest that the game will be more tightly-fought than that, and you think it will go 3-2. No-one will realise that you haven't the foggiest idea whether we're discussing some ball game or synchronised swimming, and you can go on to give more opinions in the same area.
Humour is something to be very careful about. When you tell a joke to a foreigner, you should be sure to explain that you just said something funny. Many people do this with a :-), or "just kidding", but that isn't enough. You have to not only explain that you said something funny, you might have to explain why it's funny, and even warn that something funny is about to be said before you actually say it. This is because foreigners believe that there's a thing called the "British sense of humour", which has something to do with Benny Hill and Monty Python, and unless your joke is Hillish or Pythonesque, they won't realise it's a joke. Avoid irony and satire, unless you're willing to lay it on with a trowel.
You should remember that it isn't only we British that have a culture. Foreigners do too. Foreign culture involves cooking with garlic, eating snails, drinking olive oil and a profound dislike for beer. They don't realise that they dislike beer, because they have a fizzy drink that they call beer, and which they like. As far as I can make out, this is ice-cold lemonade, coloured brown. You should drink it and smile and tell them how nice it is, and how well it would go if you had a glass of beer with it. But culture isn't just about food and drink.
There's also movies. The big problem with foreign movies, is that they don't put subtitles on them so that you can read what the actors just said. Because even when they talk English, they do it with such a thick accent (worse than Highland Scots, even) that you can't follow what they're saying. But you get some quite decent movies out of America, such as "Top Hat" and "Harry Potter". And Yul Brynner was good in the "Seven Samurai".
But it isn't all about differences; there's lots of similarities. In some ways, people are the same the world over. Sex is a universal, because in countries where there's no sex, within a generation or two there's no people, either. And violence is universal - without cars slamming into cars, movies would lack excitement. Christmas is another universal, although some people give it other names, like "Holidays". Easter is the Festival of Rabbits and Eggs all over the world. Other holidays are local - many countries don't celebrate Guy Fawkes attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and it's only in a few countries that Benedict Arnold day is celebrated. But everyone does April the First.
New Message Boards:
I've put up a Message Board for people to use with computer problems - the idea is that members can help each other.
Venus has agreed to do live video chats for members of this web site. You can see the schedule here, and you can also visit Venus' web site, and if you like it, you might become a member of her site.
If nudity offends you, don't visit the Venus chat.
Member | Posts |
| shanice82 | 12640 |
| pamela69 | 6513 |
| albogrease | 4808 |
| ginny2442 | 4769 |
| boomer444 | 4292 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 4127 |
| jabb6328 | 3373 |
| easybreather | 3235 |
| cry2cin | 3168 |
| rob001 | 3162 |
| manc1973 | 3149 |
| mit19237 | 3109 |
| Drop | 2647 |
| gaily304 | 2630 |
| msbigbass | 2588 |
| TomNine | 2565 |
| klm061 | 2153 |
| tre1313 | 2081 |
| jade727 | 1896 |
| Colette.Guimond | 1799 |
Again, Shanice takes the top position by a wide margin this month. Pam is somewhat behind, but still clear of the pack.
There were 4044 posts this month altogether.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| And it's TomNine again, retaining his long-term crown, but the Politics/economics board isn't far behind. | Jabber is still way off form this month, posting only a little more than TruthInMedia. |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of February 2002, there were about 500,000 pictures (26 gigabytes), 71 gigabytes of video, 5500 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 98 gigabytes.
Newsthumbs is now 99 million files, 2.8 terabytes. But I'm installing 1.9 terabyte servers now :-)
There's now four newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| Latest | 3.2 | 220 | 5.0 | 10 | 8.3 | 230 |
| Older 1 | 7.7 | 471 | 11.6 | 29 | 19.6 | 545 |
| Older 2 | 7.5 | 497 | 11.2 | 25 | 18.7 | 522 |
| Older 3 | 12.0 | 839 | 19.0 | 43 | 31.0 | 884 |
| Older 4 | 8.0 | 573 | 13.8 | 29 | 21.7 | 603 |
| Total | 38.4 | 2600 | 60.6 | 133 | 99.3 | 2784 |