Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - May 2002
A hard man is good to beat
The daffodils come to the end of their sexually active life, and the bluebells took up the running. The trees all got their petticoats on, and the horse chestnuts are at full gallop.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month. "His Awful Marriage" is now complete, a very depressing tale of how a man is reduced to nothing by his wife. But you can cheer up with the final part of the St Hilda's Saga, as the "Naughty Nuns" web site is complete and ... read the story.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
Acola is a new 1U design, I can get six drives in (I'm using drives recycled from the older servers) which gives me half a terabyte. I also rebuilt Penny, and she's in a 2U case now (was 5U), and has nearly a terabyte (again, using recycled drives - waste not, want not). I'm using them to back up the main news servers in Watford, copying the data over my DSL line, and also using any bandwidth I can from my main link.
Beryl is another new server, using a motherboard from Gigabyte that gives me LAN and video on-board, and takes two Pentiums. That means I can put it in a 1U case and get a lot of CPU power in a small space. Beryl is going to be the main server for the older newsthumbs. Beryl has four times the CPU power of Olive, who currently does that job. This should make searching four times faster. Well, maybe more, maybe less; CPU isn't the only factor involved in this, but I also put a very fast hard disk in place. This is the first time I've used this motherboard; if it works out well, I might use it more.
Heat is beginning to be a problem. The CPUs get hot, and there's a heatsink and fan on the CPU to get the heat away. Raven was consistently crashing after several hours and needing to be rebooted. I replaced the small CPU heatsink and fan with something a lot more substantial, and the problem has gone away. But, to get a system into a 1U case (that's 1 3/4 inches high), I can't use a big heatsink and fan. Um.
I searched around. The people who have the worst problem with this, are the people who "overclock", running a processor at faster than its rated speed. And they use all sorts of fancy things, such as water-cooled heatsinks. And they use electronic refrigerators; there's a semiconductor thing that, if you give it 12 volts, it gets colder on one side and hotter on the other. So, you put the colder side against the CPU, and you get better CPU cooling. I've bought one. It's called a "Peltier", because it relies on the Peltier effect.
Well, I tried it. It was a bit messy, gunk all over the place. But the CPU temperature before-Peltier and after-Peltier was the same - in fact, when the after-Peltier temperature reached the before-Peltier level, I switched everything off, because what's the point? I think maybe if you have a stonking great heat-sink and fan, a Peltier might work somewhat better. But it doesn't seem to be the answer for 1U cases.
Getting the heat off the CPU and into the case isn't the end of the story anyway. The next thing, is to get it out of the case. I'm adding extra fans to the cases wherever I can, to blow the heat out of the case, into the cabinet. I'm also putting fans in to blow on the outside of the cases, to help get the heat out.
That leaves me with the heat in the cabinets. Each cabinet is pulling about five amps. I'm on 240 volts, so that's 1 1/4 kilowatts per cabinet. There's a huge fan-tray at the top of each cabinet to get the heat out, and that seems enough so far.
But that gets the heat into the room, and although it's been OK in winter (I just turn the central heating down), I'm wondering what it will be like in summer. Of course, a British summer isn't exactly tropical, so maybe it won't be a problem.
So I'm now using a motherboard with a Celeron instead of a Duron, I think they make less heat, so the cooling is easier. I think the Celeron makes 20% less heat at the same clock speed. Certainly the chip now feels cool to my touch, where the Duron felt hot. And the case feels cool. I think maybe that's my answer.
A problem with StoneColdMail. I registered the name a month ago, and it was working fine. But then Network Solutions (my name registrar) have done something that means that the name can't work until they fix it. I've told them about it, they're dealing with it.
Boomer now has a CD Mavica. He did excellent work at the Arnold Expo, I've put up a few dozen galleries of his "flexin'" shots. Tre says that with his new clickety-clack whirr-whirr camera, he managed to take 2800 shots at a recent event.
No changes.
After I launched StoneColdMail, with the despammer, I thought I ought to eat my own dogfood,
as the saying goes. So I'm using the same despammer for my own email.
Our big software store Time4Buy.com is closed down. We bewail our expectancies.
Yes, I can certainly understand why you'd bewail your expectancies, I would too.
Reply with your name, address and complete
telephone number. You'll be glad you did!
Oh yummy, spam phone calls at all times of the day and night, just what I wanted.
We currently have several running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan.
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, and we're sponsoring two competitors to the World Powerlifting Championship.
One of the important things to know about this virus, is that it forges the from-address. On an infected computer, it picks two email addresses on the victim's address book, mails itself to one, and pretends to come from the other. The from-address didn't send you the email, and most probably isn't infected. So, don't respond with an angry email to the person who seems to be the sender, because that wasn't the sender.
I just ran a "pornography detector" on my computer. It thinks that "Dynamite", "terrorism", "heroin", "cracking", "blood" and "Screwfix Direct" are pornographic. Screwfix Direct is the place I go to buy nut and bolts and other such bits and pieces. But their main product line is, as you might have guessed, screws. Well, duh.
The check was free, I'd have to pay $20 to get the "Objectionable content remover". The question is, do I want some stupid program removing the entry in my "Favourites" list to Screwfix, and any other place that it's decided I shouldn't go to? And the answer, of course, is "Fuck no". Did I mention it doesn't like the word "Fuck" either? And did I mention that this really dumb program didn't look past the C drive, onto the other drives which is where I keep most data?
So, is it possible to write a pornography detector, as per their advertising? I think probably not. Other words they have on their "questionable" list include "nude", "XXX", "gay", and lots more that you'd find in many perfectly acceptable pieces of writing. And don't even think about being able to write a program that can look at a picture and decide whether it's pornographic or not.
The products says "cannot check the context of a word, it may identify both objectionable and non-objectionable files". Well, yes. So it's a bit like a fire alarm that may ring when you have a fire and also when you don't. And this is useful how?
Here's the offer:
When you forward this e-mail to friends, Intel can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period.
For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $203.15.
For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $156.29.
And for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $17.65. Within two weeks, Intel will contact you for your address and then send you a check.
And here's the scary thing. There's people who actually believe this sufficiently to pass it on. I know, because someone forwarded it to me.
Let's skip over the technical impossibility of tracking emails, because most people couldn't know that this is impossible. Instead, let's focus on the offer. Without trying really hard, you could probably find 1000 email addresses to forward it to, thus earning yourself an immediate $203,150. If a million people do this, then Microsoft is down 200 billion dollars. Bye bye Microsoft. Plus the residuals.
Let's look at it another way. Why would Microsoft offer you $203.15? (and why the odd number?)
Reading on, we get to the second part of the scam, the "convincer".
I thought this was a scam myself, but a friend of my good friend's Aunt Patricia, who works at Intel, actually got a check of $4,543.23 by forwarding this e-mail.
Well. Your friend's Aunt Patricia has a friend who got $4,543.23. No way. If it's not a scam, then that implies she only forwarded it to a 20-odd people. And anyway, I don't ordinarily consider your friend's Aunt Patricia's friend to be a reliable witness.
More convincers.
To all of my friends, I do not usually forward messages, but this is from my good friend Pearlas Sanborn and she really is an attorney. If she says that this will work - it WILL work. After all, what have you got to lose?
I'll tell you what you have to lose. You look like a complete gullible idiot when you fall for this sort of thing, and you clutter up your friends mailboxes with more junk email.
So what's the harm?
Each day, I get asked questions, people want to know how to do this or where to find that. And I answer their emails. And about 5% of the answers I send bounce because their mailbox is full, and can't take any more email, and each junk email they get is adding to that problem. So the harm is to your friends.
I added a couple of new things to the gamesroom - Rubik's Cube and a shoot-em game with nice graphics.
New Message Boards:
Member | Posts |
| ginny2442 | 4330 |
| scottf001 | 4201 |
| easybreather | 3736 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 3721 |
| jabb6328 | 3677 |
| mit19237 | 3449 |
| cry2cin | 3303 |
| pamela69 | 3146 |
| rob001 | 2856 |
| manc1973 | 2406 |
| GrappleJack | 2292 |
| TomNine | 2202 |
| gaily304 | 2115 |
| tex666 | 1952 |
| msbigbass | 1896 |
| tre1313 | 1844 |
| Drop | 1692 |
| dan1515 | 1474 |
| buffy18976 | 1458 |
| envallc | 1448 |
Shanice took a long rest this month, which meant that Ginny and ScottF were left to battle it out for top place. You could barely put a fag paper between them, as the saying goes.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The arguments on the Politics board have sent it to top place; the arguments on my board lifted it to number two. | Jabber is still the top poster, with twice as many as second place. Bill Wick enters at ninth position, which is pretty good for someone who has only just gotten seriously online. |
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.
Most listed Board of the month | Most read Board of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| As usual, Fistman is top with TomNine second. | A very different story; although Fistman's board gets listed most often, it's Tom's board that is actually being read the most. |
Look out, the Dutchies are coming, the Dutchies are coming!
If you're a swinger, make sure that you don't swing sideways, unless you have a licence for using this patent
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of April 2002, there were about 510,000 pictures (27 gigabytes), 75 gigabytes of video, 5600 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 103 gigabytes.
Newsthumbs is now over 100 million files! 2.9 terabytes. But I'm installing 1.9 terabyte servers now :-)
There's now five newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| 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 |
| Latest | 4.4 | 317 | 7.1 | 17 | 11.8 | 335 |
| Total | 39.6 | 2697 | 62.7 | 140 | 102.8 | 2889 |