Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - August 2002
A hard man is good to beat
Hot hot hot. Everyone tells me it's hot now, except folks in the Southern Hemisphere, who for some peculiar reason have winter in summertime. England has a Maritime climate, which means it never gets above 70F in summer. This month, it got over 80! Phew what a scorcher, as the tabloids say. Hot hot hot.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
Two Physical Culture videos for the price of one! Choose a tape, then pick another one. Both videos will be recorded onto one tape, and you'll only be billed for one!
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
July 9th, there was some major problem with the telephone system at Aylesbury, where one of my ISPs is based. As a result, although the main site kept going (stories, picture galleries, movies, all based in Watford), some of the servers were out of action for some hours, starting 9 am. Chat and Messages were the things that most people would have noticed being down; also the older newsthumbs. I couldn't even phone my ISP, their voice phone system was out too. Fortunately, I knew the mobile number of the technical director, and when I told him about his outage, he hadn't known.
After about six hours, British Telecom got some of the phone system working, so I was able to use my ISDN fallback to get at least something running. With the ISDN, I only have 128kbit of bandwidth, so I brought up everything except the older newsthumbs (which needs more bandwidth).
It took a couple more hours to get my megastream working, and it was only a couple of days later that I realised it had come back at 1/2 megabit. So I made my squeaky wheel noises again, and after a little while, it was back to 2 megabits.
Lorna has failed again. I guess she gets another trip back to Valkyrie Central. Oh well, she's only one of the backup servers.
Daffy got a complete rebuild. Instead of the usual front end/back end design, which just didn't seem to work for Daffy, I've put both front end and back end in the same case, so Daffy will be doing web serving *and* file storage. Maybe that will work. If it doesn't, I've bought a lemon. I suppose that can happen.
Apart from that - the heat has caused a couple of servers to go down for a short while; Ianth a couple of times, and Beryl once. Both of them were happy after a reboot. Nadia went down for a couple of hours, not a big deal. Sarah crashed once, and the fsck took about two long days, but Wendy carried the load while that happened. Jayne's mouse stopped working, and needed several reboots. Jayne used to be the main web server, but after she acted up, she got recalled. When I opened her up, the cause was that the SCSI terminator had gotten loose. Simple problem. So, I've put Jayne back into service, and she's now my main Windows workstation.
I'm about to build the next big terabyte server. I was hoping to be able to wait until Western Digital made the 200 gb drives available, but it looks like that might be a "coming soon", so I'll probably go with the Maxtor 160s again. They work well in Tegan, Unity and Emily.
We're getting another Mavica CD1000 for BA to take pictures for the web site.
And I put up the "Valkyrie Garden Cam", hoping to shoot some rabbits for folks to enjoy. But the rabbits turned totally shy as soon as it was ready, and I've not scored one yet.
I increased the limit of file size that I was allowing in, so that now I'm allowing files to be 600kb. And also I'm assembling multi-part postings into the original JPG. The result is, there's JPG files there now which are more than 1 mb.
Before we get onto this month's spams, I'd like to explain a couple of things.
If you use one of the many "free greetings cards" services on the web, then you maybe think you just sent someone a card. No, you didn't. In order to send someone a card, you have to go to the trouble of making (preferably) or buying a card, of addressing it, stamping it and mailing it. That tells them that you care enough about them to go to some trouble and expense, especially if you made the card yourself, rather than buying a factory-printed card.
No, the free greetings service don't mean that you've gone to any trouble for the person you sent it to. You just click a couple of times. Which is why I'm not impressed and delighted when I get a free greetings service email.
What it does mean, however, is that you just gave the email address of someone you care about, to an organisation that wants email addresses. And would you like to guess why they want email addresses? You got it. Spam. Your loved one's email address will now be sold on, and sold on, and pretty soon your loved one will be getting adverts for septic tanks, for enlargement of various body parts, for illegally acquired drugs, for Hunza bread recipes and for porn, porn and more porn.
If your loved one has any sense, then won't actually go and look at the greetings card. Because if they do, the server logs of the card people will show that access, and by matching that with the database of email addresses, they now know that the email address is alive and being read, and therefore even more valuable for spamming to. So I avoid confirming to the card company that I exist, by not reading the "greetings card".
People today are a bit wary about who they give their email address to, because they don't want
to be spammed. Folks - be a bit wary you you give your loved ones email addresses to. Please?
Show your patriotism online with a .US Domain
Huh? How does it show my patriotism to use a domain name of a foreign country?
4 incredible knives for the amazingly low price of 29.99
Do people really buy knives off spams emails?
Hello,
If you are a time traveler or alien and or in possession of government or alien
technology I need your help! My entire life and health has been messed with by
evil beings! If you have access to the carbon copy replica model #50 3000
series, the dimensional warp, temporal reversion or something similar please
reply! I simply need the safest method of transferring my
consciousness or returning to my younger self with my current mind/memory. I
need an advanced time traveler to work with who can help me, I would prefer
someone with access to teleportation as well as a variety different types of
time travel. This is not a joke! I am serious!
Actually, I am an alien. Every time I visit the USA, I have to
stand in a line marked "Aliens".
It has come to our attention that you may be entitled to an undisclosed
amount of unclaimed funds.
It's difficult to say whether I believe this one more or less than the time traveller one.
On January 1st 2002, the European countries began
using the new Euro Dollar.
No we didn't. We started using the Euro. Eurodollars are something else entirely, and
if that's the level of your knowledge, I'm pretty doubtful about the financial advice
you're trying to sell me.
From: cheapdentists7439@Flashmail.com
To: ..@bird.phyche.ac.ru
Hands up everyone who is willing to allow a cheap dentist who spams via Russia, to
get anywhere near the inside of your mouth?
Be an Internet Detectigator
Yowser! I always wanted to be a Detectigator. Or, failing that, at least an Investigative. Now if you'll excuse me, there's this Maltese Falcon I need to detectigate.
Remember the wireless? Remember, before the internet, before television? And, best of all, before advertising?
Hang on, there's always been advertising. Hasn't there? No. Not in the UK there hasn't. And there still isn't. We pay for the BBC via an annual tax called the "Television licence", and that means we can have advertising-free TV and radio.
And now, so can you. Because you can listen to BBC radio over the internet Radio 1 for pop, radio 2 for music and talk, radio 3 for culture, radio 4 for serious listening, radio five for news and sport. And lots of specials.
And no adverts. I'm paying for it, you can listen to it.
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.
And we're sponsoring Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller.
The latest Valkyrie Playoffs has just been launched. This was run in Sydney, read about it and vote for your favourite!
This is a very large web site. So, how do you know what's new? You probably found the "What's New" page already, but just in case you didn't, it's here
I just added "New Since".
You can use this to get a list of every story, picture gallery or video clip added since the date you select.
Also, the Top Twenty has been expanded, to include the top twenty Bookshelves. And there's now a Top Fifty and Top Hundred. Also, you can see the number of hits each day, currently running at around 700,000 (excluding Newsthumbs).
There's also a new list of links, the various sites that I host on my servers. Some you'll like, some you won't, one of them is in Polish.
A few years ago, most of the email bounces I got were because people had changed address and not forwarded their email on. But now it's different.
Today, most of the email bounces I get are because people have a full mailbox. And the reasons are threefold - A) spam B) viruses and C) free email.
Spam helps to fill your mailbox, and certainly contributes to the general clutter. But spams are only 1kb (or 5kb for a large one). The viruses that I receive by the dozen each day are 130kb each. If your mailbox is only 2mb (as is Hotmail), then after 16 of these, your mailbox is filled. Anything sent to you after that, doesn't get to you. Indeed, nothing will get to you until you log in to your hotmail account and delete the rubbish, and then, only things sent to you after that time, will get to you. There's a bunch of stuff that you will simply never see, because most people getting a bounced email, aren't going to bother resending it unless you ask them to. And you won't ask them to, because you don't know they sent you an email.
This really isn't satisfactory. Imagine the same situation in snail mail. You have to check your mailbox every day, because if you don't, it fills up, and then when the mailman tries to deliver a letter she can't, so she sends it back to the sender, who then throws it in the bin.
So what can I, as the sender, do? Nothing. I can't do anything until you clear your mailbox. If it's really really important, and if I have your surface mail address, then I could send you a snail mail letter (and I've been forced to do that sometimes). No, the problem has to be solved by you as the mailbox owner. Sure, you could gnash your teeth and say it isn't your fault, but then you still won't get your email.
First, you have to deal with spam. Use a de-spammer. Any serious email program will let you put a despammer on it. And the despammer doesn't just block particular addresses, that's nearly useless. A good despammer does a lot more than that. And most of them are free. Do a web search, you'll find dozens of despammers. They aren't actually that difficult to make, I made one for StoneColdMail.
Second, you need to deal with the virus issue. Your antivirus will probably stop you from getting infected, but it won't stop your mailbox from filling up. Maybe you can tell your email system to reject anything that has an attachment, or any email that's large.
The third problem is free email. The problem is that, if you're getting something for free, you have to understand that it isn't costing the provider much. That means you're getting an inferior service. You need to bite the bullet; if communicating with other people is important to you, then abandon your free email, and look around for a *good* email service, even if you have to pay a few dollars per year for it. StoneColdMail is the one I offer to members of this web site. It isn't free, but it doesn't cost you any extra - the cost is included in your membership. So I give you 25 megabytes, and there's a despammer.
If your email service supports POP3 or IMAP, then one possibiliity will be to use your own computer for storage. If you can tell your emailer to check your remote mailbox once per hour, and download and delete anything there, then you won't suffer from "mailbox full".
Here's how to do this with Outlook, the email client that you get with Windows. Under tools ... options ... general, you need to tell Outlook to "Check for new messages every 30 minutes" (or however often you want) and you might also want to change the "if my computer is not connected at this time" option, so that outlook will dial up for you. You might need to leave Outlook running all the time (but minimised). That will download all the junk onto your computer. But! You can also tell Outlook to deal with the junk for you.
Look under messages ... create rule from message. You'll see that you can tell it to delete emails with attachments, or emails larger than a size you choose, or emails from a person you name. You get a degree of control over what people can send you. You can use a spam filter, like I suggested above. You can take control of your mailbox and make it a whole lot more useful than it's gotten.
And next time your mother emails you, she won't get "mailbox full".
I redid the Top Twenty. Now there's also a top 50 and top 100, plus I've added the most popular Bookshelves to the top list.
You can check out the message boards that have had the most posts recently, the Top Ten Message Boards. Thanks to TomNine for that suggestion.
I changed the rules for people who aren't members. Now, in order to make a post, you have to either be a member of the web site, or get a free message-board-only registration. People can still read the boards without registering, but they have to register to post. This is intended to abolish the "anonymous-1264" type of poster, and improve the quality of posts.
You've probably noticed that I'm changing the web site banner occasionally, to honour various anniversaries. Pretty much every country has an "Independence day" (except for England, of course, we're the ones that most of them became independent from). Plus, I'm also honouring some birthdays of people I think are worth honouring.
New Message Boards:
Member | Posts |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 6630 |
| easybreather | 6474 |
| boomer444 | 6206 |
| tre1313 | 4766 |
| mikeac | 4766 |
| pamela69 | 4615 |
| JohnDavis | 4097 |
| jabb6328 | 3468 |
| cry2cin | 3431 |
| scottf001 | 3200 |
| ginny2442 | 3189 |
| manc1973 | 3153 |
| mit19237 | 3113 |
| TomNine | 3043 |
| donp500236 | 2884 |
| alfiekins | 2742 |
| thumper321 | 2652 |
| hiram2000 | 2491 |
| evan100 | 2395 |
| Drop | 2357 |
Woo hoo, I'm top of the Chat Stats! TKO is not far behind, and Boomer (now back from Tibet) close on TKO's heels.
In July, we had 4120 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The debate on steroids has rocketed the FBB board into first place. | Maxt6999 is a new face to lead the posting stats. |
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. The FBB board is ranked high this month, the steroids discussion is probably the reason. | The Grinch got the stats. My anti-Grinch thing worked until 23 July. Grrrr.... |
Supplements are not just for bodybuilders. Check out horny goat weed
This diary of a porn store clerk is a must read
And to cheer you up, the story of the cat enema
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of July 2002, there were about 553,000 pictures (29 gigabytes), 76 gigabytes of video, 6000 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 106 gigabytes.
Newsthumbs is now over 100 million files! More than 3 terabytes of pictures! But I'm installing 1.9 terabyte servers now :-) So far, I have three of those monster servers, and another one planned.
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 | 8.2 | 654 | 13.2 | 33 | 21.4 | 686 |
| Total | 43.4 | 3034 | 68.8 | 159 | 112.4 | 3240 |