Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - December 2002
A hard man is good to beat
The clocks went back, and now it's getting dark early; the trees stand naked in the garden, and there's a chill in the air.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
My new story - "The Weapon - Exodus". I called it that because it is about an Exodus, and people who read it carefully will even spot the parting of the Red Sea (and for obvious reasons, I'm renaming the first story "The weapon - arrival" to "The Weapon - Genesis"). It's another long story, 30,000 words. The recipe for Mustard Gas is entirely fictional, but the recipe for Molotov Cocktails is real, everyone knows it already. "The Weapon - Exodus" explores an idea for winning the War on Heroin, but also examines the thought that every action has consequences, some of which are unintended, and those extra consequences can jump up and bite you, hard.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
Wicked Workouts & Wild Worship
Female Power Pumping Overheats the Iron
Come and get in on this WICKED WORKOUT...
As Kasie dreams of these 2 new HOT girls working out at her gym. Who are they? Where did they come from? She begins to explore her own body as her mind runs uncontrollable with WILD WORSHIP fantasies.....
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
I built my first Pentium 4 server this month. Nothing special, but I'm trying to decide which motherboard to make my standard. I want one with video and LAN on the motherboard, so that I'll be able to use it in a 1U case. My current inclination is to a Gigabyte board.
The problems in building 1U Pentium servers are:
I found everything except the last; I can cope without that, by using an ATA133 controller card.
Why the move to P4 now? Because I'm finding that all the motherboard manufacturers have stopped doing new stuff for the Pentium 3, and I can imagine that a couple of years from now, the P-3 and Celeron-3 will be orphans; difficult to get replacements. Athlons and Durons pump out too much heat for my liking in a 1U case, because the fan you can put into such a small case, can't get as much heat off the CPU as it needs to. So, it looks like I'm pushed towards P4. Now that I can get 2.4 GHz P4s for a sensible price (about $200) it means that the one chip is faster than the dual-processor P-3's running at 1GHz. So I can use them for Newsthumbs processing.
I want to use just one motherboard if I possibly can; it's bad enough now, I have about a dozen different motherboard types installed. By reducing the number of different motherboards in my farm, I can hope to get to know the strengths and weaknesses of each one I use. But what I don't want is every computer completely different.
The cheap £35 UPS's that I bought are starting to fail. Well, at that price, I'm not too upset, but the trouble is, I only know that it fails when the power goes out and the UPS doesn't keep the computer running. I'm planning to get a really big three kilowatt UPS to replace all those little ones; I'm hoping to get that in the coming month.
The Maxtor 160gb drives are turning out to be less reliable than any other drive I've ever bought (that was the cause of the big server problem last month). So I'm planning to use them in triples (each server that uses the 160s, will have two other servers with the same stuff on them). And I've changed from buying those, to the Western Digital 200gb drives.
Fistman has gotten a great new Kodak digital camera.
I'm seeing 80,000 to 90,000 pictures per day here. Sometimes over 100,000.
I don't make these up. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their contact details - go find your own spammers!
New! Virus of the Month. Each month, I get sent hundreds of viruses. I don't know which ones they are, I've stopped bothering to identify them. So I don't know what they might do to a Windows computer - but I do know that it's safe if you don't open the attachements.
Occasionally, there can be something amusing about the virus, and I'll summarise those here.
NEW! Simpsons Talking Bottle Opener!
Just what I always wanted.
the easy-to-use Rembrandt Plus Superior Bleaching Kit
Rembrandt will be turning in his grave
RotoStyler allows you to straighten and style your hair in minutes.
You'll tame your hair and go from wild to styled at home without costly
salon visits, chemical damage, or heat damage.
I've got the manual version of that, I call it a "comb"
Check out the revolutionary opportunities.
Treason!
Japan's KINOTAKARA Toxin Pads Explodes USA!!
I swear to you, the people who write these spams cannot possibly speak the same language that I do.
$100 per hour reading your email
No thanks, I'm already making $1000/hour by sneezing once per day. When I read about that offer,
I could hardly believe etc etc etc.
I leave you with a fish that must go free
Yum yum, fish.
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.
And we've sponsored Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller.
New Message Board
Member | Posts |
| gman292 | 5197 |
| mikeac | 5177 |
| manc1973 | 4180 |
| lament2syn | 3723 |
| boomer444 | 3677 |
| mit19237 | 3109 |
| alphacentaurian | 2993 |
| Storm | 2923 |
| GrappleJack | 2626 |
| TomNine | 2433 |
| pamela69 | 2364 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 2289 |
| gaily304 | 1916 |
| buffy18976 | 1691 |
| hiram2000 | 1580 |
| rainer0000 | 1509 |
| Sheila.Burgess | 1457 |
| bro5252 | 1440 |
| shanice82 | 1372 |
| tre1313 | 1357 |
Gman, Mike and Mark are the top three; TKO fourth, similar to last month.
In November, we had 3070 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The noisiest board is still Politics and Economics, but there's a sudden surge in Boomer's Sports Chat. Maybe some cup or bowl? | Homoancient is very active on the L&C board |
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. TomNine returned to second place. | ... TomNine just edging out Fistman. |
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of October 2002, there were about 598,000 pictures (32 gigabytes), 81 gigabytes of video, 6400 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 113 gigabytes.
There's now two newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| Older 5 | 8.5 | 687 | 13.7 | 34 | 22.2 | 722 |
| Latest | 6.9 | 740 | 9.9 | 16 | 16.9 | 757 |
| Total | 15.4 | 1427 | 23.6 | 50 | 39.1 | 1479 |