Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - April 2004
A hard man is good to beat
At last! March 16th was warm enough that I could leave my window open all day. And the daffodils are shouting their joy at the sky; the sky replied by dumping rain and snow on them. And on March 22, we had hail. Not just ordinary hail - hailstones the size of marbles. Ah, to be in England, now that spring is here.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
I posted my latest Wendy story - locomotion.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
I changed the way I get the newsgroups fed to my server; this was necessary because the old way resulted in such a huge amount of unwanted data. But even after the change, I'm seeing record levels; March 11 saw 175924 pictuires in 18 gigabytes.
Also on March 12, I moved to a new server; I'm needing to do this every two months now, as the old one fills up.
A new Kasie video - "Wanta check in?
The Kavanaugh Arms assumes no liabilities to guests who become subjected to their Super Strong Staff's enormous muscles. All guests must readily submit to the muscle demands of this Super Strong Staff
I ordered the 5000 VA UPS, it certainly was a big beast. It weighed 39 kilos, 86 pounds. But that's not too bad, I could handle it. I set it up, plugged it in, let it charge for a while, and then gave it a load - one table lamp. I cut power to the UPS, and the lamp went out. That's not what is supposed to happen, of course. I tried it a couple more times, then I looked closely at the LCD display. It was saying "batteries failed". Great. A new unit.
So I called up the people who make them, and they said "did you install the batteries?" "What batteries?" "The ones we ship separately, because it would be too heavy with them in." So, I opened up the unit, and guess what - batteries not included. There's two battery packs, 18 kilos each, the total weight of the whole thing should be 75 kilos, 165 pounds. They recommend two/three people to lift the thing without batteries, one man per battery.
So, I told the people I'd ordered it from, and a few days later, the batteries arrived. It was easy to install them, they just slide in. And then the whole UPS becomes impossible to lift, unless you're a Valkyrie of course, because there's nothing you can get a hold of, and you can't get into a good lifting position. So, you take the batteries out, put the UPS where it's meant to rest, and then add the batteries.
And it's working fine now.
March 23, at 6pm, there was a sudden packetstorm. It turned out that a computer (not one of mine) that lived at my Packet Transit provider, suddenly decided to spew out a huge amount of packets. It took them two hours to diagnose the problem and pull the connection to that server.
Then it happened again, March 24. This time, it took them three hours to find and kill the culprit.
When it happened a third time (20 minutes), I made a big fuss with the packet transit people; that's still working its way through their complaint system.
I'm seeing this more and more. The cause is obvious; whichever virus is the virus-of-the-day, fills up your mailbox with copies emailed to you. So even though you never click on an attachment (because you know what a bad idea that is, right?) you're still inconvenienced by the virus, because it is stopping you from receiving your email.
This has been gettig a lot worse over the last several months, and I'd guess it's going to continue to get worse. I'm getting dozens of viruses in my mailbox every day. I'd guess I'm seeing maybe a megabyte per day in just viruses. If your mailbox is one megabyte, then it's filled by viruses by the time you read it (which is annoying) and all the messages you would want, got bounced (which is infuriating). Maybe you need to do something about it - don't expect anyone else to.
No antivirus that you run is going to help. An antivirus keeps viruses off your computer, it can't stop your mailbox from filling up with spam (to a slight extent) and viruses (mostly). Because your mailbox isn't on your computer.
What can you do? Sure, must of the email you get is junk, but that's irrelevant. The whole reason you have a mailbox, is for the emails you do want, and if you're not getting them, that's not good.
Let's look at it from my point of view first. I send you an email and it bounces. So now what do I do? Do I use the telephone? Send a snail mail letter? Unlikely, very unlikely. Do I hold on to the email and try again a few days later? Probably not. No, chances are, I just shrug my shoulders and forget whatever it was I wanted to tell you.
Only you can know how important this is to you. If all your email is just chit-chat, then it doesn't matter. If you're selling things on Ebay, you're losing business. I know one person who regularly loses money because emails to her are bouncing.
So, what can you do?
There's a couple of obvious answers. One is to check your mailbox several times each day. But that might not be practical, and if you miss a couple of days, you've lost a bunch of emails.
A more practical solution is to get a much bigger mailbox. The mailboxes you get for free, are typically quite small. What did you expect for a freebie? You can often get a much larger mailbox by paying some small annual amount.
If that won't work, then you can switch your service, to one that offers a larger mailbox. But find out first how much space you get.
Another possible answer, is to set up something that automatically downloads your mailbox to your own computer. I have something for Linux that does that, called "fetchmail", and it runs every 60 seconds. Maybe you can configure your Windows mail program to do that, I'm not a Windows expert. But if you can set up something to do that, then you're using the gigabytes of your computer as your mailbox, not the paltry amount that you currently have on a remote server.
But until you get this sorted out, you can expect to send emails that people never reply to. Or at least, you think they don't. Actually they did, but the replies bounced.
Nothing new
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!
Look Great in 2004, while sleeping.
I already look great while I'm sleeping. What I need is to look great while I'm awake.
Dear Friend,
Do not discard this as another unsolicited mail.it was sent specifically to you
and you alone.
To me and me alone? Wow, how did you find out that my first name is Friend?
I know this message will come to you as a big surprise because we have not met
before, but please do not think this is one of those junk or
scam emails you received in your email box this is for real.
Well, I'm certainly relieved to hear that this isn't another scam.
Start your own sunglass business free of charge
Somehow, I'm not excited by this.
Nothing special - I got an assortment in my email, but I don't know which ones they are. I'm getting a couple of dozen per day.
We've sponsored lots of the women; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan, Steph Parks.
We're also sponsoring individual events such as the Femsport Valkyrie Festival, and the New York Muscle Club, 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. Anita Ramsey and Rhonda Dethlefs coming up.
Napoleon Riding Cult; this will be all sorts of riding stuff. Mostly horses, but also ponies, and some other animals. You can see it here
Member | Posts |
| zig563 | 11435 |
| madman3579 | 6704 |
| tre1313 | 3479 |
| boomerflex | 3349 |
| bro5252 | 3253 |
| buffy18976 | 3177 |
| jcc115 | 3032 |
| pangel004 | 2944 |
| micha74 | 2925 |
| tkokidd0 | 2847 |
| hiram2000 | 2383 |
| TomNine | 2245 |
| Mujamba | 2171 |
| Jabber | 1939 |
| rainer0000 | 1444 |
| mit19237 | 1287 |
| thegoat77 | 1283 |
| shad349 | 1263 |
| gman292 | 1224 |
| coachrandy | 1176 |
Zig, by a mile! Madman way in front of the rest.
I've stopped moving posts from the Guest board to the main boards. Every time anyone posts as "guest", the server tells them they should register. If people can't be bothered to register, then they'll just have to accept using the guest board.
This month we had 3717 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| The Politics board is still the biggest. | Hmm, looks like I've been spending way too much time on the Politics and Religion message boards. |
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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| TomNine maintains pole position. | The Grinch got the stats. |
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of March 2004, there were about 690,000 pictures (43 gigabytes), 132 gigabytes of video, 8200 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 176 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 2 1/2 million pictures; there's about 80 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs. We'll hit 100 million before the end of 2004.