Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - May 2004
A hard man is good to beat
The ducks waddled around, but they've decided not to nest here this year. I think it's the foxes that are putting them off. Never mind. The daffodils and bluebells are putting up a good show.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
A new record; April 2 brought in 185178 pictures in 18 gigabytes.
Summer's coming. On April 24, I recorded a maximum temperature of 34C in the Valkyrie Data Shed, and Patti crashed in a way that looked like it might be a heat problem. And that's April - come August, it's going to get pretty hot in there. So, I'm planning to install 12 Kw of air conditioning. I hope my electricity supply can take the strain.
I made a new system for doing the membership administration and billings for the sites who are under the DtV umbrella, because Verotel (the people we were using) made some changes that no-one likes. I got it tested and working by the end of the month.
If anyone is interested in working with me on a new web site, here's the deal. You provide the content and tell people about the site; I provide the server, bandwidth, security, automated updating system, tech support, billing and membership administration. You pay no money out, we split the revenues.
I also made some substantial changes to the despamming system. You know the way they obfuscate the text, so that despammers can't see the key words? Well, I found a couple of ways to de-obfuscate, and I'm testing my new despammer. If it's working well, I'll install it on Stonecoldmail.
Several years back, I noticed that I had two sign-ups from the same email address. I looked into it, and the same person had signed up, at two quite different dates.
So I looked into this in more detail. I wrote software that would automate this check-up, I was looking for signups that had either the same email address, or used the same credit card. Because in almost all cases, surely the person signing up, didn't actually want two memberships.
I now do this check automatically before I bill a new member. And I get a steady trickle of people trying to sign up, who are already members. I usually just make it so that the person only has one membership; occasionally, I'll email them back to check if they really did want two memberships (occasionally, people do - they're buying a membership for a friend, using their card).
I strongly doubt if many other web sites make this check. I know that billing agencies don't, and a lot of web sites bill via an agency such as iBill, ccBill or Verotel.
So, my recommendation to you, is that you should check your credit card statement each month (you were doing that anyway, right?). Because it is possible that you've signed up twice for the same web site, and most web sites won't even know that this has happened.
If you do find that this has happened, contact the web site webmaster, and explain the situation. I'd guess that most people will be perfectly willing to do a refund.
I want to pass on a useful way to block sites from being accessible by your computer. No, it isn't censorship! You have the right to ignore anyone you want to. But which siets do you want to ignore? Obviously, that's up to you, but a lot of people like ignoring the sites that serve banner adds, pop-ups and pop-unders. Mike Skallas shows you how.
Here's how it works. When your computer wants to access something from ads.doubleclick.net, it needs to know the IP address. That's a number like 62.25.96.136 (that's the IP address for www.thevalkyrie.com). To look up the IP address, the first place it looks is your hosts file (in Windows, that's a file called hosts in C:\windows). When it uses the hosts file you got from Mr Skallas, it translates ads.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 which means "this computer". So, it tries to find the advert on your own computer, sees that it isn't there, and so can't display it. Neat.
And if it can't find it in the hosts file? Read the Newsletter for February 2004 to see how it works.
Nothing new
I'm finding that a majority of the spam I'm getting now is for drugs. I have no idea whether these drugs are legal or illegal (it doesn't really matter to me, since I'm not going to buy them) or whether they really are the drugs claimed, or whether you get sent a mixture of sugar and chalk. What is interesting, is that these spams must be achieving a measure of success, because that must be what drives the increase.
I'd say that the second most common is offers for loans (sometimes called debt management) and credit cards.
I see other people complaining about pornospam, but from my experience, that's a very small part of the spam I get.
The other thing I've noticed is that I get about as many viruses/trojans/whatevers through my email as I get spam.
From where I sit, I see email gradually beoming less useful, and I'd predict that within ten years, either the nature of email will have to change to make this stuff dramatically less possible, or else email will be almost useless.
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!
U R Stupid Dumbass If U Pay Retail Pri-Ce For Softwares
I am stupid dumbass if I buy anything from a spam
Become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours
As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies
of the church!
Perform Weddings, Funerals, Perform Baptisms, Forgiveness of Sins
Visit Correctional Facilities
Want to start your own church?
Press here to find out how
Let me know if you need any sins forgiven; I can do it for you wholesale.
You´ve just sent a message to slabdal@uol.com.br
In order to confirm the sent message, please click here
This one is quite interesting. I think it's a spam; I think it's purpose is to confirm that
my email address exists and is being actively read, which makes it more valuable
to sell on. The reason why I think it's a spam, is because I'm getting quite a few of these.
³Ì·sºZ¾P°ê¡B¥x»yCD±M¿è¡B¦è¬v¼öªù¬y¦æµ¼ÖCD¡]¨C¤ù50¤¸¡^¡K¡KÁÙ¦³¦U°ê¡K¡K
³Ì·s¼öªù°|½u¤ù¡]¤¤¤å¦r¹õVCD¨C¤ù70¤¸¡^¡A¨ä¥L¥d©ÔOK¡B¥d³qµ¥¡KÀ³¦³ºÉ¦³
±m¦âºô¦L «ö¦¹¬Ý¥Ø¿ý
qÁʬ¢¸ß±M½u¡G0912-033241§õ¥ý¥Í¡]¹j¤é°e¹F¡^
Ooh, I've *always* wanted one of those!
Nothing special - I got an assortment in my email, but I don't know which ones they are. I'm getting a few dozen per day. This problem has now overtaken the spam problem, at least it has for me. That's partly because I'm getting more viruses/trojans/whatever than spams, and partly because when I send out emails to people, their mailboxes are filled and my email bounces.
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
Asian Wrestlerettes the content of this site is fairly obvious from the name. You can see it here
Member | Posts |
| zig563 | 18331 |
| madman3579 | 10849 |
| tre1313 | 6847 |
| tkokidd0 | 5705 |
| buffy18976 | 5579 |
| bro5252 | 5356 |
| boomerflex | 5173 |
| pangel004 | 4754 |
| TomNine | 4497 |
| jcc115 | 4011 |
| hiram2000 | 3873 |
| micha74 | 3795 |
| ginny2442 | 3720 |
| Mujamba | 3202 |
| Jabber | 3107 |
| thegoat77 | 2887 |
| mit19237 | 2832 |
| rainer0000 | 2824 |
| gaily304 | 2761 |
| lpdorman69 | 2401 |
Zig, by a mile! Madman way in front of the rest. There's two month's statistics here, because I forgot to reset the counters last month.
I've put up a new style of board; it includes threading, the possibility of moderation, and lots more. You can see what it looks like here.
This month we had 3605 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Lots of great discussions going on the Politics board, as we try to solve all the problems of the world. | I'm still spending way too much time on the Politics message board, but still got edged out by Steve. |
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 again - he must have something special going for him. | The Grinch got the stats. |
Here's a nice little project for all you do-it-yourself electronics buffs. It's the USB-powered turd
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of April 2004, there were about 708,000 pictures (44 gigabytes), 152 gigabytes of video, 8300 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 197 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 7 1/2 million pictures; there's about 85 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs. We'll hit 100 million before the end of 2004.