Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - June 2004

A hard man is good to beat

May, 2004

Everything is flowering. The garden is a riot of colour, the bean fields near here float their giddy perfume over the air, and most of the fish in my duckpond have survived the heron.

New and updated Galleries

Galleries added this month.

The Library

Stories added this month.

Listen with Diana the Valkyrie

Nothing new

The Movie Theatre

Movies added this month.

Newsthumbs

A new record; May 9 brought in 197900 pictures in 18.6 gigabytes. I'm seeing about 1000 gigabytes arriving in two months - that's why I have to change the server every two months. And it's still speeding up.

Shopping Mall

The Server Farm

I need more bandwidth for the backups from Watford to Chesham. So I'm ordering two more DSL lines. As a home-use line, there's pretty cheap. As a business-use line, they're *ridiculously* cheap. I pay for that cheapness, with the fact that they aren't 100% reliable. But that isn't a problem; if a backup takes a bit longer than it might, that's no big deal. And because I'll have six, if one goes down, that's only a small part of capacity. Unfortunately, where I am I can only get the 0.5 megabit lines; I'd much rather have a couple of two megabit lines.

The air conditioning system arrived. The lads installed it, and I put an earth leakage meter on it. There's about 20 milliamps of earth leakage on each of the two units, which makes me a bit nervous, given the problems I had in the past with that. And they draw up to 7.5 amps each, which makes me a bit worried about the total electricity supply capacity out there, which maxes out at about 32 amps. So, I think I'll call in the electrician again.

I'm running them at 29 C. The aircon installer boys we're a bit surprised, they were thinking more of 21 C. But I know the computers are OK up to 35, and I start getting nervous at 40. And since there's no-one in the Valkyrie Data Shed, I don't have to worry about human comfort. The big advantage of running the temperature at 29, is that it means that the aircon will hardly ever be running, which saves a lot of amperes.

My main data preparation server (where all the stuff for the web site is made ready before uploading it) filled up. So I added a 300 gb drive (and ditto to the server that is the hot backup).

I upgraded my Secure Server; it's been running on a 400 Mhz machine for four or five years now. It's an old version of Linux, on a slow (by today's standards) machine, with not much (only 128 mb) memory. So I upgraded to a 2.8 Ghz pentium, 512mb memory. This is because I'm expecting the DtV Family web sites (see below) to be making a lot more use of it.

This violates my usual rule of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I left the old server intact for four weeks, just in case I needed to pop it back quickly, but now that it's been running for a month with no trouble, I feel confident about it.

Understanding the internet - Ebay and Paypal

If you haven't discovered Ebay and Paypal yet, it's time you did. I have to admit, I knew about Ebay some years back, but it's only recently that I've been actually using it.

I have a seriously large tape backup system (200 gb per tape), and because I want to back up the Newsthumbs, I need a lot of tapes. Newsthumbs is running to about 500 gigabytes per month now. And the tapes, well, they aren't cheap.

Then I thought of Ebay. On Ebay, I'm buying the same tapes, brand new and sealed, for a third of what I'd be paying even if I bought as cheap as I can find elsewhere. I think that the reason for this, is that I'm buying something that not many people would buy. Corporates wouldn't buy backup tapes on Ebay, and home users don't have the kind of Valkyrie-strength backup system I use. So, there aren't many bidders for these tapes.

I also bought a few webcams. There's one particular type of webcam that I know will work well with Linux, and it runs at 640 by 480 resolution, which is as good as you can get for a webcam. I'm sure other cams will also work, but I *know* that this one does. Trouble is, they're obsolete. Creative don't make them any more.

But I can still get them on Ebay, and because they're obsolete, there's not many other bidders.

And I bought about 50 CDs; Boogie, Dixie and Bennie Goodman. Really cheap.

On the other hand, I've been watching the prices of 300 gb drives, because that's something I buy a lot of. And it seems that they sell on Ebay for about the same as I can buy them normally. So, when something is in good demand, the prices aren't so good, which is exactly what you'd expect.

You get the idea. I haven't tried selling anything yet, but it's great fun buying things on Ebay, you get some really good bargains. And you can buy some really obscure things. So I've started to take Paypal as an alternative to credit cards.

I told my bank about this - they didn't seem to have even heard of Paypal.

Cameras

A new camera for Jabber - Pentax *IST D with Battery Grip D-BG1

Spams of the Month

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!

I ate chocolate and lost 20 lbs

Lucky you. I must be eating the Wrong Sort of Chocolate

This may be our last attempt to contact you

Lucky me.

Pop that egg out of it's shell with EggStractor

Build a better egg extractor and the world will ... ignore you.

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?

Hmm, I especially like the Forgiveness of Sins part.

This may be our last attempt to contact you, please do not 
wait until it's too late.

I can but hope.

Virus of the month

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.

Sponsorships

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.

DtV Family web sites

Verotel is the billing agency used by Femflex, Boomerflex and most of the other sites that I host on my servers. We call these sites the "DtV Family". It means that people like Fistman, Tre and Boomer can set up a pay site, which means that events like the New York Muscle Club and the Vancouver Valkyrie Festival can take place, it means that a lot of photo shoots can be paid for that wouldn't otherwise happen, and it means that people can get started as professional (meaning, you somehow charge for your services) photographers without any big outlay of cash.

A few weeks ago, Verotel (under pressure from Visa) changed the way they do things. This was not a good change, from the point of view of the DtV Family. For example, it meant that instead of going straight to the site you wanted, members were supposed to go via the Verotel "Ticketsclub" thing. And there were other issues. So, there's been a big change there.

I got my thinking hat on, and adapted the membership system that I use for the main DtV site, so that members of the DtV Family could use it too. And that means there's all sorts of other advantages. For members, it means there isn't a third party involved (Verotel) when we're trying to sort out problems like "password doesn't work". Previously, that might have been a problem with Verotel, with my server, or with the webmaster. Now there's only one party involved, you can see it's easier to sort out problems like that.

It's also a plus that there isn't a third party, Verotel, taking a slice of the membership revenues. They did a fine job in the past, but in future, they'll be out of the cake.

There's a couple of unexpected benefits - because Verotel aren't involved now, it's much simpler to set up a new site, or move an existing site from another server to one of mine. And the benefits of doing that are large - it means that a site doesn't have to pay for hosting services, bandwidth consumption and billing services. I do the whole thing, so that all the webmaster needs to do is create the content, and tell people about his great site. Even things like thumbnails and menu pages are taken care of by the server. To update a DtV-Family web site, you just upload new pictures to the relevant directory.

And I send you a $US check once per month.

Moving off Verotel means that we can't take 900-number payments, but in my opinion, those are a really bad idea anyway. We see more fraud on the few that do get used, than on everything else put together. I don't know why.

So I've replaced it with Paypal, which I've used quite a lot to buy things on Ebay. It's really easy to use, and I think a lot of people already use it.

The new system is described here. If you're interested in setting up a paysite, and you like the idea of zero upfront costs, and you're willing to do a revenue-sharing scheme, then contact me at valkyrie@thevalkyrie.com

Here's the first new site set up using that new scheme Gerri Deach, which is run by Andy, of Andy's Muscle Goddesses.

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Welcome to Maeven - from a standing start, she's shot right to the top.

On the Message Boards

I've put up a new style of board; it includes threading, the possibility of moderation, and lots more. You can see what Tom Nine's Tussling Tenement looks like, we gave it a new coat of paint, and it looks great. Mixed wrestling sessions is a popular topic!

This month we had 3629 posts to the boards.

Back Page

Damn, why didn't I think of this?

I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.

At the end of May 2004, there were about 712,000 pictures (44 gigabytes), 152 gigabytes of video, 8300 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 198 gigabytes. The Current Newsthumbs has 2.7 million pictures; there's about 92 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs. We'll hit 100 million within a couple of months.

To the Magic Carpet