Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - February 2005

A hard man is good to beat

January, 2005

We had about a tenth of an inch of snow this month, but it didn't last long. The snowdrops are flaunting themselves on the lawn and in the flower garden.

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

Running smoothly

The Server Farm

January 7, I took nine new servers down to Watford; half to replace servers that had failed, half to upgrade servers that had become somewhat obsolete.

On January 13, Freya (who hosts chat and messages) reached 500 days of non-stop running. So did a few other servers

Understanding the internet

I'm as big a fan of spam as the next person, and it would be good to do something about it. But Verizon seem to have gone a bit too far, according to some of their customers. The Washington Post has an article.

Since some time in mid December, every email I've tried to send to anyone with a Verizon.net, bellatlantic.net or gte.net email address, can't get to them. directvinternet.com is showing the same symptoms, but I don't think that's a Verizon company. So, if you're the owner of an address with that domain name, and you want to be able to get email from Europe, you should consider getting a Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail or similar address.

Verizon, when asked, say that this is an antispam measure, and tell you to complain to your own ISP. I did that, they contacted Verizon, and were told that they had to send an email to an address they were given. That address, of course, is blocked. So far, my ISP has had no success in talking to Verizon. They can't get anyone at Verizon who has responsibility for this, let alone get themselves unblocked.

Verizon are taking the position that this is not their problem, it's the problem of the people who are hosting spammers. That would be a possible position, except that they've made their block so sweeping, that a large amount of non-spam email is being blocked.

Some Verizon customers are quite angry, because they depend on email to get contracts with European companies. And, of course, those people will be thinking about switching from Verizon. And there's also talk of lawsuits against Verizon for the lost business, but such talk of lawsuits rarely amount to anything.

So what should you do if you're not a Verizon customer, and what to get some action on this? Verizon, quite reasonably, aren't willing to give support to people who aren't their customer, and suggest that you complain to your own ISP, who can then contact Verizon with a view to getting their part of the block lifted.

Someone who claims to be with Verizon tech support, says that the email address to complain to, is security@verizon.net. Of course, that won't work for your ISP if they are blocked.

A spokeperson for Verizon said that the address that your ISP should write to is whitelist@verizononline.net. Unfortunately, that's blocked too. I reported that to Verizon.

The blockage isn't total, despite rumours that it is. It would seem that Verizon have chosen substantial ranges of IP addresses, but I've been unable to determine how they chose those ranges, or what ranges are covered. There's a simple test you can make, to discover if you're affected by this issue. Start up a Dos session, and type

telnet relay.verizon.net 25

What that does, is tap on the shoulder of the Verizon email server. If it replies to you, then you're one of the lucky people who can send email to Verizon.net addresses. If you just see a blank, and then after a while it tells you that it can't make a connection, then you're one of the people that Verizon won't accept email from.

So what's Verizon's suggestion for those of their customers who are expecting an email from Europe and aren't getting anything? Verizon's Ells Edwards suggests that you make a phone call.

Naturally, a class action suit is in the air. A law firm called Kohn, Swift & Graf are gathering their forces; if you believe that you should be included in this class action, phone (215) 238-1700. Their email address is info@kohnswift.com, and the lawyer in charge of the case is Mike Boni.

Understanding people

We're a funny old bunch, we humans, and writing the Wendy stories, in which I look at humans from a non-human point of view, has made me see that even more clearly. Many of the things that we do and take for granted as normal, are actually pretty peculiar. There's nowt so queer as folk.

One of the things we take for granted, is self consciousness. We can watch ourselves think! That's a pretty amazing characteristic. I can understand why I have two legs (locomotion is difficult with one, and having hands is such a huge advantage, it makes up for not having four legs). I can understand why I have two eyes (binocular vision lets me judge distances). I can even understand why I have a nose, and why I don't have two noses (you wouldn't be able to judge the distance of a smell). But why do I have self consciousness?

I think it's so that I can understand other people. I can't know what they think, but by knowing what I think, I can make a good guess at what they think, by assuming that they think the way I would. And for a social animal like we are, understanding other people is a big plus.

Of course, that is only a guess - often people don't think the way I would.

Switching the subject briefly to computers, I see a strong tendency for people to assume that all computers work the way theirs does. For example, I recently visited a web site that had something in Flash on the front page, and no way into the rest of the site if you don't have Flash. I don't have Flash, and I don't want to install it. So that site is unreachable to me. I'd guess that the person setting it up, assumed that everyone has, or would be willing to get, Flash.

People sometimes ask me for a detailed, step by step, instruction on how to do some particlar thing, and they're quite surprised when I tell them I can't do that. Why? Because I don't know hoow their computer is set up, or what version of Windows they have, or what they use to play video, or what browser they use, or what resolution their screen is, and so on and so on. It would be like asking for a step by step instruction on how to make a cup of coffee, when I don't know which cupboard in your kitchen you keep the coffee jar, or where your kettle is, or where you keep your milk.

And it occurs to me that we make the same mistake with people. We assume that they're all set up the way we are ourselves, because that's the only model we have. And they aren't, of course - people are all different.

My own particluar weakness is my memory (actually, I see it as a strength). I have a memory like a goldfish, for anything more than a few days. Short-term, my memory is just fine - I can carry in my head a *lot* of details while I'm actually doing a task. But when I move on to the next task, that memory gets cleared, and very little of it goes into long term storage.

By the way, I suspect that the movement of stuff from short term storage into long term is one of the big reasons why we have to switch off our consciousness for several hours each day, and dreams are the echoes of the movement of data from short term to long term. But that's just speculation, I don't have a good reason to believe it.

I think that other people have a *much* better longer term memory than I do, and it's taken me a long, long time to learn this. Because, naturally, I've been assuming that everyone else's brain works the way mine does. What I see is people frequently expecting me to remember something that they told me last week, and I think they're surprised when I don't, and I have to be reminded.

You probably think that everyone's brain works the way yours does - yours is the only one you can know in detail. And you're probably wrong - there's probably difference that you haven't noticed yet. Of course, I have no idea what those differences might be.

Here's a good article from Scientific American

Useful keyboard tip

80% of the time when I'm typing, I'm looking at the keys, 10% at the screen. The other 10% is when I'm looking at something completely irrelevant.

Occasionally, one of my fingers hits the "Caps lock" key, usually when I'm aiming at "a" and miss. So, then after a while, I look at the screen, and find I have a couple of lines to retype. Annoying.

If you're running Linux, then put

xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"

in your .bash_profile

This completely disables the Caps lock key, which is fine by me, it's really rare when I actually want to use it.

I expect there's a way to do the same thing under Windows.

Music while I work

After my big jukebox decided to play fast-and-loose, I started digitising my collection of CDs. Now I have the whole lot as Ogg files, and also MP3. I recycled an old computer (Pentium 133) with a hard disk that had failed but rescued by reformatting, and put it all on that. There's 60 gigabytes, and I've got a backup of it on tape now. So, my big jukebox is redundant, I don't need to worry about CDs getting scratched or fingerprinted, and I can play my music while I work, whether I'm in my studio, my workshop or in the Valkyrie Data Shed.

Cameras

Nothing new

Spams of the Month

I don't make these up, although the comments on the spams are mine, of course. 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!

By the way, if you're using StoneColdMail (which is free to web site members) then you won't see most of these spams, they'll be delivered into your "Spam" folder.

                                            
This pills is a modern grease-adhere accessory which
takes away fat from a fare we consume! Excogitated with
the influentialcogent grease-adhere fiber, the mixture
of natural multipliers...

I'm so glad you explained that.

   
   Who can resist a

I can.

  
   How Big Is YOUR Dog?                                       

Well, he's about so high - wait a minute, why are you asking?

  
Clepsy Clock is ticking for GreenCard Register 2005!                             

We prefer to be called timepieces.

I owe you $400000

Send it to the usual address.

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. Also Anita Ramsey and Rhonda Dethlefs.

DtV Family web sites

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

It isn't often that we become the subject of an academic paper, only a couple of times per year (usually it's my Cockney translator, cited by someone writing about dialect or slang). But this one is exceptionally fine, and many thanks to TomNine for spotting it. Download the pdf

Look at page 11 and onwards. And in case you're wondering, no, they didn't ask my permission before using it. But the chatroom logs are publicly available.

Their analysis is done using a methodology known as "discourse analysis", which, as I'm sure we all know, is derived from ethnomethodology and semiotics. Ordinary folk like you and I call it "guessing what people mean".

In case you didn't realise, "Zorro" is Bob Bass, who usually uses the nickname "Blu". He's just not taking Warrior Poet's complaints seriously. What is interesting, is that the writer of the paper took Blu's joke about a "trial by jury" so seriously. As if that's possible!

Chatter of the month

Tre knocked Madman of his top spot. Grapplejack re-entered the list.

On the Message Boards

This month we had 3890 posts to the boards.

A new message board, LA Melanie's Women and Couples Discussing Real Contacts, it's about wrestling.

Back Page

Answers to the Christmas Quiz: 1) The answer is "stuffing". Mr Cholmondely of Ealing should wash his mouth out with soap. 2) It takes two people to pull a cracker. Some of the answers to this question were quite unprintable.

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

At the end of January 2005, there were about 739,000 pictures (48 gigabytes), 158 gigabytes of video, 8900 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 207 gigabytes. There's over 100 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs. How many web sites do you know that have 100 million pictures?

To the Magic Carpet