Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - April 2005

A hard man is good to beat

March, 2005

You can see my garden; that's a live image, so if it's black, that means it's night-time in England. But during the daytime, you can see the daffodils nodding in the March Winds, and watch the April Showers.

The Valkyrie Gardencam

That's the view from my window. If you refresh it a few times, you'll see the trees waving in the wind, unless there's no wind. If you're lucky, you'll see birds pecking on the grass; pigeons usually, some blackbirds. If you're a bit more lucky, you'll see ducks in the duckpond, squirrels or the black-and-white cat who seems to own the garden. If you're *really* lucky, you'll see rabbits, foxes or mountjack deer. If you're not lucky, then it's night time in England, and you'll see nothing whatsoever.

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

Hey, I won a 400 gb drive! Seagate emailed me, saying they were giving them away. I filled in their form, and got a free 400 gb drive. For evaluation. Trouble is, the only way I know how to evaluate a drive, is to use it for five years. If it's still working well at the end of that, it's a good drive.

Not much happened apart from that. A couple of servers died, but they were just spares, there in case a server in use goes down.

Understanding people

You know those emails you get from friends where you just can't work out what on earth they were trying to say? Well, here's how they happen. People write what they're thinking, but then fail to read it back from the point of view of someone else. Someone who doesn't know what they know, someone who wasn't thinking about the things they're thinking about.

Do you ever do that? I try not to.

Understanding the internet

I think I discovered something a bit interesting recently. You know all the spam we all get? I think I found a way to decrease it somewhat.

I have a mail exchange server, which is there to send and receive the 2000 emails per month that I get (not counting spam, and internal emails frmo my servers to me to tell me about problems). If that server were to go down, suddenly anyone sending me email, get a bounce. Not good.

So there's a backup mail server. Your mailer is supposed to send to me main server, and f it finds that it can't, it should try to deliver to my backup server. I even have a second backup server! So far, so good. You can ask my DNS server for a list of these mail servers in order of preference; that's how your mail server knows where to send the mail.

I recently looked at my backup servers, and was surprised to find a large amount of spam there. How did that get there? My main mail server hasn't been down.

It looks like spammers don't follow the rules. It looks like they ask my DNS server for the list of mail servers, and then send to the first one they hear about, which isn't necessarily the first in order of preference.

So I'm doing a little experiment. I've set up nine mail servers (any server can act as a mail server, it costs me nothing to try this). And guess what?

1. I'm getting a lot more spam on the other eight, than I'm getting on my preferred server
2. None of the non-spam email is going to any of those eight

I'll keep this test running for a while longer, to see if it's consistent. But if it is, I'll set up a whole slew of dummy mail server for the spammers to use, and reduce the incoming spam both to my account, and to StoneColdMail (the free email system for members).

Cameras

I bought and tried out several web cams. You can see one of them any time, it's the Valkyrie Garden cam

Well, not any time. When it's night-time in England, you won't see much!

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.

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  ty    gw   tuf  df    uv. Wbm.  eve  oxi    yq;   @fS         hxfua         @uo        ayyX:,qxl
  cdt  dmi   WmW    8bvtos: ll     yb  WaZ      Znulpb@           r@otj    .vvt2                8yq
   xo .rm    WkW  jvW:: on, ja     vi  WtW    hjh,i 0vW       Za  gS sur  wqb            8X     Zaf
   SevieS    WyW tj     ud  fxZ   rqm  WvW   mhB    0vZ       nn  oS qxi ZiX             umg    vw:
    djlx     gsy  tuuirgiyh  sriWockf  fuh    wsjkmufkn0       ecWxmavt Xtuqvhhvct7 jcs   nebfmlu:
              ,    ,:;i   :        xi   ,       ,;i   .:          sa     .       i   i,
                            Zhe   fmr                             Z,
                              hcchf.

Now this was a bit unusual!

Click on the link below and please enter your birthday for me. I am creating a
birthday list of all my friends and family.

         A19s a lB8i_m*itMled timnJe prom|ot0iFKovn we are offe;ring a,
                                                                                
                                                                                
      100% F&REO3E lifet"ime ac,cess pGSasTsworZd tLo oE4ucr Rea7lity Porn
                                 MTeddga SitUe
                                                                                

Sorry, could you take the chewing gum out of your mouth and say that again?

Make even god's envious of you in bed!

The 's is the possessive, not the plural. You can refer to "god's wounds" or "God's eyes", but when you want to talk about several gods, it's gods, not god's.

Bon an\x{FFFF}wou ke\x{FFFF}to\x{FFFF}sha h\x{FFFF}yo st\x{FFFF}plac ger
usm ld\x{FFFF}li re\x{FFFF}wit u\x{FFFF}the\x{FFFF}be e\x{FFFF}to\x{FFFF}wa
on\x{FFFF}Ma adne th\x{FFFF}TH T\x{FFFF}BON
rch\x{FFFF}M ss\x{FFFF}wi E\x{FFFF}BES USES

Sorry, could you take the chewing gum out of your mouth and repeat that?

The rules for its and it's are a little more complex. I'll deal with that later.

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

I'm running dozens of these now, and lots of people are members of more than one. In some cases, there are combo deals available; you get a discount if you're a member of two that are available as a combo. If you're already a member of two that are combo'ed, you should seriously look at this, you can save money at no cost. If you're a member of one site in a combo, then look at the extra cost of getting the combo, and the advantages of joining the other site (or sites). It can be a very good deal.

Some advice - check your credit card statement, every month. My billings show up as "Internet Privacy" (or similar, I don't control exactly what your card company prints on your statement). If you can't understand why you're getting billed, email me with the details of the latest billing, and I can tell you exactly what I'm billing you for. If you're a member of half a dozen great sites, it's easy to lose track.

More advice - if you have a financial crisis (maybe your car needs emergency repairs) then cancel all your memberships until your financial health is restored. You can cancel them individually, of course. But you could also email me and ask me to tell you what you're a member of, and I'll tell you. You can also ask me to cancel all of them, and I will. No problem - I believe that by making cancellation really easy, I also make it easier for you to rejoin later when your money situation is better.

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Boomer pushes past Tre, with Madman, TomNine and Buffy somewhat trailing.

On the Message Boards

This month we had 3222 posts to the boards.

Back Page

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

At the end of March 2005, there were about 742,000 pictures (49 gigabytes), 158 gigabytes of video, 9100 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 207 gigabytes. There's over 100 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs.

To the Magic Carpet