Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - May 2006
A hard man is good to beat
The daffs are going strong, and the bluebells are peeking out.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
Going fine.
At Watford, I have a bunch of working servers, and backups for those, and I fill the rest of the cabinet with spare servers. The idea is that if I get a failure, I don't need to make a trip down there.
My last trip was in October, to replace a failed switch; I also took that opportunity to replace all the servers that had failed at that date.
Now I've accumulated ten servers which have either failed, or become seriously obsolete. So, on April 13, I made another trip to Watford to replace those with working servers.
I have two common causes of failure. One is the CPU fan, and that's very frustrating, because it means that a $1 component failure stops the entire system from working. The other main cause, is hard disk failure. Right now, my standard server is a Celeron 2.53GHz with four 300 gb drives. The 300gb drives are the best value for money right now, costing about $110 each. So there's a lot of hard drives there, and if even one of those four fails, that means I need to replace the server.
I also just made an interesting purchase - it's a little box that lets me switch on or off any of eight relays, controlled via the serial port. I currently use six of these little fellows, and I just bought five more.
I use them for anything that I want to control by computer. For example, if you're in the chatroom and you want to summon the Valkyrie, you type /valksignal on. This switches on the Valksignal (you do follow the Batman books, right?) and I know that someone is looking for me.
Mostly, I use them for remote power control - I can power off and power on my computers from anywhere in the world, provided I have an internet connection (or a signal for my mobile phone). That's great, because sometimes I need to do that if something drastic happens to a server and I need to cycle the power. It also means that I can have servers which are there to run up if an important server goes down. I could do that by having them permanently powered up, but because I have remote power control, I can save a lot of electricity by keeping them switched off.
So, I took out ten servers, and installed ten servers, and it went very well, only took me about four hours. When I got back, I found that one of the servers that I hadn't touched, had gone down - actually, one of the hard drives had failed. So I switched people over to using the backup of that server, set up one of the new servers as a backup, and I don't think anyone would have noticed the problem.
As I've mentioned before, I have six DSL lines, which I use to back up the Newsthumbs - it means I don't need to travel down to Watford every two months to take out the filled-up servers and put up fresh ones.
Originally, those ran at 0.5 megabits (64 kilobytes per second), because that was the best I could get at the distance I am from the exchange. Then British Telecom decided that they would work at 1 megabit, so I upgraded them to that.
Now there's a thing called DSL Max (also called BT Max). They monitor the line quality for ten days, and work out how fast they'll be able to run the line. I just got mine tested, and they reckon I can get 3 megabits out of them. The best part of this, is that the upgrade is free! So, I'll be getting three times the bandwidth at no charge. And I don't need to change my DSL router, or even change the configuration.
How I found out about this is rather fun. One of my lines developed a fault, and so the BT engineers came to fix it. One of them told me about DSL Max, so I checked it out on my ISP's web site, and there it was!
It might be that the ISP told me about it - I don't read most of the junk email that I get, and I include the marketing emails from my ISP in that. And I don't visit their web site much.
So it might well be that you're in the same position. DSL Max can go up to 8 megabits (depending on line quality between you and the exchange). So it might well be that you can get a much faster line, like I did, at zero cost. Ask your ISP (I don't know if this applies outside the UK) or visit their web site.
Something I've never understood - some people repeat themselves in an email. It's as if they haven't comprehended that I can read the email a second time if I didn't get it the first time. They feel they have to tell me the same thing again, and they know they are repeating, because they say something like "I repeat ..."
Well, that's not so bad, just amusing. What is annoying, is when people don't recap or quote the email that they're replying to. So the email might say "yes", and I have to dig back to find the email that they're replying to. Of course, I can do that, but the protocol of email is that you quote the part of the email that you're answering.
Opinion is divided on whether you reply after the quote, or before. My preference is to reply below the quote, because I read from top to bottom (and I guess most people do), so I want to read the question before I read the answer.
I had an email from a member, which asked me why I was billing him four times for one membership. I asked the name of the merchant doing the billing, and it wasn't me. I used Google to look up the names, and sent him back the results.
He had a total of four extra charges per month from different so called "discount clubs" that he was enrolled in (unknown to him through his credit card). HeI was charged as a result of a sales call from a video club claiming a 15-day free trial with charges to accrue after the 15 days were done. Well, he didn't see the charges right away on his statement and noticed them a few months later.
The four charges were from: AP9 ShoppingEssentials, AP9 Passportoffun, American Family Healthcare, and Direct Discount Club.
You should check your credit card statement every month, and you should know what each billing is for. If there's a billing you don't recognise, then you can, firstly, ask your credit card company to put in a request to the merchant to provide details. When I get those, I print out the name of the web site I'm billing for, and the membership sign-up details, so that people then are reminded what it's for.
If that doesn't help, you can tell the card company that the billing is unauthorised, but you must be pretty sure that you're correct, because you're accusing someone of fraud, and you don't want to do that lightly.
And you should be especially careful about AP9 ShoppingEssentials, AP9 Passportoffun, American Family Healthcare, and Direct Discount Club.
And here's some more names: AP9* HOMEWORKS PLUS, MWI HOMEWORKS PLUS MWI CONNECTIONS HDI SIMPLE ESCAPES Adaptive Marketing LLC - Site Map Adaptive Marketing LLC AP9 ValueMax, IK9 ValueMax AP9 TodaysEscapes, IK9 TodaysEscapes AP9 SimplyYou, IK9 SimplyYou AP9 SimpleEscapes, IK9 SimpleEscapes AP9 ShoppingEssentials, IK9 ShoppingEssentials AP9 PrivacyMatters, EP9 PrivacyMatters, IK9 PrivacyMatters AP9 PremierHealthPlus, IK9 PremierHealthPlus AP9 PassportToFun, IK9 PassportToFun AP9 HomeWorksPlus, IK9 HomeWorks Plus AP9 GalleriaUSA, IK9 GalleriaUSA AP9 Essentials, EP9 Essentials, IK9 Essentials AP9 Connections, IK9 Connections AP9 BussinessMax, IK9 BusinessMax AP9 AtHomeRewards, IK9 AtHomeRewards AP9 24ProtectPlus, IK9 24ProtectPlus
Nothing new.
Nothing new.
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.
Your c t redi u t doesn't matter to us !
If you OW q N real e z st p at e e and want IMM u EDI a AT a E
ca w sh to sp i en h d ANY way you like,
or simply wish to L k OWER your monthly p w aymen u ts
by a third or more, here are the deal g s
we have T u OD x AY :
Can you repeat that in English?
Gamble for free!
My understanding is that the whole point of gambling is that you're risking money. If you aren't risking
money, then you're playing a game but not gambling. So how can you gamble for free?
Most of the sponsorships now are by giving women server space and bandwidth, so they can operate their web sites without having to pay these fees. There's also photoshoots, which gets some revenue into their hands, as well as the traditional direct-funding sponsorship.
A couple of new sites.
Asian fem/fem wrestlerettes is now open
The other new site is West Coast Female Wrestling
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
You can give a Diana the Valkyrie membership as a gift.
Sign up here for the gift that lasts and lasts. Perfect for an Easter gift!
Member | Posts |
| TomNine | 2219 |
| madman3579 | 2090 |
| zig563 | 1775 |
| Terry | 1483 |
| mac999 | 1279 |
| gaily304 | 951 |
| mit19237 | 893 |
| Jerroll | 869 |
| rainer0000 | 854 |
| heather.pedigo | 854 |
| buffy18976 | 721 |
| bro007 | 631 |
| boomerflex | 614 |
| GrappleJack | 340 |
| steve5924 | 292 |
| ginny2442 | 286 |
| shad349 | 252 |
| hiram2000 | 249 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 178 |
| drop112 | 160 |
Tom squeezes Madman back into second place.
There's been a major discussion on my board, about the message board software. Once again, we're talking about the idea of changing to a different software package, possibly to YaBB (that's the package I put on Herbiceps and other sites). But I've also been changing the existing software to accomodate many of the things that people say they want.
Look here to see a new style of board, with threads, and multiple posts on the same page, and the ability to handle as many inline links as you want to have. The old style of viewing the boards will still be available when that version of the software starts to be used.
3036 posts this month.
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| A major theological discussion has overwhelmed even sport. | Terry and GrappleJack are the main protagonists in the theological debate. |
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.
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| It's still about FBBs, but Lift and Carry has become very popular. | The Grinch struck again |
Tomb Raider delayed in US because of breasts
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of April 2006, there were about 896,000 pictures (71 gigabytes), 176 gigabytes of video, 10,200 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 248 gigabytes. There's about 180 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.