Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - October 2006

A hard man is good to beat

September, 2006

Wind is starting to blow leaves off trees, and the conkers are ripe. Each day I go out, I help myself to the blackberries along the way.

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

Shopping Mall

Nothing new.

Down on the server farm

I bought a PDA, a little handheld computer, five inches by three. I got it to use for walking, because I can have a 1:50,000 Ordinance Survey map loaded on it, plus it has a GPS, so it tells me exactly where I am.

But, as a matter of principle, I got the model that also does Bluetooth and Wifi. The principle is that something is a lot more useful if I can connect it to my network.

It comes with a thing called "Pocket internet explorer", and I tried it out. It's great! It works very well, and especially for my site, because I've never required that people have a 1024 by 768 monitor, or any other size. The PDA is 320 by 240, and I found that I could navigate the site, and look at pictures (Pocket Explorer resized the pictures for the small screen).

Some time soon, there's going to be more people accessing the internet via things they think of as mobile phones, than via things that they think of as computers. Actually, a mobile phone is, more and more, a computer with telephony added. And all these people will be able to use my web site!

I also set it up so I can do email on it, but the small size of the screen makes that not very practical.

But what was really nice - I accessed Project Guthenburg, and downloaded all the A A Milne books (they're out of copyright now). He didn't just write the Winnie-ther-Pooh books, he wrote some very funny stories. And I transferred them to the PDA, and I can read them anywhere now.

I also put a bunch of music on the PDA; I bought a 2gb SD card for this. It's only $25 or so, and the PDA works great as a music player. It means I can walk through the countryside to the music of John Philip Sousa, or the Mikado.

I had to find a way to format the 2 gb card, but if you search around, you can find disk management tools for the Pocket PC. I chose the largest cluster size, 64kb, because I'll be having large files almost entirely.

Spams of the Month

I'm not counting carefully, but I reckon I'm getting over 500 spams per day now. About 99% of that falls straight into my spam trap - the other 1% is a bit of a nuisance, but not too bad. Email without a despammer will soon be unusable - it might already be for some people.

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.

I now get about 1000 spams per day. My despammer works quite well, only a couple of dozen get through, and it's very rare that a real email gets into my spam folder. But I've divided the spam folder into two, one spammier than the other. The spammier folder, is for spam that meets all the criteria for spam, and also isn't addressed to me. That helps a lot, because ti do look through both spam folders, but I pay less attention to the spammier one.

Your credit doesn't matter to us!

Well, there's a coincidence. Your loan offer doesn't matter to me.

We inform you that we are the leading manufacturers & exporters
of Veterinary Instruments in full rang with high grade stainless steel (
Ear Notchers, Tatoo Pliers, Sheep Shears, bloodless Castrators,
Elastrator Plier, Emasculator Plier, Hoof Knives, Bull Nose Rings, Hoof
Cutters, Balling Guns, Pig handling equipments, crooke sticks, etc.). If
you need any samples for approval the quality dont hesitate to contact
us.

Hmmm. Could you send me samples of your bloodless Castrators, Emasculator Plier, and Balling Guns? Thanks.

Sponsorships

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.

DtV Family web sites

It's been a busy month this month!

Site name	Description
AOSland	Artwork by AOS
Gina Bonfiglio	Pictures of Gina Bonfiglio
Vicki Ingram	Pictures of Vicki Ingram

Here's the full list of DtV family web sites

The Clubhouse

In the Chatroom

Chatter of the month

Boomer is the man this month.

On the Message Boards

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.

2259 posts this month.

Back Page

Bank robber exposed by exploding trousers

Here's a useful device for every active woman.

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

At the end of September 2006, there were about 928,000 pictures (74 gigabytes), 200 gigabytes of video, 10,600 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 275 gigabytes. There's about 210 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.

To the Magic Carpet