GENERAL AMNESTY Aug. 2009

I cleared out the "BADUSERS" firewall IP set today. There were over 1000 IP addresses in both tables (2:1 in favor of EXP4), so it seemed like a good place to start over again.

So, watch for the Bad Guys. They're not hard to spot, especially when they start sliding all over the place.

This is the last day of my two week Busman's Holiday. I never got around to doing half the things I wanted to do, but that's what holidays are for.

I did mess around with the files from that time lapse movie I made a few months ago. The hardest part was actually finding the original files (they were stuck on a seldom used Linux VM). The plan was to make a better quality video, and I finally did, but in the end the file was multiple gigabytes in size. Just too large to do anything at all with.

While Pinky and I were out of town at Rinky & Twinky's wedding I had another small video project going on. We hired a Cat Lady to come by the house twice a day to feed the cats and 'keets.

She seemed like a Nice Old Gal but the bitch ripped us off. She came once a day and I have the whole thing on video (three cameras total were running). If that's the worst of what she did, fine (we haven't counted the silverware yet). After discussing it, Pinky & I decided to let it slide and simply not hire her again next time we go globe-trotting.

So it's back to work on Monday.

Fuck.

Twitterfication Update/Busman's Holiday

Since BOT House and EXPIV were put on Twitter the two servers have generated almost 40,000 tweets.

I haven't managed to control things enough to avoid the 150 tweets per hour maximum, so the servers get cut off quite a bit. Usually in about an hour they're back, chattering away.

If you have a Twitter account, it's not a good idead to "follow" the servers because they'll stomp over everyone else you're following.

At one point, BOT House had over 700 followers (mostly bots, I suppose) but overnight that number dropped to about 200 and has been there ever since. EXPIV is lagging behind with about 140 followers.

This whole exercize has me looking over the Chat-O-Matic code to see how I can liven things up, because, quite frankly, the chatterbots tend to say the same things over and over and over again. Plus there's that need to throttle things back so I don't get banned every hour.

I will be playing a bit more in the next two weeks since I'm on vacation. There will be a break in the action because my wife (Pinky Dink) and myself will be attending the kid's (Rinky Dink's) wedding to his True Love (the future Mrs. Twinky Dink).

Aside from the wedding festivities, this will be Yet Another Busman's Holiday. Sometime after the wedding I'm going to consolidate www.mrhinkydink.com and proxyobsession.net, mostly just to put everything into one account and partly to move the proxy material over to ProxyObsession and perhaps - just perhaps - to make some parking meter change off the content. Traffic to the Proxy List has tripled since last year and although it seems to have peaked for the time being I think it will continue to grow.

Some disruption to UT may be involved, but it shouldn't last for more than a few minutes.

MURDER/SUICIDE > UT99

Yesterday I was poking around in my old posts at the Murder/Suicide Blog when I stumbled across something I wasn't aware of.

It's actually getting traffic.

And what really punched me in the gut was that people are actually posting comments to the cut&paste news stories I drop in there day after day. REAL people. Not linkbaiters. Not blackhat SEO SPAM bots.

Real. Fucking. People.

Not only are they real people, but they're people who in many cases knew or worked with the victims and went the the funerals. People pouring their hearts out looking for meaning, reasons, and prayers.

It stopped me in my tracks, put me in a real weird mood, and made me realize I will never look at that blog in the same light as before.