Special Blog Post:
The Seven Things Lists
Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. Go a whole semester without making an arithmetic mistake in a math class.
2. Go a whole day without making an ass of myself (see above for an application).
3. Write a book that sells more than a hundred copies.
4. Be conversant in two dozen distinct languages.
5. Publish a post that has no grammatical errors.
6. See competence return to the Presidency.
7. Host a radio show.
Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Stay in close quarters where a radio, stereo, or television is running.
2. Leave teaching as a profession.
3. Watch the same movie twice.
4. Sit in full lotus position.
5. Straighten my nose.
6. Sleep for more than about 4 hours at a stretch.
7. Accomplish all that I need to accomplish in a timely manner.
Seven Things That Attract Me to Blogging
1. It develops my writing skills.
2. I meet very interesting, informed people.
3. I can inform others and myself about a variety of subjects.
4. Blogging seems to annoy extremists (who almost never have the temerity to counter me here).
5. I can weird people out with references to myself in the third person.
6. Blogging gives me a focal point for developing my Website architecture skills.
7. It gives me something to do while I watch over my online classes.
Seven Things I Say Most Often
1. "Uh..."
2. "It's Bill Gates's universe; I'm just a hacker in it."
3. "Anyway..."
4. "Well, that was different."
5. "Good morning." (or "afternoon" or "evening," as the case may be)
6. "Gawd-aw-mighty!"
7. "Am I having a small stroke, or did somebody just turn the reality dial?"
Seven Books That I Love
1. Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales, by Ray Bradbury
2. Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Edited by David Wallace
3. Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Part, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, by Geoffrey Chaucer (Edited by Walter W. Skeat)
4. The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spencer
5. History of English, by Jonathan and Jona Culpeper
6. Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics, by Kevin Chiang
7. World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, Edited by Katharine Washburn et al.
Seven Movies That I Watch Over and Over Again
I cannot watch a movie more than once anymore. Before I got to this point, I watched some movies two or three times. These are the ones I recall seeing more than once:
1. Bladerunner
2. The Hunger
3. Highlander
4. The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet)
5.-7. The Evil Dead Trilogy
Seven People I Want To Join In Too
1. misty at expostulation
2. PoliShifter at Pissed on Politics
3. Liz at BlondeSense
4. The Fat Lady Sings at The Fat Lady Sings
5. Ms. Julien at Julien's List
6. Canuk at Canadian Perspective
7. Lizzy at Night Bird's Fountain
The Dark Wraith has thus responded to and passed on this challenge.
Published 1/09/2006 07:16:00 PM
<< 49 Comments Total
That was extremely weird. I published this post this afternoon, and six comments had been generated on it. At some time around 7:00 p.m. EST, the post and its comments simply vanished.
I mean, it just totally vanished without so much as a link trace. There is not a shred of it anywhere in the server.
Uh...
The Dark Wraith is totally and completely mystified.
You must not have heard - the NSA released their Echelon Blogging Toolkit 1.0 yesterday. I believe someone must be playing with the Rapture It feature. It allows key word searching of the entire web with erasure of words, phrases, individual posts, threads, articles, or entire blogs if so inclined. Great for sheeple mind control.
At that time I couldn't access your website, either ("Cannot find server").
- oddjob
You were probably hacked by the gubmint, mr wraithy-poo.
It must have really knocked you for a loop. You used the first person a few times!
The blonde one is chuckling.
Not so fast, there, woman.
I deliberately used the first person to throw off the spies who are using that new Echelon Blogging Toolkit 1.0, which everybody knows is really just the second beta release of the Paleo-Echelon Pre-Blogging Toolkit 0.7, released two years ago in an effort to track down and thwart particularly annoying discussions involving dark chocolate and whipped cream.
The early field tests indicated that the communications traffic was substantially heavier than had been imagined, so there had to be a major upgrade to handle what turned out to be an inordinately large threat matrix that was compromising the integrity of the SQL database on the Carnivore I server complex, which was never meant to handle anything more than the routine blues-saxophone-and-Satanic-glazed-doughtnut fetishists originally thought to be part of the saxist-of-evil.
Clearly, then, the Dark Wraith successfully overcame the plot against this blog.
Good evening, Dark Wraith.
AH - my comment was swallowed! I'll try again...
Do you have an update for us on the status of your radio station. I was particularly looking forward to that one.
I just had another short spell of "Cannot find server".
- oddjob
Good evening, OddJob.
I just submitted a ticket to the tech jockeys where my server is located to find out what's going on.
This could be a minor technical problem, or it could be a real attack. I know how it could be working either way, and I need them to tell me what they're seeing on the big server complex at their end. This isn't a Blogger issue, of course: for this blog, Blogger is nothing but a publishing platform to shuttle posts and comments to my server.
This is something hotter, but as I noted, I can't see anything unusual from my end, so I need the eyes of the jocks at the server site to tell me what's coming in there. If it's a packet storm, I need to know, and I need them to put a filter up to stop the stuff. If it's just something goofing up the works in the big computers, then they need to clear it out before I get Medieval.
As I told them just a few minutes ago, this blog is getting a pretty strong readership base, much of it regular or semi-regular. The last thing I need right now is for something like this to knock me back for a loop.
And the last thing I need is for one of those good advertisers over there in the sidebar to notice that this site isn't reliably coming up, either.
The Dark Wraith had a feeling things were too quiet around here to stay that way.
Good evening, Mr. Shakes.
I actually got your question answered before things went haywire here, but it bears repeating, and I appreciate you giving me the chance to get the information up again.
Tomorrow is the day I finally get a poor-man's version of broadband, which means I'll have the speed I've been needing to move audio files up to the server. It'll take me a few days of sound tests to ensure that I have the right audio quality, but I've gotten everything else put into place, including the music feed and the software architecture. That means this weekend should be when you see in the sidebar the logo for The Dark Wraith Forums Internet Radio Network.
And then we'll see how it goes.
The Dark Wraith needs to get his authoritative voice in order, too.
I got your comment, Dark Wraith - but Typepad has been not posting every comment since yesterday. Just some of them. They will show up in my stats, but not on my site; nor will I get an email telling me there was a comment. Since my stats don't identify the commenter unless it actually gets posted, I am left with a comment note on my stats, a number assigned it, but no identifying info as to whom left the damn thing. It makes me look rude, and I am royally pissed off. Typepad is no longer accepting my help tickets - I send them in, but they are either being ignored, or something is once again broken with Typepad and they are not receiving them. Either way, I am not a happy camper.
Changing my blog carrier is on my to do list - but I will have to start over with a number of improvements I was working on, as well as the podcast I was playing with. I have a lot on my plate to do every day - so time devoted to improving the aesthetics of my site, while something I want to do, is nevertheless low on the priority list. So, I'm sorry if your comment was eaten. Personally, I wish Typepad and its minions would all go the hell in that ubiquitous handbasket everyone is always referring to!
Add to that a series of scary and probably illegal pornographic trackbacks attached to a diverse selection of my posts, and I’m about ready to pack it in – It’s just awful to come across something like that. I block the IP, and hope for the best – but I’ve received three now – all attached to innocuous, older posts - it’s a pestilence, but I can’t seem to get rid of them. Typepad doesn’t offer comment authentication – not easily, anyway. If I opt to use theirs, it will force all commenter’s to set up accounts with Typepad – including their real names – and I won’t put people through that shit. You know – all in all it’s been a rather frustrating day. I wake up to having my back deck lights shot out, and end it with Typepad bullshit. Man – there are times I wish I still smoked!
Good evening Dark Wraith,
Meme challenge accepted and done!
I have been having server issues as well, though none related to blogger or the sort though. With The Big Move coming up in two weeks, we moved our sites from being hosted on our desk (and tied to our current ISP) to an outside location. Nothing but problems thus far and, of course, mostly with my site. I was very close to purchasing a large club-like object to resolve the issue.
I am sorry I cannot help poke at issues with Typepad or Blogger. We use seemingly little-known Typo (which uses Ruby on Rails).
Oh for fuck's sake. I post that and now my site is totally fuggered.
I *lost* my banner graphic! How the hell does *that* happen?
WTF? Le sigh. Now I must go get my in-house Geek to fix it. Damnit.
Good evening, Misty.
God bless you: I thought I was going to fall out of my chair with that last comment of yours.
The Dark Wraith is absolutely certain that misery loves company.
Okay, good people. My very helpful tech friend at the server complex sent me a very diplomatically understated advisory that, indeed, there had been "problems" there today. He noted that the Apache server had been "reconfigured" so the problems would no longer be there.
If I were a betting man, I'd be betting that they just put up a filter to stop a packet storm that had been coming through in waves. That means there was an attack. Against whom the attack was directed is anybody's guess, but I'm betting there was an attack.
That'd be my guess, anyway.
Since the reconfiguration has resolved the problem, the Dark Wraith will let it go at that.
And while I'm at it, I should give a little recent background on new visitors here to The Dark Wraith Forums.
On the one hand, a regular reader here (he calls himself "Tim," and he does not post comments here) referenced this blog in a comment over at The Blogging of the President. I saw incoming from this thread there, so I went over to see what was going on. I ended up posting three long-winded comments that ultimately brought quite a bit of traffic. The fellow I was addressing probably didn't deserve quite the lecturing I gave, given that his heart is in the right place, but the thread was taking a turn toward a sore spot of mine in the issue of losing the middle ground of moderation and discipline in economic policy. I came off a little sterner than I probably should have, given that the readers over there are for the most part unfamiliar with both my style and my economic philosophy. Nevertheless, it did seem to hit a pretty strong chord: not only did the hits come to this blog, but I also received some strongly supportive e-mail.
On the other side of the aisle, a post here got a reference on a military/pretty-much-Right-wing blog. The reference was actually favorable, with the statement that there was "common sense" in what I had written. That brought some traffic.
Then came the fun. Our friend "Phoenician in a Time of Romans" was commenting over at what appears to be a blog heavily invested with seriously Right-wing hardballs. Give the Phoenician credit: the guy was taking ad hominem insults like an Iraqi takes depleted-uranium radiation, but he stood his ground, hammering back every time. The main thrust of his fight was over the military adventurism of the Bush Administration, but he was also trying to expand the fight into the area of economic policies. In a comment, he referenced and linked to the article here entitled, "Yield Curves 2005," demanding to know what people there had to say about that issue.
I was relieved when no one had anything to say. So what does Phoenician do?— later on, after lots of new comments attacking him on other matters, he links to the same article and again demands to know what they think!
I thought to myself, "Dude! They didn't want to bother it the first time, and that means I didn't get smoked over there. So now we're going to see if we can give 'em a second chance to lay into me."
I'm kidding here, of course, about being worried about it, especially since no one touched him on the issue the second time, either. But the upshot is that I got hundreds of hits from those two links to that article. I mean to tell you, that place is just a bustling diner of people wanting to hit links others put up.
But do you notice that there wasn't one—not ONE—comment posted over here from any of those people over there? Not one. And we're talking about people who, if those comments over at that blog are any indication, eat human flesh for snacks!
Okay, then. That's the background on some of the new traffic that has come here. I should note that about 40% of those visitors who came here for the first time from one of the points noted above have returned.
Although many of them will never comment (as is the case with the vast majority of readers here), they'll become more-or-less regulars. It is possible that from those ranks (which I am genuinely glad to have here) someone might have been a little more technically inclined and disinterested in having anyone read this blog. It's possible; but I should point out that it's somewhat unlikely. My experience is that most folks, even if they pose as total whackos on the Left or the Right, aren't up to doing some kind of attack that creates denials of service: that stuff isn't child's play; but that stuff is a federal crime.
That's enough story for the time being.
The Dark Wraith thought you might be interested.
And by the way, Fat Lady Sings, I meant to tell you something, but you might already know all about it.
There is a way to block incoming traffic to your Website. In fact, not only can you block specific IPs or clusters of "dotted quads," but you can also redirect them to customized HTTP 404 error pages or even to other Web pages you've created just for them.
Some Web hosts offer a fairly easy interface for doing all of this, but most do not. If not, it's a more technical and challenging piece of architecture, but it's very do-able. If you've ever looked at your domain's directories on your Web hosting server, you might have noticed a directory with the name ".htaccess" there. That's where the action would occur should you ever decide to start playing the heavy game with undesired visitors. I've used it extensively in the past on Websites I've administered, but I don't use it much at all here.
It's something for you to look into when you have the time.
The Dark Wraith has offered some perhaps not-so-helpful advice.
Dark Wraith answered:
"I deliberately used the first person to throw off the spies who are using that new Echelon Blogging Toolkit 1.0, which everybody knows is really just the second beta release of the Paleo-Echelon Pre-Blogging Toolkit 0.7, released two years ago in an effort to track down and thwart particularly annoying discussions involving dark chocolate and whipped cream.
The early field tests indicated that the communications traffic was substantially heavier than had been imagined, so there had to be a major upgrade to handle what turned out to be an inordinately large threat matrix that was compromising the integrity of the SQL database on the Carnivore I server complex, which was never meant to handle anything more than the routine blues-saxophone-and-Satanic-glazed-doughtnut fetishists originally thought to be part of the saxist-of-evil."
Blonde answers: But of course. I knew that... and there is also a conspiracy about the use of the numeral 7 too many times in one blog post.
This post has been removed by the author.
Interesting sevens.
Good evening, Dark Wraith.
Sorry, about that, I was having some typing difficulties. Your seven meme answers are quite interesting. How many languages do you already speak?
You've mentioned an increase of readership, perhaps we will all buy your "Dark Wraith" book - when you publish it, then you will have achieved your Number 3. on the first topic, as well.
That is odd, about the packet storms at the hostserver. I don't know a lot about these things, but by reading your comments and explanations, I think enlightenment comes through, to me, in small doses:)
Good evening, Old White Lady.
I doubt if I'll hit a hundred on the book, although I might do better than the publications I've done for my classes: I thought waiving royalties would bring down the cost substantially, but it didn't. I nearly passed out when I saw what the bookstore was charging for the stupid thing. Fortunately, real estate isn't a big field academically where I teach, so not all that many students had to suffer the cost (and the rather grueling math) of that particular finance course.
I should mention on another subject that the term "packet storm" was what we used to call a certain type of Internet attack, but I suppose there are more sophisticated names for all the variations on the old theme these days. A "bot" storm has about the same effect as a hurricane of fragments coming in, as do other entry vehicles designed to overrun a narrow channel. Sometimes, the effect is wholly unintended, as when this domain finally got some decent, legitimate traffic and I hadn't provided for nearly enough bandwidth. I got all kinds of excited when I saw that my bandwidth had actually been exceeded. It occurred to me that I had never had that happen before on a Website I was hosting.
I noticed earlier tonight a brief glitch that was undoubtedly just a belch in the server: for a few minutes, trying to access this blog by using http://dark-wraith.com opened the main public_html directory like an old-fashioned ftp instead of opening the index page. That was weird.
I think I've had enough of weird for a while on the Internet.
Oh, and as far as languages I speak, that's problematic. I count five, but I count Old English ("Anglo-Saxon") as a separate language from Modern English; however, I've honestly never been quite sure about Middle English. I've been thinking about putting up a couple of little challenges here to entertain readers. I don't know if folks would be interested or not, but I've considered putting up a passage in Old English and another passage in Middle English to see if people would like to take a stab at translating them. In particular, the Old English passage has some translations already available online, but most of those miss some interesting little nuances. The Middle English passage is one I use in teacher training seminars for a math department: the instructors who are about to teach a course that uses "discovery" methodology get to sit in groups and try to translate what I've provided. This takes them out of the "math" context completely and puts them in the "learner" context, having to work together to accomplish something with which none of them are even remotely familiar. It's a good exercise because it gives them an idea of what it's like to be a student who is way behind in math skills. In fact, after the exercise is completed, I point out that some of them even say, "Why are we doing this?" and "What does this have to do with anything?"—just like our remedial math students are constantly saying!
Then again, maybe I should knock it off with all the off-topic stuff here on the ol' blog. I know how much people want to stay on point 24/7 with economics.
The Dark Wraith understands that deep-seated need within everyone.
Hey there - just wanted to let you know I posted the '7's' list. Here's the link. You know - I'm still having trouble with Typepad keeping track of comments. I guess I have to really get serious about moving elsewhere. {Sigh} Another thing on my ever lengthening to do list!
Okay, The Fat Lady Sings, you have me befuddled. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't see the post on your blog, and then I noticed from the link you've provided here that the date on which you did it is January 3, 2006, which means it has already sunsetted because of posts since then.
But you couldn't have done it on January 3 because I didn't do it until January 9. But you got a number of comments, which means people saw it on your main board before it sunsetted!
Uh...
Is the Dark Wraith having a small stroke, or did someone just turn the reality dial?
Is the Dark Wraith having a small stroke, or did someone just turn the reality dial?
It's the Ergot feature of the NSA toolkit. Great for drving people crazy, and the flashbacks are intense.
I haven't been able to access the site for several hours; each time I tried I got some kind of Apache file table instead.
- oddjob
Good afternoon, Mr. Goat.
The ergotic angle might explain a lot of things. Something deeply, deeply weird is going on at my server. Some time early this afternoon, this entire blog was deleted. And I mean, the whole thing was deleted: it didn't go to Heaven to be with the Lord, it didn't take a vacation to Rio, and it didn't go into the basement to have some me-time.
The thing was turned back into elemental electrons and other lepton-oriented particles that were transported to a universe to be named later.
Gone.
Vanished.
Wind in the willows.
Fortunately, I make back-ups on a regular basis like the obsessive-compulsive I am.
The Dark Wraith is just sitting in his chair staring.
Good afternoon, OddJob.
W-a-a-a-y weird things are happening here in Weird World.
As you can see, we're back up and running, but I plan to find out once and for all what's going on. I am almost positive that this isn't a Blogger issue; but whatever it is, it's beginning to really pinch my athletic cup.
The only thing that's keeping me from going into a total paranoia hissy-fit is the obvious fact that there are a whole lot of far more incendiary blogs out there than this one. Anyone technically skilled enough to be doing serious damage would be going after all of them before this backwater blog would ever get on a hit parade. And more imporantly, those blogs are far and away more vulnerable to attack than this one is.
Nevertheless, something really evil is going on.
The Dark Wraith needs to find a blood sacrifice right about now.
Good afternoon, Dark Wraith.
What a bizarre thing to happen. I would be sooooo pissed! Is it also occurring at the Message Forum? Boy, it sure makes an impression that we all should back up our blogs, often!
I hope you don't have to go thru anymore of that type of irritation.
Good morning, Old White Lady. Yes, make back-ups. Make a back-up each and every time you alter your template in any way. And keep copies of any files (pictures, notes, etc.) on your own machine.
I actually write my posts in plain old Notepad and save them as text files before I copy and paste them into the publishing screen. (Never use Word for this purpose. If you're wonder why, I'll explain.)
Back-ups may not be a life saver, but they'll do wonders for your sanity.
The Dark Wraith once again slips away from the straight jacket.
Good afternoon, Dark Wraith.
Let me take a guess - word has formatting and notepad doesn't? or is there more to it than that? Notepad probably takes up less space, too. I decided it would be a good idea and backed up my blog, today. It looks like (free) blogger only backs up to 999 posts.
I do save my templates after every change...I learned the hard way.
Anyone technically skilled enough to be doing serious damage would be going after all of them before this backwater blog would ever get on a hit parade. And more imporantly, those blogs are far and away more vulnerable to attack than this one is.
I don't necessarialy agree. If an entity is testing some sort of attack, the removal of a high profile site might make more people sit up and wonder what is going on, relatively speaking. The fact that this blog may be less vulnerable may relfect on the sophistication of an attack. In other words if the wolf practices taking out your brick house, he'll have a cake walk with all the straw houses when he's built his lungs up.
Good evening, Old White Lady.
Yes, the formatting is a real issue, but it gets even more detailed than that: Word replaces characters like the old, straight quotation marks with the "curled" ones. They look very nice in word-processed documents, but they have no HTML equivalent, so it's up in the air as to whether a given browser will be able to render them. Worse is that the RSS and related feeds can't do interpret those characters at all, so they come out looking like bursts of weirdness in readers of those types of services. You might have seen that from time to time. I've seen quite frequently that, in the feeds truthout.org picks up for articles it reprints, those strings of odd characters will show up where the feeds didn't know what to do with certain characters that had been used in the original documents.
These create all kinds of fun in blogScream. I have a special little macro I run to catch the most common of these Word characters and turn them back into something that can be rendered as a special character code so all browsers can see it.
Another character widely used is the ellipsis: in Word, if you put in three periods in a row, as soon as you then hit the space bar (or about any other key, for that matter), Word replaces those three periods with a single, ellipsis character from its own character set. Again, that Word character has no HTML equivalent. I didn't even know Word was doing the three-period replacement (and I teach Word, for Heaven's sake), until I was using Firefox to look at a blog that had blogScream running. I saw this odd character in a headline, and I realized that's where three periods had been (or were supposed to have been) in the headline, but Word had changed them to that Word character, and when it went into the news feed as that character, Firefox didn't know what it was, so it put in a character that was sort of like an "I don't know what this is, but here's something to replace it."
By the way, there actually are special character codes for angled left and angled right single and double quotes. It's always a pain to have to key in a special character code; but if a blogger wants a nice, more refined look to the quotation marks, those are available.
Anyway, stay away from Word as a drafting tool for posts. Notepad is ancient, but it has no sophisticated enhancers that can cause it to confuse the ancient HTML.
The Dark Wraith does like the old fashioned ways.
Good evening, Mr. Goat.
I suppose I never thought of it that way.
Now, the Dark Wraith has even more reason to be justifiably paranoid.
The Dark Wraith does like the old fashioned ways.
Does the Dark Wraith pine for the days of programming in COBOL? (I never did, but I had a few Comp. Sci. friends while I was in college....)
- oddjob
(never did programming, that is)
The Dark Wraith is just sitting in his chair staring.
I was staring at your post but not able to get comments for a bit...OK, I promise to do my 7, since you so kindly challenged.
Well, OddJob, I did learn COBOL, but my favorite was and still is FORTRAN. Programming at the assembler level was great exercise in disciplined thinking, but I got so used to FORTRAN that I thought I could do anything in it.
For regular science students, the universities started abandoning the hard-core stuff years ago in favor of fluff like Pascal and BASIC. Some moved to C, and others took more of the approach that students would get applications types of classes instead of more fundamental training unless they were going into computer science as a major.
Pity. There's nothing like a semester spent in a sleep-deprived state while repeatedly mumbling, "Why is my program still not working?"
I don't know, though. These days, I have great difficulty getting students through some of the Microsoft Office Suite. Many have some difficulty getting their minds around the concept of a database, which means they can't see how powerful such a beast is for managing data; and most students struggle with VBS. But the worst of the woes come in Excel: by its nature, it's a mathematics-oriented application, and right there, I'm going to be banging my head on the wall with about two-thirds of the students in trying to get through using formulas. It's true frustration for long stretches, but it's worth it when most of them get to the point where they can start doing impressive work for projects where I have them create their own spreadsheets for their own personal or other work. A couple of semesters back, a fellow built a spreadsheet for his job that actually ended up being used there (after we'd shaken out a few inefficiencies and added some more stuff together).
Oh, and once folks get a handle on spreadsheets, they can start making some fairly expressive and pleasing graphics. The ones you see in my articles here are almost always from Excel, which can do some really eye-catching stuff (although I need to get a stronger video resource to move the bitmaps from Excel over to a graphics program with higher optical-quality resolution).
Where was I? Oh yes: COBOL. It's a decent computer language, and it's one that just doesn't seem to want to die. There's still so much old stuff in COBOL that I suppose a good programmer could still probably make a living with just that language.
But I still miss the old days. I don't think I'll ever get used to having tolerance for silicon-based life forms.
The Dark Wraith is a bit of a carbon-centric heathen that way.
I swear, Lizzy, this whole internets thing is enough to drive a man to the bottle. (A bottle of nitrous oxide, that is, so I can laugh through the pain of it all.)
The Dark Wraith just knew there'd be problems if they put the Internet on computers.
Since I got my bachelor's degree in 1981, I remember those days when my friends (the few that were Comp. Sci. majors) had to keep the strangest sleep schedules in order for them to get computer time at the too small computer lab. They always seemed to grown especially loudly when the latest project had to be done in COBOL. They always seemed to find it slow & cumbersome (maybe even primitive, or simplistic) in comparison to languages like FORTRAN.
- oddjob
(Ach! That was supposed to be "GROAN". I haven't slept much the last couple of days and am very tired right now....)
Hey, Dark Wraith - sorry it took me a while to reply - this week just keeps getting longer, no matter what I do to shorten it! First - about the MEME - I had actually completed and posted it prior to getting your challenge. That’s why I sent you that particular link. I also wanted to say thanks for the info on blocking the nasty intruders. It’s another thing on that ever lengthening ‘to do’ list. Lord, do I need a vacation! Preferably somewhere warm, with lots of empty beaches and shark-free water.
The sharks are there for a God-given purpose, Fat Lady Sings: every time you see a neo-con walking across the beach, you tell him there's a hare-brained idea in the water.
Neo-cons will go for a hare-brained idea every last time.
In the case where sharks are waiting for them, it really will be their last time.
The Dark Wraith believes in feeding the marine creatures properly.
DW,
Your site was not the only one this was happening to. I think the night I posted the "knee slapper" comment was when I experienced problems.
Have your site bookmarked and when I clicked it kept coming up with a could not be found retort. After the third time of trying I then tried to open Bilmon with the same reaction. Since a the language of cursing is one that I am fluent in, there occured much of it..but all of a sudden there you were.
It did strike some deep paranoia. But at this point refuse to let it creep into this life!
Good evening, elf.
Here's an old and stupid trick that sometimes gets around a denial error: if you came via
http://dark-wraith.com
then try again using
http://www.dark-wraith.com
or do it the opposite way if you originally came in via the www route. Again, this is an old trick, but it works too frequently to dismiss (as one young techie snorted when I first told her about it a couple of weeks ago).
Also, now that I've had a chance to do some traces on my logs, I'm realizing that there wasn't just one thing happening. It looks like, not only was something really bad going on at my server, but there was a problem at Blogger (which shouldn't have affected this site), and there was some kind of a weird thing happening in a bunch of visitors' browsers. That last one happens all the time on one or two people coming in, but from the looks of it, clusters of visitors just started bouncing off because of full caches and things like that. That's just mystifying, and I'm getting only a few Webmasters saying so far that they've caught the same thing going on, although one really heavy-duty Web jock described to me the very same thing happening on a site he administers. So, although it's not just here (as you note), it's not all over the place, either.
But that thing with my index file getting deleted is just driving me up a wall because I can't see how it happened. The thing was there, and then it just disappeared, and I can find no command that was issued to cause it. I still have a lot of places to look for the culprit, but right now it's still a mystery.
When teleportation finally gets technologically feasible, I think I'll pass on the opportunity.
The Dark Wraith has no interest in aeeing what results when a weird glitch occurs during a routine teleport across town.
I suppose I should mention this more formally, and I probably will, but those of you who were waiting for a new bumpersticker in my series can check the Advertisements section in the sidebar to see the one that's now available.
This one is already scheduled to sunset on the second day of February so the fourth one in the series can be available.
As I noted, I'll probably do some kind of tasteless and shameless promotion for this latest bumpersticker a bit later, but it's available as of now.
The Dark Wraith should have had this one up months ago.
And I might note that sales of the Elvis Presley wines from Graceland Vineyards aren't nearly as strong as I had hoped.
Go figure that.
The Dark Wraith is concerned that the next wine—a red little number from The Dark Wraith Forums Vineyards—might not go over so well, either, seeing as how the folks here apparently don't drink wine all that much.
OK - your turn, sweetie! I've a short, kinda fun Meme over at my blog. I've tagged you as one of those challenged. So take a look, and do at your leisure.
Oh, that is an interesting little challenge, Fat Lady Sings.
The Dark Wraith must now decide which five to list.
Good that the bumper sticker is now available. I've checked a couple times, but it hadn't been up. I'm happy:)