Author: Paul Tomblin

And the horse you rode in on, too!

For the past couple of days, this “Willow Internet Crawler by Twotrees V2.1” has been agressively crawling my site. And I mean agressively – they download every single page as quickly as they can, with no pause between them. This is a bit of a pain, because it means they are sucking down my bandwidth that I’d rather use for live human beings or better behaved applications.

But today was the last straw – I have a robots.txt file because when web crawlers hit my image gallery, they tend to cause errors in the php code that gets logged in /var/log/messages. So today I noticed a “Last message repeated 147 times” message scrolling by, I looked and sure enough “Willow Internet Crawler” isn’t obeying the spider guidelines – they haven’t even looked at my robots.txt.

first thing I did was go to their web site – and discovered that under “Contact Us”, you can only see their email address while your mouse is hovering over the title – once you move the cursor away to actually type in a mail program, it goes away again. And the address isn’t in the same place as what you are hovering over. Making it a (probably purposely) difficult to cut and paste the address into mutt.

So fine, you want to be an asshole? I can be an asshole too. I opened up /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, found the “allow all” line, and added a “deny 68.244.166.8” after it, restarted the web server, and now I’m watching “Willow Internet Crawler” get a lot of 403s. So fuck you, Twotrees.net, and the horse you rode in on too.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit

Since I got back from the cruise, my PowerBook has been occassionally showing the “no battery” icon. The first time it happened, I had to reboot in order to fix it. But when it happened the this time, I tried taking out the battery and putting it back. And it worked. Hooray. But unfortunately while I was opening the Powerbook again, the left hinge broke. Waaah.

Pictures:


Man, I sure hope it holds out until the next qpromo.

Why aviation is expensive

Subtitle: “Why the American Legal System turns grievers into money grubbing scum”

Some idiot pilot flew his plane into a thunderstorm, and inevitable two things happened:

1. The plane is torn into little pieces and tossed on the ground.

2. The family files a wrongful death lawsuit against anybody who had anything to do with making this flight possible. Except of course the guy’s brother, who was the one and only cause of his own demise.

Sorry, grieving family, but when your flight instructor warns you two weeks beforehand that you have “deficient decision making” when it comes to flying near “adverse weather systems”, and the before-flight weather briefing shows massive area thunderstorms (not isolated cells) on your route of flight, IT’S NOT PIPER AIRCRAFT’S FAULT THAT IT DIDN’T PREVENT YOU FROM MAKING THE FLIGHT.

So grieve all you want, but realize that your brother killed himself. Piper didn’t. Pratt and Whitney didn’t. Naples Air Center didn’t. He did. As surely as he’d taken a loaded gun and stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

What is the matter with this credit card?

I have a credit card that’s issued by MBNA through the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). When I first came to this country, I kept getting turned down for supposedly “pre-approved” credit cards because none of them would check my Canadian credit card records and would say “no credit record”. AOPA/MBNA were the first to issue me a US dollar credit card, and at first it had a hideously low credit limit ($300), which meant I’d almost have to use it as a pre-paid card when I wanted to make a major purchase – preloading a large credit balance before hand.
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