I drove up to Ottawa last night. I definitely was feeling the effects of the sickness – I’d laid off the cough syrup and benedril so I wouldn’t be drowsy, but I noticed a definite slowing of my reaction times and some difficulty with division of attention. For instance, I had to retune my radio because I haven’t made the Ottawa trip since they had to yank the engine a few months ago, so none of the eastern stations were set – but I couldn’t do it in traffic because even feeling for the radio buttons and occassionally glancing at the display would put me over the lane lines. Damn good thing I decided not to fly, since you need be able to do several things at once and prioritize them way more actively than you do driving.
Continue reading “I’m here, but should I have bothered?”
iTunes Meme
Seen on somebody else’s (friends only, so I can’t link it) LiveJournal.
How many total songs?
18474 songs, 48:15:38:51
Sort by song title – first and last?
“? (Modern Industry)” by Fishbone
“遠き時代を求めて” by 久石譲
(No, I have no idea what that means, I’m just a cut and paste machine)
Sort by time – first and last?
“Jim Bachus” by 3rd Bass 0:04
“Terrors of Pleasure” by Spaulding Grey 1:11:32
Sort by Album – first and last?
“�Jonathan, Te Vas A Emocionar!” by Jonathan Richman.
“紅の豚 飛ばねぇ豚は、ただのブタだ!” by 久石譲
Top five played songs?
This is probably meaningless because 90% of the time I just use iTunes to load my iPod.
Find ‘sex’, how many songs show up?
89
Find ‘death’, how many songs show up?
92
Find ‘love’, how many songs show up?
990.
Decision time
Ok, it’s nearly time to decide if I’m healthy enough to travel to Ottawa this weekend. I’m feeling better than I did yesterday, the sudafed keeps my nose from stuffing up and the cough seems to respond ok to DM-based cough syrup. But I’ve got pressure behind my eyes which isn’t responding to anything.
I really don’t want to cancel this trip – I told Alyssa that I’d take her snow boarding, and I was looking forward to learning how myself. Originally I told her I’d switch weekends with Liane, but when Liane’s weekend came up I had to help me move into a new apartment. And then when Alyssa’s weekend came up, I had to fly to Chicago for the memorial service. Next weekend is Liane’s weekend again, so this weekend had better be it.
I’m not going to be able to snow-board, but at least I can keep my promise to get Alyssa kitted out in rental equipment and in lessons. I really want to do this, but I’m not sure I can.
I don’t know what they’re up to, but I don’t like it.
Watching my logs scroll by (doesn’t everybody?) I see an awful lot of hits on obscure parts of my web site from the IP 68.7.32.213. Grep back, and see that they’re evidently crawling my blog, and every link from my blog. And even weirder, every URL they grab they use the same URL in the referrer string – an obvious attempt to defeat one of those redirections that shows you a different page if you deep link something instead of going to it from the place you saw it referenced. – although wouldn’t it be simpler to use the page you found the link on instead? Further grepping shows that they did NOT get my robots.txt file. They’re also downloading the pages as fast as they can with no pause before getting the next one – it’s possible that they’re doing several simultaneous ones. Ok, three strikes, you’re out.
Into the /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf file, and a few well-placed
Deny 68.7.32.213
restart the server, and now Mister Badly Behaved (and probably Badly Intentioned) Crawler is getting a lot of 403s instead of pages.
Cool toy OTD
The new Google Maps service is very nicely interactive. You can drag maps around with the mouse instead of clicking and waiting for a refresh. Plus the directions search works extremely well, as does the “nearby business” search. Unfortunately it only supports Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers and IE, but then again why would anybody want a browser other than Firefox?
One interesting quirk – if you ask for directions to ROC (it takes airport identifiers as well as addresses), it gives you directions to the general aviation area at the south end of the field off Scottsville Rd, instead of to the passenger terminal at the north end off Brooks Ave. I’m not sure why that would happen, since a web search for the airport’s name finds my flying club’s web page ranked well below the airport’s own web page, and the airport’s official address is on Brooks Ave, not on Scottsville Rd.
In other news, GMail must be about to come out of beta, because I suddenly have 50 invites to give out, instead of the usual 4-5. If you want a gmail invite, email ptomblin at gmail.com.