Weird site searches, no.2

I monitor traffic to my website, but what is really disturbing is some of the weeeird things that pull my site up:

3. food that looks like things

2. this is the time and the place and the way that you’re moving and grooving

1. daddy like my panties

Weird.

Medical Research

“Well I think it’s nice the medical community is finally doing something to help sick hamsters.”
Clicky. Just think of all the hamsters that can now be saved, after being made blind from having medical research carried out on them.

You know you’re unloved when…

You check your mail in the morning and there’s nothing… not even any spam. That’s bad.

I was reading a news story yesterday about how readership of American newspapers is gradually declining, which led me to Craigslist. I’d heard of it, but wasn’t familiar with it. I checked out the London “list” and was surprised to see how active it was.

Always good for a laugh, I investigated the personals section, and I was not disappointed. Full up of some of the usual top quality junk (the “I’m Brazilian and want rich husband for kids and love” and the “Marry me so I can get a visa”), but more impressive was the good old fashioned British swearing (except for someone’s insult which was “penis head”. Er.).

Things that define good swearing:

1) The overuse of the word fuck (obviously)
2) Repeated and unnecessary use of exclamation marks!!!!
3) SHOUTING
4) A smugness and arrogance, which is completely eroded by using YOUR and not YOU’RE
5) A gradual but noted crescendo, where the post starts off in a controlled and tentatively literate fashion “I read with dismay your insidious post about the degratory incomprehension of the aforementioned quote…”, but by the end they’ve lost their rag and all goes to pot “… so why dont u just go n fuckn shut up you stupid ugly wanker”

And if all else fails, you can’t go far wrong with the C-word.

So if you can be bothered (or at least it you’ve got a few hours to kill): Rants n Raves

And if that doesn’t sort you out…
Have you discovered the joys of erotic spanking, roleplay, fantasy realisation and much more in a safe, sexy, sensual and secure scenario. The thrill of knowing you are going to be spanked, the submission, erotic surrender, arousal and ecstacy cannot be matched. Perhaps you want to dress up in costumes, act out your favourite fantasy, atone for your sins, be mildly humiliated or reduced to tears. I can spank you until you orgasm multiple times using my hand, use the strap, tawse, martinet,cat’o’ nine tails or that traditional English discipline instrument, the cane. All experience ranges and all limits catered together with use of safewords. The perfect experience for the unitiated, the inexperienced, the seasoned spankee or the bdsm babe.

The spankee: 20-50, f, N/S, intelligent, no dramas, willing to learn, wants to surrender or the experienced player seeking to broaden the educational horizons. Naturally you will be discreet, private and confidential expecting the same in return.

The spanker: Tall, fit, versatile, educated, safe, sexy, sensual, highly experienced in spanking, CP, BDSM and a host of other plaisirs du boudoir. Experienced with the nervous, the unitiated, respecter of limits and with a decidely wicked dry sense of humour.
There’s even more weirdness and outright filth elsewhere on the same site. If you like that sort of thing.

You know it’s a bad day when…

… you have to dump yourself. Yep, when they’re unable to tell you, and leave you to figure it out yourself. Always a real treat that.

And England lost at both Cricket and Rugby. Great start to the week.

The jealous mind

People are naturally jealous. Jealousy is a perfectly healthy emotion. It shows you care about something – that you’re prepared to be vulnerable, to have desires and dreams. Jealousy is a sign that there are parts of your life you feel you could improve. Most commonly, jealousy is in relationships. Jealousy shows that you have trust issues. That some emotional scar is inhibiting your ability to fully open yourself for emotional commitment.

Jealousy isn’t a bad thing, but it can be very destructive if not controlled. Sadly, controlling it is an extremely difficult thing to do.

The irony of jealousy is that it’s an internal war of your mind – versus your own mind. You know that jealousy is a dangerous thing, and that it’s probably irrational, and that it has the potential to destroy your relationship. Yet the gremlins (the ‘green-eyed-monster’) has a say too – and often overpowers your natural inhibitions.

I hate jealousy.

Home LAMP made simple (minus the L)

I finally have a reliable LAMP at home, except it’s Win2k. Other than that it’s running like a beaut. Admittedly, nowadays it’s no real headache getting each of the components installed – I did this a couple of weeks ago without issue – but I found the configuration of it all to be the real PITA. Notably, MySQL 5.0. My frustrations are mainly due to the system it’s running on – an old P3 600mhz with at most 128mb of RAM, and whilst ample for what I need it to do, it does mean that VNCing the headless machine is painfully slow. That said, I simply couldn’t get Apache2 and MySQL5 configured and got thoroughly fed up of it all.

Step up Vertrigo, another Sourceforge gem. The download is about 8mb, the install takes all of a minute and out of the box it’s all up and running. The documentation is admittedly non-existent, so advice like “change your root password” falls on deaf ears unless you already know how to do this. But once installed, password changed, all 300mb of website and SQL backups downloaded and copied over, restored and tested – I finally have demo versions of my sites available on a standalone dev server. You’ll be shocked when I say that before when developing and editing PHP websites, I would make a change, FTP upload, refresh the page – working LIVE on the site. Tut.. tut… tut. Not anymore!

Of course, all Vertrigo does is copy the required files over and set some permissions – it’s still in your interest to check your .conf’s and your .ini’s to check everything’s hunkydory and locked down. I was, however, pleasantly surprised when my MySQL4 site database restored to MySQL5 with no errors.

In the case of established databases, by far the easiest way is to download a backup (if you’re on a Cpanel webhost, this is simple) and then restore directly from the command line (rather than using e.g., phpmyadmin) using:

c:\mysql\bin> mysql dbname < dbnamebackup -u root -p

where C:\mysql is where MySQL is, dbname is the name of your database, dbnamebackup is the backup file and is in the bin directory (otherwise you’ll need the full path to it, in quotes). You’ll be prompted for your root password.

Anyway, I can now get on with the intended purpose… expect a new mt.net soon

Why my job isn’t quite cool enough…

Because I never get to say things like “Pass me the nightscope” or “Yes, Mr. President”. I’ve been watching Season 3 of 24 and it’s awesome, possibly the best yet, but then they’ve all been great. I really wish though they’d kill off Nina, though. When she came back in Season 2, I was a bit gutted, but to bring her out for 3 as well, it’s getting silly. I have Season 4 to watch when I’ve finished 3, and if she’s in that as well, well…

In other news, I’ve spent the weekend playing with two new toys: a Freecom FX-50 External DVD writer and a Lacie 250gb Ethernet Hard Disk.

The DVD writer has been flawless so far – I chose this particular model because it’s compatible with both Mac and Windows – it comes bundled with Roxio Toast (OSX) and Easy Media Creator (XP). It’s also Lightscribe enabled – which means you can “burn” an image directly on to compatible media. Additionally, it’s dual layer – so if you buy the unnecessarily expensive dual layer discs (about £17 for 5) you can burn up to 9gb of data to a single disc. Nevertheless, backing up all my digitial music, documents, videos, and other precious items to DVD was a pretty painless task. The only stipulation is that the bundled version of Toast (6 Lite) has limited functionality – it will only burn certain DVD discs, and it won’t burn Lightscribe images. So you either need to upgrade to the Titanium version (about £40) or use the Windows software. Burning DVD-Rs plays on my standalone DVD player (DVD+Rs don’t). The drive will do virtually every DVD drive format available, of which they’re seem to be a completely unnecessary number of.

The main reason for doing all this was to make way for the Ethernet drive – and to ease my fear that it might all go tits up. So I have DVD backups of everything important, before I started the arduous task of moving everything (over 20gb of music for starters) to the network drive. The point of the drive is that it sits on my home network, and any of the 5 computers on it have shared access to it. Primarily it means I have a central store for music which can be accessed at any time, without having to boot a particular machine. It has also meant I’ve been able to erase a lot of the junk off of two of my machines which are set aside specifically for University work. Now they’ve got the bare minimum on, freshly defragmented drives, and appear to be running a lot more happily.

I’d read many bad reviews of the many different network drives out there – mostly that they were all noisy, they kept crashing, speeds were slow and there was too much setup involved. Well, the setup was simple. Just plugged it in to my switch, the DHCP server gave it an IP, and then I could map to it. There is also a web based admin panel to set up further things. This seems a little buggy, but with patience, it’s easy enough to get it going. Speed – yes, it is a little slow but that’s mainly due to accessing it across a wireless connection to my network. For serious data movement, there’s also a USB 2.0 port which gives reasonable speeds for your initial moves. It isn’t silent, no, but it’s not accessive. I have it hidden away, and given that I’ve usually got music or the TV on, it’s not too noticeable. I’d say it’s about the same volume as my Mac when the fan spins up, though the fan on the network drive is permanently on. Having said that, there is a power button so you can power it down if you want. It’s basically a mini Linux computer, which you need to bear in mind.

Generally – it’s been hassle free. And a lot of fun. If it had a Firewire interface as well it would have been brilliant – the biggest trauma is really the initial copy across – the 20gb of music on USB took quite a few hours.

God damn it. In the time it took to write this post they’ve also brought back Sherry. She’s phenomenonly irritating.