Month: January 2005

AllResearch.com and webclipping.com can bite me.

Along with the new host, I finally got around to installing some web stats software .. and by install I mean I clicked the “Install Webalizer” button on the host’s management page .. sometimes it’s nice to do stuff the easy way 😉

Anyway, I’m looking at these stats .. and one single host has accounted for nearly 70% of the traffic (>200 megs of it) and 40% of the hits. Holy crap! About every 4 seconds (!?) I get a hit from rss.allresearch.com with a user agent of "Mozilla/4.0 (WebClipping.com)". And if just grabbing all of spoon.cx in less than a minute wasn’t bad enough, they’re fetching each page multiple times .. in the same day .. not the front page of the blog or anything, but the archives, pages which haven’t changed in years, literally! Some of these pages they fetched 100 – 200 times in the last 2 days!

So this new host also has the ability to block IP’s .. that address again was rss.allresearch.com or 38.144.36.19. For now, this is faster than telling them their crawler is broken, assuming they don’t already know (which I bet they do) and that they care (bet they don’t) .. At least I get a chance to try out that new nofollow tag 😉

(selections from) the top N most often played songs on iTunes .. on my iBook .. which i don’t use for music-listening that much anymore

.

  • Delta Mk II – The Orb Orblivion
  • I miss you – Bjork
  • Fluffy – Spaceghost – Musical Bar-B-Que
  • Dry The Rain – The Beta Band – The Three E.P.‘s
  • Army Of Me – Bjork
  • Summertime – Miles Davis
  • Asylum – The Orb – Orblivion
  • Dark & Long – Underworld – Dubnobasswithmyheadman
  • In A Landscape – William Orbit – Pieces in a Modern Style
  • Car24 – Yoko Kanno + The Seatbelts – Cowboy Bebop OST 1
  • Couldn’t Cause Me Harm – Beth Orton – Central Reservation
  • Hyper-Ballad – Bjork – Post
  • The Steward of Gondor – Howard Shore & Billy Boyd – LOTR ROTK
  • Everything Is Wrong – Moby – Everything Is Wrong
  • Circles – Soul Coughing – El Oso

Top 10ish from the iPod .. which i use nearly everyday but still doesn’t include all the music i listen to
(can’t export a songlist of iPod tracks for some reason?)

  • Postal Service – Such Great Heights (played 23 times(!))
  • The Shins – New Slang (18)
  • DNTtel – (This is) The Dream of Evan and Chad (15)
  • Mogwai – billisdead (14)
  • Coldplay – Don’t Panic (13)
  • DNtel – Fear of Corners (13)
  • Royksopp – In Space
  • Beth Orton – Sweetest Decline (12)
  • Claude Debussy – Claire de Lune
  • Son Volt – Chanty
  • Aquabats – Welcome to Eltingville (11)
  • Bjork – Triumph of a Heart

other bands and albums that showed up near the top

  • Garden State soundtrack
  • Royksopp – Melody AM
  • Postal Service – Give Up
  • DNtel – Life is Full of Possibilities
  • The Shins
  • Gotan Project
  • Sigur Ros

Some of those have been on the iPod longer than others ..

new server

spoon.cx now lives on a new server! it’s on a Virtual Private Server with westhost.com. Looks like most of the blosxom widgets are working again (removed a few, added some other stuff .. like my recent flickr photos).

Starting to get some pictures back online in the gallery .. switched to Gallery for the new server — a VPS doesn’t give all the control of being root, so a php program was a bit easier to get working than Apache::Gallery and all its prerequisites. Still working on getting mailing lists set up for some different domains also hosted on the new account. also thinking about switching blog software again .. WordPress looks interesting, or I may switch back to MT

in other news, played some Munchkin and Escape from Elba … wheeee

changes

Making some changes .. all the silly doodads and blinkenlightzen on the right side of the page won’t be working until I get a chance to reinstall all the perl modules and plugins they depended on. So you’ll have to go a few days without knowing my exact whereabouts or the last song I listened to 😉 Also, the wiki and picture gallery have gone on vacation.

Recent Rentals

We watched Wimbledon and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other night … odd combination, eh? Both entertaining in entirely different ways. The first was nothing amazing, but alright. The second .. insanity! but the good kind of insanity, the kind that leaves your brain all melty. Charlie Kaufman likes that idea of crawling around inside your own mind .. or John Malkovich’s mind. And Jim Carrey’s come quite a ways from Ace Ventura 😉

hippo! gnu! deer!

Happy 2005! We are back from our Christmas Tour of Texas (2 weeks, 8 cities (4 overnight, 4 brief stops), 2000 miles!), had fun seeing everyone, had fun being back in Austin for New Year’s Eve.

In other news, I’ve been breaking things lately .. glass things. I hope this is a get it out of the way at the beginning type of thing and not a sample of what the rest of the year will be like. Also, forgetting things at relative’s houses seemed to be a theme for the trip (hopefully not another sign).

No resolutions for the new year .. a change of calendar doesn’t increase my chances of getting things done. 😉