June 1, 2009

There were 2 posts published on June 1, 2009 (this is page 1 of 1).

Rankcrawler update

I received an email this evening from Philippe Martin at RankCrawler, apologizing for the bad bot behavior:

Dear Mark Turner,

I apologize for not properly identifying our crawler (RankCrawler) by using the user agent. Our reverse-dns go to rankcrawler.com but we don’t use our own user agent. We will fix this problem soon. We have stopped to crawl your website as soon as I read your message.

We DO NOT crawl with the IP 94.23.51.159 as you claim in your second blog post about Rancrawler. It should be another company that we don’t know and that uses the same ISP (OVH is a very large ISP). We uses at this time only 5 IP that goes to rankcrawler.com.

I apologize again for this problem and I hope you will let our crawler access your website once we properly identify our crawler with our own user agent.

Thank you for your message,

Philippe Martin
http://rancrawler.com

I’m pleased that Mr. Martin chose to respond to my complaint and as such, I will allow RankCrawler to access MT.Net once again.

A tale of two stadiums

While we were enjoying yesterday’s baseball game, Kelly pointed out something quite true.

“This just makes me all the more angry at Walnut Creek,” she said offhand.

Kelly was referring to the rampant price-gouging that occurs at the Time Warner Cable Music Pavilion at Walnut Creek (that’s its $20 name. Locals know it by its $2 name of “Walnut Creek”). Go see a show at Walnut Creek and you pay $6 per ticket for parking (wiping out any incentive to carpool). Expect to pay $10 for a shitty beer, a few bucks for a bottle of water, and if you want a souvenir T-shirt you’ll be parting with two Ben Franklins at least. It’s out of control.

By comparison, the Mudcats game cost some money to get there, as it’s a 30 minute drive out of town. You pay $4 per car for parking, but then the concession prices are reasonable ($3.50 for a pretty good-sized ice cream, for instance). Ticket prices are affordable at just $6 for general admission seats. The kids had a great time and so did we.

Kelly and I have seen more concerts and show this year than we have in a long time, but with the exception of Buffett none of those were at Walnut Creek. And we’ll not set foot in that place again if we can possibly help it.