October 2009

There were 43 posts published in October 2009 (this is page 1 of 5).

Orcas is calling

Damn it. My friend Ron sent me pictures yesterday from his home on Orcas Island. Now I can’t stop thinking about the place!

Oh, to have more vacation time and more money.

MSN can’t take no for an answer

Earlier this week I banned MSN’s msnbot from spidering my website. I did this with an entry in the robots.txt file:

User-Agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

I checked with MSN’s robots.txt verifier to make sure this would keep msnbot from spidering my site. The only problem is that I also blocked the MSN IP addresses. Thus msnbot couldn’t fetch robots.txt to tell it was no longer wanted.

So, I unblocked the IPs and allowed msnbot to grab the robots.txt file, which it did repeatedly (this is a small sample):
Continue reading →

Cheap Thoughts: Keys

cc credit: Bohman

Career success can be judged by how few keys one carries. The more successful one is, the fewer keys one must carry around.

Take the President of the United States, for instance. Do you think he or she carries any keys? How about fat cat CEOs? Think they do any driving? Heck, no! They’ve got people for that.

The low man on the totem pole is always the poor schmuck with the mountain of tin hanging from his belt loop.

Inaugural Trams

Inaugural Trams (YouTube) (download from Mediafire)
Super Furry Animals

Trams
Inaugural Trams
Trams
Inaugural Trams
Trams

I will design a town in the image of your face.
Round the wrinkles of your eyes my footsteps you can trace.
We could promenade down infranasal depression.
The streets of your hands will never feel a recession.

It’s a secular day and it will be even better tomorrow.
It’s the first day of the integrated transport hub,
Let us celebrate this monument to progress.
We have reduced emissions by seventy-five percent.
Continue reading →

Sad, sorry newspaper

There was a bank robbery this afternoon on Six Forks Road near North Hills Mall. This kind of thing happens from time to time but usually they aren’t violent. Usually the robber implies he has a weapon, or brandishes one but never fires it.

This afternoon’s robbery was different: the robber toted a shotgun into the bank and then fired on witnesses as he fled. No one, fortunately, was hurt.

Tonight this story is prominent on WRAL’s website but there is no mention of it whatsoever on the News and Observer website. Clicking on the “Crime/Safety” link shows no story, either. The N&O completely dropped the ball. It’s been over six hours since the incident.

I suppose the N&O staff has been too busy chasing Mike Easley out of office to cover anything else. It’s sad to see how far the N&O has fallen.

The case of the mangled remote control

Exhibit A

Exhibit A

Kelly and the kids had a mystery to solve this afternoon. They stepped outside for a half hour to play in the driveway and when they returned, they were astonished to discover the TV remote control was destroyed. Parts were littered everywhere and the case of the remote control was shattered. Strange indentations were found on the end of it and what was left of the device was covered in an unusual oily substance.

The family searched the house but could find no signs of forced entry. All the locks were locked and no other valuables were affected.
Continue reading →

Daylight saving time experiment

This winter I thought I’d try something new: a somewhat altered Daylight Saving time change. The goal is to minimize the impact of the time switch.

My idea is to switch clocks like everyone else but adjust my waking schedule by only 30 minutes, not the full hour. So as I currently wake at 5:45 AM EDT, I will awaken at 5:15 AM EST after the time change. Thus I’ll be waking up effectively 30 minutes later than I do now but the rest of my schedule will match others.

If I were brave I would continue to wake and sleep at the same time I do now but I’m not yet ready to take that on! We’ll see how a half-hour difference goes first.

More MSN search bot shenanigans

Got more funny hits this morning from MSN’s search bot (emphasis mine):

65.55.104.132 – – [26/Oct/2009:10:20:24 -0400] “GET /2009/03/06/sailing-this-weekend/ HTTP/1.1” 200 4398 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)”
65.55.104.132 – – [26/Oct/2009:10:20:25 -0400] “GET /wp-content/themes/mtdotnet/style.css HTTP/1.1” 200 10345 “http://www.markturner.net/2009/03/06/sailing-this-weekend/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)”
65.55.104.132 – – [26/Oct/2009:10:20:25 -0400] “GET /wp-includes/js/comment-reply.js?ver=20090102 HTTP/1.1” 200 786 “http://www.markturner.net/2009/03/06/sailing-this-weekend/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4325; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)”

The IP address 65.55.104.132 resolves to msnbot-65-55-104-132.search.msn.com.

I’m about ready to kick MSN off my sites permanently.

Update 10:41: Done. MSN is no longer welcome at my site. I’ve never banned a search engine before but this is inexcusable behavior and Microsoft should know better.