Seven Years Ago

This night seven years ago was one of the scariest nights of my life. Kelly was in the hospital seriously ill with preeclampsia, her vital organs slowly shutting down. I watched in terror as her blood pressure soared, feeling utterly helpless. It was a terrible feeling. I worried how it would all turn out.

And yet through it all was the chirp of a baby’s enthusiastic heartbeat, offering hope for a happy future. Sure enough, the next day became one of the happiest of my life when Hallie was born. We had to wait another 7 weeks to take her home, but we made it through. If only I could’ve seen back then where we’d be today.

In her young life Hallie has shown there are no barriers she can’t overcome. Our amazing girl turns seven tomorrow. Happy birthday, Hallie!

Roomba zoomba

We had not been using our Roomba that much until this spring, when I thought I’d turn it loose on the dog hair that piles up. Roomba would clean half a room before stopping and complaining: its battery would no longer hold a charge. I remedied that last month when I purchased a replacement battery. Now Roomba is back to cleaning like a pro, sucking up “dog-hair sandwiches,” as I like to call them.

It’s nice to have a vacuum that does the cleaning for you!

Obama pushes to keep torture pics secret

President Obama is supporting efforts by Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman to amend the Freedom of Information Act so the Obama administration can legally withhold photographs showing detainees being tortured. Don’t like a court ruling forcing you to do something you don’t want? Simply change the law retroactively!

I’m still waiting for Obama’s open and transparent government. Is this what “change we can believe in” is all about?

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.

Rankcrawler bot update

Sheesh. Just after I finished blocking Rankcrawler from accessing my site, I found yet another connection attempt from them – this time from a totally new IP address:

94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:14:02 -0400] “GET /2009/05/30/conn-clusion/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5574 “http://real-url.org” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows -NT 5.0 – real-url.org)”
94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:15:25 -0400] “GET /2009/05/30/conn-clusion/ HTTP/1.0” 200 5574 “-” “-”
94.23.51.159 – – [31/May/2009:07:15:25 -0400] “POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0” 200 473 “-” “XML-RPC for PHP 2.2.2”

This IP resolves to rps6637.ovh.net. OVH.Net is the same ISP that Rankcrawler uses. They just can’t take no for an answer.

[Update: 1 June 2009] Rankcrawler says this isn’t them. Duly noted.

Weekend spent outdoors

It was a weekend spent outdoors.

Friday evening I stopped by the Seaboard Music event to meet my neighbors and hear some music. Saturday morning the kids rode their bikes while Kelly and I Rollerbladed up and down the streets in our neighborhood.

Then they went to a birthday party while I pulled on boots and waded through Cemetery Branch creek picking up trash along with six or so neighbors. We picked up many bags of trash and got that section of Cemetery Branch looking great. Unfortunately, we had to stop before we worked further downstream, as I suspect that’s where all the trash is (and the homeless people). After the stream cleanup was done, Kelly told me that the Dolls had invited us over. I got cleaned up and we all spent time visiting with them, heading home around 8 PM.

Today we talked about going to the pool or going biking, but instead Kelly took to weeding the flowerbeds and I mowed the lawn and sprayed the poison ivy. Before we started though I recalled finding an injured baby opossum during my morning walk, so we all piled in to the car and went to fetch it and deliver it to an animal rescue place. The kids really enjoyed helping out an injured critter and so did I.

After lunchtime piled into the car again and headed to Five County Stadium to take in a free Mudcats game. In spite of the 90+ degree day in the sun and the kids’ lack of understanding of the game, we all had a great time.It was surprisingly affordable, too, so I think another baseball game is in the cards.

Now I’m home and quite tired. But, hey, I earned it!

Bad bot alert: Rankcrawler

Looks like a bot has been scouring my website without properly identifying itself. I noticed that my older posts were getting a lot of unexplained hits. I checked the logs, looked up the IPs, and discovered the visitors were bots from the rankcrawler.com domain. The bots don’t properly identify themselves in their user agent field, as good bots should do:

Some of the bots came from these IPs (though there may be others):
87.98.249.75
87.98.133.249
91.121.26.45
94.23.152.34
94.23.153.8

As you can see, Rankcrawler prefers to disguise itself as a regular browser. This is a no-no.

87.98.249.75 – – [29/May/2009:23:56:09 -0400] “GET /page/2/ HTTP/1.0” 200 34160 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6”
87.98.249.75 – – [30/May/2009:00:11:16 -0400] “GET /2006/07/ HTTP/1.0” 200 41171 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6”

91.121.26.45 – – [29/May/2009:20:47:22 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 34467 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
91.121.26.45 – – [30/May/2009:00:01:23 -0400] “GET /2008/05/ HTTP/1.0” 200 27858 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

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Conn-clusion

Yesterday I gave the last of my GPS talks at Conn for this school year. I went into it thinking it would be like the last one, where the kids were bored and unengaged (I found out later that because I was a bit late, the kids felt denied a free trip to the playground). I also thought I would be tired of hearing myself talk.

Instead it was the best talk I’ve given yet! The kids were engaged and so was I. I got many good questions from the kids, some of which I’d not gotten before. They were practically falling out of their seats to answer them! The thing that really impressed me was when I asked if anyone knew what a sextant was. One young man began explaining how you line up the its two mirrors to get a fix. Wow! It takes a special kind of fifth-grader to know that! Heck, most adults don’t know that. Also. when I mentioned that GPSs don’t work inside, another young man asked how some mobile phones show your position when you’re inside. It was a very good question!

I had to end my talk a bit early as there was a school meeting that afternoon but it turns out I timed my talk just right and was done right on time. Mrs. Jarrett inquired if I would be back next year and I have to say I will. I’ve had a blast talking to Conn students about GPS and look forward to next year!