Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Screensavers, the Ill-Begotten Stepchild Application
November 04, 2007

After my debacle with the monitor this week, I decided that I needed a new screensaver. Primarily I was thinking of disabling the login display when returning to the OS from the screensaver, but I have been thinking I wanted something more for a while now. And since my new monitor does not recover from power-save mode, I need something good to prevent the burn-in that I saw on the monitor at Best Buy.

I’ve been using the basic My Pictures slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP for a while. I have a lot of pictures, and the kids like to see my computer showing them photos of us on all of our vacations. Abby actually asked me why I had changed my screensaver once, which prompted me to restore the photo one.

Today Sucked
November 01, 2007

I’ll just say it plainly – today sucked.

It started last night after the kids got home from Trick-or-Treat. I was reassembling my computer, which I had to take apart partially to hook the projector to my notebook. See, I was projecting a Halloween sign onto our garage door that told the kids to go up the street for candy. Perhaps I’ll explain that more later. In any case, I was reassembling things when I noticed that, unrelated to my reassembly, my center monitor’s backlight seemed to have blown out. This makes it exceptionally hard to log in.

It’s kind of a strange puzzle. The center monitor is the only one on DVI, and the side monitors are both VGA-only. This might have been fine if I had a DVI to VGA adapter, but there were none to be found. So, it was time to order a new monitor, and with me being off to take care of Riley while Nana was on vacation, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to visit Best Buy and get that upgrade I’ve been considering. But then, events seem to collude to conspire against me.

The Routine
October 30, 2007

Today was an interesting day for both Riley and me. Nana has vacation this week, and so she’s not at the house to watch Riley during the day when I’m working. Normally, Berta would take off these days, but she’s been taking off so many days on these occasions - from times that Nana needs off to times when I’ve got to be somewhere at the end of the day when Abby comes home from school - that it’s becoming a burden to her work. So to ease that burden, I told her that I would watch Riley on the two days this week that he didn’t have preschool.

I had originally thought that I would keep Riley at home and take the day off myself. I had mentioned to Nate that I might need a couple of days this week to be home with Riley, as I’ve described, and he suggested that I could bring Riley over to his house and his wife, Mary, would keep an eye on Riley while I got some work done. Riley would be able to play with his kids and it would be a good work day.

One hundred and forty thousand and sixty one dollars and ninety six cents
October 29, 2007

I’ve been trying to have my 401k from my old employer transferred into a new tax-deferred “vehicle”. I finally managed to get all of the paperwork handled, and sent it all away to be processed. Recently I received a notice that there was a certified letter to pick up at the post office.

Digressing into my first annoyance- I am home all day, pretty much every day, because I work from home. Please, Ms. Postwoman, knock on my door instead of filling out one of those stupid little pink cards and making me trek to the postoffice, which is way off yonder toward Yellow Springs, aka “nowhere”. Anyway…

Throttling
October 26, 2007

The past two weeks have seen an upswing in posts around here, and the consequence is that more spiders stop by, and the consequence is that they find the search links on the right. When the spiders hit the search links in quick succession without loading anything else, it digs a big crater where the server used to be. Well, I’m tired of that.

There are a ton of nasty bots that aren’t obeying the robots.txt, and really I think it can’t be relied upon to prevent the most heinous bots from destroying a site’s productive page serving. I’ve thrown some Apache modules at the issue, but they don’t seem to help. I’ve specifically excluded sections of the site from certain user agents, and that seems to do well, but there’s no avoiding getting trounced by these freaking ill-behaved spiders and comment spamming bots.