White Woman Black Dog

We got a few inches of snow last night.

Oh, friggin’ yay!

I hate it when the first real snow if the year falls on a weekday. People seem to forget every year that

• snow is slick
• you can’t stop
• leaving early for work in a good idea

I saw one pickup truck that had been creamed by a semi . The truck was seriously crunched butit looked like eveyone was ok (the truck had been t-boned).

Again with the spam ranting!

I was going over the logs today (via a lovely little graphical interface I have… the logs themselves would make you go blind if you tried to read and make sense of them) and it kinda shows what’s going on:

I’ve got 1400+ hits for the month to a page that doesn’t exist. It’s the comments page of the old blogware I was running (until I got so sick of the incredible amount of spam I got that I changed to something else). It’s been gone for a couple of months, but the spammers still have the address and are giving it their best to still fill ye olden website with their trash.

Of course, add in the ones who’ve attempted to connect to my current comments posting page and you’ve got well over 2000 attempted spams (the only people who hit the comments page as their entry page are spammers). Of those 2000 hits, a lot were successful (I’ve deleted about 1,800+ comments this month alone).

Add that all up and you get a grumpy webmaster.

And before you ask… yes, I was running blacklist software (and updated it very regularly), had several spam plug-ins installed, yadda, yadda, yadda. It appears that I was someone’s bitch for a while… trying new ways to get around the blocks. Hopefully they forget about me.

On a much brighter side… the changes I made to the way this site now processes comments, how the server reacts to referring hosts, and a few other things I did to make life harder for those rat bastards seem to be holding (for the moment). That dam could burst at any moment though.

In non spam related news.. it’s monday, it’s nearly 5 pm… and I have a cold beer waiting for me at home… so life is pretty damn good (or will be in about 8 minutes when I grab my coat and sprint for the door).

Comments are open again.

We’ll see how long this lasts

Overall, this holiday weekend was good.

I spent the last couple of days doing pretty much nothing. I did, however, discover something wonderful this weekend: Widmer Snow Plow Milk Stout. Damn… that’s nice!

Today’s game plan: set up the Christmas tree, lights on the front of the house, and put the remains of the turkey in the freezer. Oh yeah… I lead the rock star life style!

Comments are still turned off on the website. I’ve been reading up on different ways to lock it down, making it more difficult for spammers to hit me. I have noticed something interesting while looking at my stats. It appears that the program that they’re using to fill blogs full of crap shows as a referrer with the IP address of 12.163.72.13 (which isn’t real).

I’m going to set up Apache to redirect anyone who attempts to connect from that referrer to either go to a special page designed just for them or to just forward that traffic to fbi.gov. I’ll also try implementing something stupidly simple today. We’ll see how that goes.

On the Half-Life 2 front… I’m back in the game again. Since I beat it last week, I’ve been going through it more slowly… looking for things I missed in the first go around and making sure EVERYONE is dead. Apparently, I missed quite a bit in my first run through the game.

I’m on the air boat part at the moment. The first time I played it, I ran that thing at full throttle all the way through the canals. There’s quite a few “hidden” areas along the banks (most of which are marked with a spray painted half-life symbol). They contain ammo and life (as well as head crabs).

I’ve closed the comments section of the website for a bit while I figure out how the hell the load/dump script kiddies are filling my blog with spam. Why they feel it’s their right to fill my blog up with links to their shit websites is beyond me.

It’s not that I haven’t tried blocking them. I’ve renamed things, added all sorts of tricky php to the backend using random numbers and such. It only seems to stop them for a short period. What am I, their one stop shop for new tricks to overcome?

Fuckers!

*sigh*

In other news: turkey day was good. We managed to mangle a 17 pound dead bird with all the fixings.

I also finished Half-Life 2. I’ll write something up about that later.