Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

apparently i’m being accused of “backscatter”, or at least my mail server is. the complaint comes from the practice of testing incoming mail to see if its sender is a real address. my server sends a callout to the apparent sending server of an incoming message to see if joeSpammer@domain.spoofed is a real sender, and if not, rejects the message.

my bad. it’s abuseable and causes undue traffic on a domain that’s been spoofed.

oh well – it was working as a pretty good spam blocking resource for me. blocked a metric shitload of spam every day with that one method.

so, now i have to wait to get delisted by backscatterer.org, or else pay 50 euro to get it “expedited”

now, who’s making money off spam?

astonishing, even to me, is that this month marks the tenth year this site has been online. amazing.

i was “blogging” even before i knew it was a verb. here’s proof:

archive from February 1999.

back in those days, i had ambitions that i would open up the “rants” to other writers and guests. the whole engine was custom built on a PowerMac 7600 running WebStar and FileMaker Pro, with Lasso as the language holding it all together. that worked for a surprisingly long time – with the help of several new hard drives, a pile of RAM chips and a G3 upgrade card.

then came the linux server, and WordPress.

and still, here i am, not capitalizing my shit.

for those of you that have requested the pattern for the ipod cozy – i’m working on writing it up. i’ve never written a pattern before, at least not one for other people to try and follow, so i’m enlisting the help of my knitting sensei and the craftiest woman i know, ebeth. i’ll have something posted, and maybe a PDF to download in the next week or so.

and, probably some time after the server stops smoking and is cool to the touch again, i’ll have to write up something about how the post-it elvis mosaic has turned into a little meme, and just how much traffic this site is now getting as a result.

a sample: the average day in may, i had 64 visitors. two days ago, i had 107,201.

you know, the whole advantage of running the latest high availability, super-stable stable and svelte operating system on this site is somewhat negated when the UPS it’s hooked to goes tits up.

sigh.