Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Something amusing happened here. Stan has a collection of screen shots of failed dot-com web sites, and someone discovered it. Apparently, they found it amusing, and at about 4:30AM Friday, they posted a link to it from a site called Kaliber 10000 [http://www.k10k.net]. And the hits started rolling in. We got ten days’ worth of traffic in the first fourteen hours. During that time, the Internet echo chamber took over, as people who had seen the link on Kaliber then posted it on other sites. As of noon on Saturday, there were 20 sites that had links to the gallery. Our site is self-hosted on a DSL connection, and the outbound bandwidth was saturated for most of Friday morning. Now it’s down to manageable levels, but it’s still lots more than we usually get. And it picked up on Monday morning when people got back at work.

Statistics for our web server are at http://cosmo.pasadena.ca.us/stats/usage_200306.html

The gallery itself is at http://cosmo.pasadena.ca.us/stan/dot-com

Here is a list of the sites that posted links to us:

And after all, who wouldn’t be flattered to have their site linked from sensibleerection.com or ultimateinsult.net?

Today we went to the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino. They were having a special presentation about the air war in Italy during World War II. Lucinda wasn’t too interested in hearing the talks, as it was not really geared to a four-year-old. But she did like seeing all the airplanes. They had a lot of planes from World War II. The first hanger had British, Japanese, and German aircraft, including a V-1 buzz bomb and a pair of German and Japanese rocket planes. They also had a children’s area with some small airplanes for the kids to climb into and play. There are pictures of Lucinda in her photo album. Later on, we got a chance to see a P-47 fly. We also toured their B-17 bomber and we got to talk to a fellow who had flown as a ball turret gunner in a B-17 in 1944. He had a scrapbook with all his orders, photos, and letters home the war. It was nice to talk to him, as this is what really makes history come to life. For more on this, see the pages from the other times we got to meet and talk to bomber veterans about their experiences:

Bombers in Burbank – 1998

Bombers in Burbank – 2003

After this, we all went to Cafe Bizou in Old Town Pasadena and had a nice dinner out.

Got a piece of spam from isc2.org [“Your account is now active”] Put *@isc2.org on the blacklist for spamassassin in /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf.

We went to the science museum to see the Titanic Artifact Exhibit [http://www.casciencectr.org/Exhibits/Weingart/Titanic/Titanic.php] This was a show of all manner of objects brought up from the wreck, from a big piece of the hull, down to playing cards and hats. It was all very fascinating to see.

Afterward, we walked over the the newly-reopened Aerospace Hall and saw the Gemini 11 spacecraft and other relics of the Space Age.

Finally, we went out to the Rose Garden in Exposition Park for a while before heading home.