Stan’s Obligatory Blog

The traffic is continuing to die down. We picked up a few more links, but no big network-busters. Still, our network traffic did take a jump just after 14:00 today. This appears to be from the link from mikeslist.com, which also puts out an email newsletter with links.

The count now stands at 3889 visits from the link from http://www.metafilter.com yesterday. Our outbound bandwidth was completely full all morning yesterday.

This morning, traffic took off again when we were linked from http://www.bbspot.com at about 05:00PDT. This surge is not quite as big as yesterday’s, and our outbound traffic has only been running about 80% of capacity. Still, the bbspot.com link has been driving the surge today. The visitor count from that link currently stands at 1163.

Besides this, we’ve been linked by a bunch more sites:

So far, we have gotten 3027 visits from the link from http://www.metafilter.com, which works out to about a day and a half’s normal traffic every hour. The outbound network traffic is down to about 110Kbits/sec, and our connection is feeling a bit less slow now. I’m actually pretty impressed with how it’s holding up. But $DEITY help us if this gets mentioned on Slashdot…

Besides metafilter, I also see links from:
http://www.furiousball.com/inmydiatribe/index.aspx
http://rss.xiffy.nl
http://www.samizdata.org/blog/200306archive001.asp#1056451078001

But the bulk of the traffic is coming from metafilter.

Well, here we go again. There was a link to our dot-com gallery posted on http://www.metafilter.com at 07:10 this morning, and our traffic is through the roof again. I’m actually surprised at how well our DSL connection is working. We’re getting more than the advertised 128Kbits upstream. Still, the little Alcatel modem is gagging like a foie gras goose. Check out the graph of our network traffic.

Here’s a view of our network traffic for the last week, showing the big spike and its decay.

Installed a new removable hard drive tray in the bottom bay. Put our old 10GB Maxtor in it. Discovered that the key switch has to be in the ‘locked’ position before it will spin up the drive. This is the drive I do backups to, but now it is removable. Took the daily backups out of the crontab.

Just an update on the network traffic. There was another small surge today when the link was posted on about six or so new sites.

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.