greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Bizarre Search Query Theater

    If you don’t host your own website, perhaps you don’t know the strange fun to be had perusing the list of search queries that bring visitors to your pages. I get a lot of “cowboy bebop mp3” searches as well as “transparent concrete” queries (no, I don’t know why). The “pink hello kitty laptop” craze drew at least one visitor, as did the “oral sex donations” article.

    A new one appeared recently: “gundam wing circle jerk”.

    Everyone repeat after me, “Eeeewwwwwwww!” I’ll never look at Quatre the same way again…

  • Talking Martha

    Ever wanted to put words into Martha Stewart’s mouth? Here’s your chance, courtesy of the ever-lovin’ Brunching Shuttlecocks. My entry, of course, is kinda lame:



    Thanks to Cosmic Central for finding this toy. You know, if I were just a bit more clever I could probably put together my own captioning toy. Hmm.
    Brunching – Talking Martha

  • Blogsnob Snafu

    So I come in this morning, fire up Mozilla and go to my website to see… this. (Warning, kinda big image.)

    Turns out that the little “bs” Blogsnob link button was replaced with… this. (Warning, sorta big image.)

    According to the BlogSnob website, “If you’ve noticed a slowdown in your page load or anything abnormal, please bear with us… Someone edited the adtemplates.

    “There is no security problem. don’t worry.”

    What, me worry? I’m just having fun showing off screenshots of weird CSS rendering! Muahahaha!

    (Until BlogSnob gets this fixed, I’m pulling the ad. Cute screenshots are one thing, but that’s a helluva waste of bandwidth for anyone visting my newly-resurrected website.)

  • Bouncy Bouncy Email, Part II

    So, because I can’t be bothered to RT(entire)FM, email to my account has (still) been bouncing back. Until now.

    You see, if you don’t tell Qmail that email to a particular domain belongs on that server, then Qmail will cheerfully and politely throw it back with an explanation of why. (Sure, it would accept email for the machine, but not for the entire domain.)

    Duh on me. I think I’ve got it fixed now.

    Now I need to figure out how to let my sister know how to get at her email. Given the events of the last three weeks, I bet she’s just a little bit miffed with me by now. Sorry, sis! =)

    So much for that smooth transition I envisioned way back when this debacle began, eh?

  • Northwest Link almost comes through

    Part of the process of bringing this site back online involved having Northwest Link point the DNS for my domain to the new machine I built. As soon as I was able to change my domain so that their DNS servers were in charge, I sent their hostmasters a couple of emails detailing what I wanted.

    All but one of the instructions was followed perfectly. You see, the new server is named “duckpond,” hence “duckpond.greyduck.net” being the machine name that email should be directed to. They did put that address into DNS… but put it in the MX record as “duckpond.greyduck.com” which, of course, does not exist.

    So email directed to greyduck.net is bouncing like a big rubber ball right now.

    That’s not all: Because the Request Tracker system I use to track “trouble tickets” is (was) set to email my greyduck.net account every week with a list of current tasks, and because Request Tracker is (was) configured to reply automatically to new ticket requests, and because email to greyduck.net addresses bounces, my RT system has almost three thousand new tickets, all from Northwest Link’s mailer daemon telling me that my email address is undeliverable. RT sees those notices as new tickets and replies, which generates another bounce, which generates another ticket, which generates another reply, which generates another reply, which generates another ticket, ad infinitum.

    I’ll be spending the next few hours here at the office, killing duplicate tickets, 100 at a time. *sigh* Just another lesson in system administration, I suppose.

  • If it weren’t for lousy luck, I’d have none at all.

    File this one under “The Joys Of Mergers And Acquisitions.”

    Invite.net has been sold to BizLand.com, which doesn’t support several of the key features that brought me to Invite.net in the first place. I got an email today that states that first thing next week my website and email will be transferred to BizLand’s servers.

    There’s a very good chance that this site will completely break when that happens. The best-case scenario is that the existing journal entries will display but comments and a lot of the “extras” here won’t work (not to mention some of my security settings), I won’t be able to add new journal entries, and there won’t be a damned thing I can do about it since SSH shell access isn’t an option with BizLand.

    My current plan is to have Europa, the dial-up provider I’ve used for many years now, point the domain at a box I need to build here at the office. It’s not the best solution, but at least this way I’ll control the box in its entirety. This is also going to cost me a little more. Such is life.

    Ideas and contacts are welcome. Be warned that this may be my last journal entry until I get this thing moved elsewhere. No point adding entries that may get lost anyway. Grr.

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