I can't wait.

I ran over my download limit last month; that extra 600MB will cost me $90. At my new ISP, that would have only cost me $3.60.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:52 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy Misa, an undercover agent working for the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons, is directed by his boss, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, to infiltrate Frnak's Fortress of Drakness. Pixy's disguise as a heron is successful until he inadvertantly corrects Frnak's grammar.

Pixy is captured by Frnak's Heron Corps and taken for interrogation, where he is surprised to learn that Frnak's Chief Interrogatorer is none other than his friend Susie, a nice girl with a penchant for heavy weapons. Susie, it seems, has been abducted by Frnak's minions, brainwashed, and turned into a heron - although possibly not in that order.

Pixy frees Susie from captivity, and together they flee the Fortress on board a UFO. This UFO is of an odd design: its course is controlled by a huge vending machine which takes up most of the craft's interior. Fortunately, Susie is familiar with this design, having previously averted an alien invasion of Earth by ordering a can of Dr Pepper, which apparently diverted the entire fleet to Puerto Rico, where it was unable to refuel.

Due to a snack-related accident, Pixy and Susie shortly find themselves on Mars, which they discover is being used as a forward base for a renewed invasion by the Moon Men, who are now in the service of Frnak. Susie saves the day by reducing the Moon Men to small piles of ash. Susie finds a menu for the vending machine, which turns out to be written in phonetic Greek, which Pixy is able to read. Sort of.

The pair return in haste to the InstaBase in Knoxville, taking a forced detour via Rome, Kentucky, since there is no Greek letter for V. There they learn that the InstaPundit has been replaced by a robot. (Which, it seems, runs CP/M.) We learn - though our heroes do not - that this and other RoboBloggers are part of a malevolent scheme launched by the evil Frnak.

Susie's flamethrower makes short work of the Electronic Pundit, and the two return to Susie's home at Practical Penumbra to regroup. There, they discover that Susie has also been replaced by a robot. The SusieBot stuffs Susie head first into her own main template, but Susie is rescued by Pixy who wipes the Bot's boot program.

Meanwhile in Florida, a growing crowd of bloggers, forced by Frnak's nanotechnology into the shape of water birds, has broken free of their mindwashing and is planning escape. Led by Tiger, who contructs a bomb using only hard-boiled eggs and velveeta, the bloggers, still in bird shape, pair off and take to the skies in the Moon Men's fleet of UFOs.

Now the story continues in episode 17: License to Blog

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:52 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Will the madness never end? Will I manage to think of a plot for episode 17? Tune in next week...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:03 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Weather forecast in Hell: 1C to 7C, chance of overnight frost.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I can't stand pumpkin, but I love pumpkin scones. How does that work? Take a scone, add something I don't like (pumpkin) and it tastes better. I don't get it.

Mainland brand butter comes from New Zealand. New Zealand doesn't have a mainland. It's two islands off the coast of Australia (called, in a fit of originality, North Island and South Island). Where's the mainland? Are they planning something?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:38 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A kimchee vending machine? The mind boggles.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:38 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I have a little server hosted with United Colo. I've had this server for... maybe nine months now, and it has mostly worked fine. It hosts my blog, some other blogs, a web forum, and a few other bits and pieces.

Now, according to SPEWS, the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, United Colo (or their new owners, Sagonet; I don't know and SPEWS don't say) have also been hosting spammers. Repeatedly, say SPEWS. Is this true? I don't know. I suspect it may be so; United Colo and Sagonet host a lot of servers, some of them probably belong (or belonged) to spammers.

So, if United Colo has been hosting spammers and not dealing with them in a timely manner (as SPEWS claim), they have acted irresponsibly. United Colo make money from the Internet, and spammers do nothing but harm to the Net.

So what do SPEWS do? They list the entire /19 subnet belonging to United Colo - 8192 IP addresses - as a spam source. Including me. Me, who hasn't ever sent an unwanted email of any sort. And several hundred other people who are very likely as unfriendly towards spam as I.

So, we have a second example of irresponsible behaviour. SPEWS - knowing full well that most of those IP addresses do not belong to spammers - listed the full set anyway. Whatever inconvenience this causes to the innocent people with addresses in that range is not their problem. Besides, picking out the actual spammers would take work.

And for whatever reason, their web site is basically hosed, and it's almost impossible to get any information out of them.

Now, apart from mu.nu, I have a web and email hosting account with EZ Web Hosting. I've had this one for over a year, and again it's mostly worked fine. Yesterday, though, they decided top start using the anti-spam lists at Osirusoft to filter and reject incoming email. Before, they'd been using it as an input to SpamAssassin, which works extremely well. Not satisfied with this, they decided, without notifying anyone, to start rejecting my own emails to myself.

Numbers three and four in the chain of irresponsibility. SPEWS advises that the list they provide is not necessarily made up only of spammers, but also includes (not may include, does include) people who are just on the same part of the internet as spammers. Osirusoft forwards this list without doing anything to check it, or taking any responsibility for what people do with it. Their website, incidentally, is now coming up with an Apache test page, which is truly encouraging. [Update: No, it's back now. Still deathly slow, though.] This list includes over 32,000 IP addresses belonging to Sagonet. A handful of these actually belong - or belonged - to spammers.

An attempt to use Osirusoft's online utilities results in:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Thanks guys. Thanks to all of you.

(And then there are the charming people who think that mu.nu is a great domain to use for fake email addresses. So I get their spam, and my mail server rejects it, but the spammers are (of course) also using fake email addresses, so the bounces bounce and the error messages from my mail server end up in my inbox with the spam still attached! Aargh! Die! Die the lot of you!

But that's a whole 'nother rant.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:46 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Yay. Not.

Update:

Looks like my hosting provider has been harbouring spammers, and I've been caught in a net cast too wide. Wonderful.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:50 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:32 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Right.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:58 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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