For those who are interested, in the five days my site has been at my new web host, mod_security has successfully repelled 384,360 spam comment attacks on the site. That’s over 76,000 per day. And while I’ve done all I can to thwart them, I feel really powerless and frustrated by this. Whoever is doing this: YOU REALLY SUCK.
Author: Kris
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Moving Update
It’s been one week now, and I’d say we’re past the 75% mark. It’s starting to look like a home! Amy came over on Friday for a much needed interior design consultation and also helped me move over quite a bit of stuff. (She’s handy with a wrench, that one.) We also had the plumber and the exterminator over that day too, which made for quite a party. (Dude, toilets aren’t cheap to fix!) Saturday the Snook and I took apart the IKEA entertainment wall and started sorting through the crap. We put some stuff into storage (VHS tapes, etc) but the rest is all going to Vinnie’s. We also started on the mammoth task of moving over the books and bookcases. Sunday I continued to move books while the Snook started bringing over office and computer stuff. What’s left: the last two bookcases, about half the kitchen stuff, and about half the office. Oh, and the fridge and the washing machine. I’ve got no idea how we’re going to handle those…
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Idol Sighting
The Snook and I walked to work together this morning. About five minutes after we split at Liverpool Street, I had a phone call from him.
Me: What is it?
Him: Idol sighting!
Me: No way! Who?
Him: All of ’em! I think they must be staying around here.
Me: What were they doing?
Him: I dunno, going to breakfast probably. I saw the Jazz Man; he was wearing a hat and sunglasses but he wears those on TV so I recognised him. And then I saw this little girl, and I was like, there’s another one! So I looked around and then I saw Bad Haircut going up the street.
Me: Nice one.For what’s it worth, I want Natalie to win. Holden’s pulling out all the stops for a Matt Corby landslide though…
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Alexander = Yoda
Kristen posted a photo of Alexander in his complete Yoda costume. I love, love, LOVE how the three-toed socks turned out.
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RIP Yarn Mag
Not sure if all the Aussie knitters have heard the news yet, but YARN mag is no more. That sucks.
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More Halloween love
Our Mythbusters Halloween costume got some more attention this week. Mathowie posted it to del.icio.us and then mentioned it in the latest MetaFilter podcast. He referred to me as a “sexy Adam Savage”!
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Allez cuisine!
This week was our highly-anticipated dinner with Iron Chefs Sakai and Chen at the Observatory Hotel here in Sydney. I was kicking myself the whole time that I’d forgotten to print out the photo of me and Snook dressed as Sakai and Kaga. (And of course, I couldn’t print it out at work because the site was down. *grumble*) But that niggling annoyance aside, I was excited and rarin’ to go. We met up with Toast and Shan and headed in. We had a small table for four in the back corner of the Globe Bar with a big TV screen right beside us (for watching all the kitchen action). Shan and I took photos of every course, but I’m not going to bother posting them because Not Quite Nigella has written it all up way better than I ever could. Seriously, if you want to see and read about what we ate, go over there. I will say that my favorites were definitely Chen’s mud crab soup and his signature mapo tofu, but that my least favorite was the soup that went with the mapo tofu. Afterwards, we all rushed out into the lobby for a chance to get autographs and photos.
Neither of them spoke English very well, so I chose my words carefully. “Chef Sakai, do you know ‘Halloween’?” I asked as I approached. “Halloween, yes!” he said cheerfully. “I WAS YOU!” I blurted out. “And him,” pointing at the Snook, “he was CHAIRMAN KAGA!” They laughed and laughed.
Final tally of weird/unfamiliar stuff that I ate that I never would’ve eaten five years ago: salmon mousse, braised carp, caviar, jellyfish, calamari, sea urchin roe, foie gras, kinugasa mushrooms, mud crab (with roe), lobster tail, and shark fin (we guessed there was some in the soup I didn’t care for). And while all that sounds really exotic, the dishes weren’t really “out there.” It’s not like I had a pile of any of those things; they were mostly used in tiny amounts as interesting flavours or textures. I had the definite impression that the Chefs were toning down the weirdness factor for Western palates. (Case in point: Sadly, no fish ice cream.)
Here’s an extremely blurry shot of the Snook and I enjoying our champagne cocktails at the start of the evening.
Halfway through the night, we played a game where everyone tried to guess where a mystery wine was from. The Snook made it the furthest out of the four of us. Here he is contemplating his next answer. (He didn’t win.)
The desserts really were something out of this world. Here’s the Snook checking out the pannacotta on top of the upturned martini glass. We were all a little unsure how to approach this. It was nummy though.
Everyone wants to know whether we got enough food for the money, and whether we were stuffed at the end of the night. Well, there was plenty of food. The portions were a good size (given that we had seven courses) and I’m not sure I could’ve eaten any more at the end of it. It just took so long! We were there a good five hours. Five hours of eating and drinking wine is actually pretty tiring. Here’s me and the Snook at the end of the night, just wanting to get our photo and go home to bed.
Here are our other two tablemates, Toast and Shan. Thumbs up all around!
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Comments are BACK
The comments are back! Do you guys even KNOW how difficult this week has been for me? I said to the Snook in a moment of frustration on Wednesday: “It’s like I keep having all these THOUGHTS, and I don’t have any outlet to share them with the world! If Kristy has a thought and doesn’t blog it, does it ever really exist?” Hyperbole, sure, but I really missed my little site.
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WE ARE BACK
And we are BACK!
Man, that was annoying. I got up Tuesday morning and opened up my site to see… nothing. Forbidden errors everywhere. You know; you saw them too. I fired off a quick support email to my hosting provider asking what was up. I got a reply back pretty quickly informing me that my site had been the target of a DDOS attack for the previous 72 hours, and they’d eventually been forced to shut it down because I was knocking all the other sites off my shared server. The support person claimed that access was now restored. This was not the truth. Not only could I not see the site, I couldn’t ssh or ftp to it either. I was able to get to the access logs though.There are some assholes in this world, let me tell you. Some person (or persons) is hitting my comment submission page upwards of 70,000 times a day. Luckily my little “captcha” question does a great job of keeping them off the site. Not a single one actually made it into the database. Unfortunately whoever has turned on this firehose doesn’t actually care whether their comments make it through or not. I’ve been explaining it like this: Say someone is prank calling your house every ten seconds. You’ve got caller ID so you know not to pick up the phone, but your phone line is still tied up the entire time. Plus it costs you time and effort to look at the number every time it rings. My php script was filtering them, but it was using up too much processing power to do it. I needed to block them before they got to the filter. Unfortunately they were changing IP addresses every couple hundred requests (mostly using open relays in Bulgaria and Turkey) so I couldn’t just block them outright. Finally the Snook and I hit upon a solution. It involves mod_security, an Apache module that allows me to set rules and kill bad requests before they tie up my system. So far it seems to be working. They’re still pointing the firehose at me, but hopefully I’m deflecting the worst of it.
So the upshot is – I’ve changed to Quadra Hosting, which is based here in Australia. I don’t begrudge my old host for turning off the site, but I am annoyed that they took 72 hours to give me access to my files. (No, I didn’t have a recent backup. Yes, I know this is stupid.) That’s why commenting is still restricted; even though they gave me ftp access, they’ve still locked down that particular file. Anyway, we seem to be back in business. I’ll hopefully have commenting back on as soon as possible. Thanks for hanging in there!
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Cold Turkey
Another Moving Update*: I’d say we’re about 20% along now. I managed to successfully cook dinner in our new crappy oven, which was mildly gratifying. The cat has finally emerged from the closet and seems to be eating. Here’s the truly amazing thing though: We just realised that it’s been 48 hours since we’ve watched any television. I cannot remember the last time I’ve gone that long without turning on a TV. On one hand I feel oddly free, and almost like I never need turn it on again… and on the other hand, I friggin’ love our bigass TV and I can’t wait to see it in the new living room. Technology will win.
* You’re going to get a lot of these, because I have nothing else to talk about until IRON CHEF on Wednesday night…