BunkBlog

My Odd store hasn’t generated any interest yet, even though I think it’s a funny slogan.

Meanwhile, the kind folks at Cafepress have put out a new topical design – the military bear. Since many of my designs are military in nature, I figured it would be a good fit. So, get your camouflage Winged Ignorance bear today!

Over at the Andy Social Emporium, I’ve added a new design: What Would Guevara Do? I figured the What Would Chthulhu Do? design kind of bombed, so I’d get more political. Enjoy.

I’ve moved the past 14 months worth of LJ entries into Movable Type (minus comments), and I’ve added the RSS feed as a syndication for LJ. Anyone who wants to keep up with the site via LJ’s friends pages can now add the feed to their friends list. Those who read via any other RSS feed aggregator, look on the main page for the “syndicate me” link.

Now let’s see if I can sit still for a while…

For the next few days, the site will be odd. I’m going to be moving files around, changing the main index file so often your head will spin, and otherwise being a right pain in the ass. Deal with it. My site – mine!

Just added a new section to my site, with not much in it. Scavenger hunt to find it, if you care.
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Yet another new design in the Andy Social Emporium.

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Got a clarification on Cafepress’s “make $25 or get erased” policy. Apparently, there is a significant accounting problem at CP, due to the many stores with a small amount of commission due, yet not enough to send them a check. Those stores cause headaches. Stores with no commission due (all too many of them, I’m sure) don’t cause a problem.

So, I fall into the “pain in the ass” accounting category, it seems. I get about 25 bucks a year in commissions from Cafepress. But, they say they’ll make it easy on folks, by allowing them (soon) to use their commissions as partial payment on Cafepress products. If you do that, the commission accounting mess goes away, and your store remains open. Of course, it also means you used up your commission to buy a t-shirt instead of getting a check, but if you’re not making more than $50 per year, it probably doesn’t really matter anyhow.

Now, to prevent me from having to use CP-Bucks to buy my own stuff, you could head over to my store and help me out. Nobody has bought any “Eat Me” gear yet, which is quite a surprise, considering the folks on LJ…

Because some people think my background graphics for my site are BORING, I’ve revamped it a bit. If you view the site with a Mozilla-based browser (Netscape 6.x or Mozilla are the two biggies), or with IE 5.5 or greater on a Mac, you’ll see it exactly as intended. If you use IE for Windows (any version) or Opera (any version), you’ll see a slightly wrong version, but still readable.

Is the background boring or is it interesting enough?
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Just updated the site a little, adding a new Thought, this one about LJ.
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The store has some new stuff. The fine folks at Cafepress have added stickers, lunchboxes, and kid’s clothes to the line. Pretty neat.
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One of the highest-traffic clients hitting my site is WestPac Bank in Australia. Um, do the banks in Oz provide internet access, or are there lots of bored tellers there?
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While ICANN is contemplating whether to continue allowing Verisign to be a domain registrar (which makes me think of Dominar Rigel but I digress), they are sending out renewal notices claiming absurdities.

Apparently my domain is up for renewal “soon.” By soon, Verisign means next July. What time scale does the company work on that counts any time longer than a quarter as soon? Just trying to rake in a little cash before they lose the business, I suppose.
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Explain this, oh great geeks on my friends list:
The DNS records for andysocial.com were updated at midnight Saturday night. When I query ns1.earthlink.net for andysocial.com I get the new IP address. When I query WinSock’s internal lookup for andysocial.com I get the old IP address. I waited until 2 full days had passed before I erased the account at Virtualave, so I figured I’d be safe. Hell, I was surfing through my site all day yesterday, on the new host. I even set up a subdomain for to use for her vanity site. I uploaded a boatload of pictures to the gallery. Yet, I cannot get to my site through my ISP. The log files show other people are getting to the site just fine.

Why am I being sockblocked, if the DNS servers I am querying know better?

Update: Earthlink’s local POP got their cache re-started again. How it went back from a working updated load to an older set of data is apparently pure fucking magic…
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I never bothered to set a “robots” text file for my site, which explains some of the peculiar search results I get occasionally.

I noticed that I’d gotten 50 hits for “windows xp activation crack italian” as a search term, so I entered it into Google. Amazingly, my site is up toward the top of the hits, but the page it goes to is the stats page itself. It appears that once one person gets a strange search onto the stats page, it ends up being self-fulfilling, since the robots that index web pages hadn’t been told to exclude the stats directory. That’s been all fixed now, though. Of course, the Google cache won’t expire for months or years, so I’ll keep getting strange hits but at least now they won’t continue to multiply I hope.
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Finally trashed the cascading menu-tree metaphor for the site, replacing it with a frame-free DHTML-based menu system. Love that DHTML.

Anyway, hope it is easy to follow, I thought it worked pretty well. I even tested it in several browsers. It works in Opera, Netscape 6, IE, and Mozilla. Coolio.
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People who use my server’s bandwidth without asking are just rude. Someone had linked to the (now departed) Lianna’s Nekkid XXXmas images, so I kept moving them around to foil their off-site linking. Now, someone has decided to use one of the LJ userpics I made as an avatar on some board named “Suddenlaunch” – that one JPEG image is now the most requested file on my site, and is adding noticeably to my bandwidth usage.

Whoever is using that image – it’s been renamed. If I find it being linked again, I’ll delete it. Stop doing things without asking. That’s rather presumptuous.
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OK, please someone explain to me this anomaly:

According to the user agent logs for my site, I’m disappointed to see only 0.5% of the visitors are using Opera – my primary browser. I recently downloaded Mozilla 1.0, and I’m thinking I may change my primary browser soon…

Anyway, the anomaly is this – there was no version 5 of Netscape (also known as Mozilla due to a long history of rivalry with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champlaign’s Mosaic program). There was a version 4.x and now version 6.x, yet there has been only one hit in the month of July from “Mozilla/6.xx” and 2025 from “Mozilla/5.xx” browsers. So, does this mean that the user agent tag sent with every HTTP request from Netscape 6.x and Mozilla 1.x is fictitious? Does Netscape/AOL intend to keep identifying their browser by one lower number internally than externally? Isn’t this rather confusing to the software developers?

I need a more mentally stimulating day job…
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I added a new page of photos to the site, this time from my trip to Biosphere2. There are only a few photos up right now, but more will follow as I resize them and get a round tuit.
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I updated the Andy Social Emporium and the Camp XRay stores with new stuff. Frisbees and wallclocks are the order of the day.

It’s been a long time since I’ve update the Random Meandering Thoughts page, and this one is truly random and meandering. Things that aren’t just throw-away comments get put on my site, while more ephemeral stuff goes here.
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