Ramblings of the Mildly Insane

It just occurred to me, after posting my list of search results, that I rank within the top 3 on the major search engines for my name “teli” and a couple days ago, I offhandedly mentioned my blog to a client of mine. He asked for the address and I politely declined.

Well, sure ‘nuf, he says he’ll find it and I laughed, then asked him how. I feel like such a dumbass. Well, maybe he’ll think this blog belongs to a different Teli. Gosh I hope so.

It’s that time again (well, I’m actually late this month, but oh well). In January, people found my blog by typing one of the following phrases below (bolded stuff in parenthesis are my own thoughts) – BTW, they are in no particular order, just whichever ones jumped out at me.

1. teli (woohoo – people know my name!!!)
2. do men have it easier than women (yes)
3. opening gmail inbox takes ages (it does, doesn’t it?)
4. i spent the summer between my 2nd and 3rd year of college suckling on the parental teat in south florida.(?!?)
5. what did maya angelou do with her spare time (write? hell if I know)

Bonus:
6. budget-telecom scam (seems I’m not the only person this company screwed)
7. i want to know how to draw vampires (yea? me too)
8. the perspective of the insane (who could possibly think I have perspective?)
9. chrismakwanzakah (hope you had a merry happy one)
10. insane poems (what other kinds of poems are there?)

It seems that this whole bandwidth consumption and DDoS problem is spreading. First Paul’s hit, then I receive an email from another friend asking for help for her friend because her bandwidth is being consumed like water. Then I check my stats and see that somehow, someway, my tiny blog which barely used to consume 10MB of bandwidth per month has consumed 210MB since this morning (bringing the grand total to 710MB for the entire 8 days of Feb.) – WTF?

Why? Why in the world do people just decide to suck up people’s bandwidth for no good reason? Who did I manage to piss off with my non-denominational inspirational blog? For that matter, I know my insanity blog is a little insane, but I didn’t personally call anyone an a**hat or anything like that – so, why?

Well, after checking my stats, I see that some dumb f*****r from *********.com has managed to suck up over 500MB of bandwidth in just under 8 days. Correction – just under 3 days. I’ve just finished banning their IP and adding some rewrite rules, but this problem has prompted me to take action against another annoying problem – referrer spam.

It seems these pesky boogers are starting to get persistent. I’m now seeing 50+ hits per spammer domain name so their referrer spam is visible within the top 50 referrers – and not just for one of my sites, but ALL of my sites. This is absolutely ridiculous – what they hell do they hope to gain by spamming my NON-PUBLIC log files? I frankly am not a balding impotent poker playing man – I don’t want any of the crap they’re selling.

So now, my already huge .htaccess file is going to have to get huger so I can block these dumbasses, like I don’t already have enough s**t to do – WHYYYYYYYYY MEEEEEEEEE?!?

UPDATE: It seems I know the dumb f*****r and this person really isn’t dumb at all – actually quite intelligent (and nice). It appears that this individual was having some problems with the server and is working to remedy the problem. After the problem’s all sorted out, I’ll be un-banning the IP address of the sesrver and all will be right with the internet world (well, except for that stupid referrer spam).

P.S. For those of you who know me IRL, I know your eyes are bugging out right now cuz I’ve just cursed a million times in the last couple days and “it’s not like me” – I apologize. I’m cranky.

I’ve never actually wretched while watching television before…until now. I wonder whose brainchild “How Clean Is Your House” was because this show is scary on so many different levels. When you can say:

I think the cockroaches carried it off one day

with a straight face (not even a flinch) – you know you have a damn problem. I shudder to think. I know I should have flipped the channel when my chest started heaving and I was almost assured I would lose my cookies – but I couldn’t, I was paralyzed from fear and some sick twisted awe.

I do have to comment on the two ladies though. WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY THINKING?!? If you walk into a house and things scatter – you don’t pick anything up. You don’t touch anything. You don’t stick you nose in the sh*t and then look surprised when it smells like it will come back to life and snatch you. You just don’t do that. You just don’t. But apparently, they needed to put common sense aside for ratings or something.

I have my days when cleaning sucks (every day), but I do it anyway. I’m afraid of toilets, but I still clean it. And you know what else? Even if my fear of toilets did become so crippling that I wasn’t able to clean my toilet anymore, I’d HIRE someone to do it for me.

Parents, if you want your children to clean their rooms, sit them down, tape their eyelids open, and make them watch this show – I guarantee you they will think twice before they toss their dirty undies on the floor again.

Lord I pray I have no nightmares tonight.

As I always say “the grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s just astroturf.” (i.e. fake grass). It’s always nice to be reminded that the people we often look up to and strive to emulate are not the perfect creatures we make them out to be.

I won’t link to anyone specifically because I don’t want to call anybody out or anything, but, while I don’t enjoy seeing anyone fail – it’s a good reminder to see a *not so successful* project or item or whatever launched by a guru (or a-lister).

The one difference between the gurus (or a-listers) and the upcoming gurus (or a-listers) is that the gurus keep going in the face of failure. They don’t give up.

I’m currently working on a project that is “under wraps” and I had to find blogging software that would entail all the features I wanted while still being easy to use.

I looked over 3 in particular. ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, and WordPress.

Textpattern has a great deal of template flexibility. While it would be easy for me to figure out from a publishing standpoint – I would like to think I understand how the average user’s brain operates, and I believe they would definitely be confused with the Sections/Categories schema and frankly, I don’t have the time or patience to sit down one on one with some 50+ people to babystep them through how to publish with Textpattern – at least, not for this project.

ExpressionEngine was definitely looking like the leader of the pack because it had all the functionality I was looking for and then some – well, that is, all except one feature. A very important feature. The ability to restrict posting to specific categories.

I was two steps away from going with ExpressionEngine when I decided to email their support and ask about the category restrictions (which was one of the biggest things for me) and was politely told “no – they don’t support that” and since I already knew WordPress had a hack for it (heck, it’s already set up in the installation I have) – my decision was made.

WordPress was looking like my only remaining option. But I really didn’t mind at all because I’m very comfortable with WordPress.

I had a list of absolutely necessary features, not absolutely necessary, but would greatly sway my decision features, and would be nice to have features.

The list of absolutely necessary features is:

• Relatively easy to use.
• Something I am familiar with (or can become familiar with in a relatively short amount of time)
• Unlimited # of users
• Flexible (I needed to be able to customize to my heart’s content)
• Automatic RSS feed publication
• Search Engine friendly link structure

The “not absolutely necessary, but would greatly sway my decision” list of features is:

• Ability to restrict user posting to specific categories
• Post moderation (just to make sure no overzealous users post something, um, illegal)
• Uploading images restrictions
• Category Specific Feeds
• Password Lockdown
• Email all users from admin panel

The “nice to have” features are:

• Post expiration dates (for the time sensitive stuff)
• Author icons
• “email this post to a friend”
• Naughty word filtering

While I thought there were a few things that WordPress didn’t have which could be found in one or the other alternate choices (post moderation, post expiration dates, user password control, email to a friend), those items fell into the not absolutely necessary and nice to have categories, so I knew I could live without it.

Then today, while working on a completely different project ( ) I went through the WordPress Plugin Archive and found plugins for just about every need on the list that was not yet met. Now I have post moderation, author images, email to a friend, and password lockdown for specific users (on a side note, I really think that the next release of WP should give the super admin power over user passwords – not necessarily to see them, but to change them, edit them, prevent them from being changed when need be). Sweet.

After all is said and done – plugins downloaded and installed – WordPress is only lacking two features which would be nice to have for this project:

• email all users (or users above a specific level) from the admin interface. Hmmm, maybe I’ll get to writing a plugin for that if someone already hasn’t – would definitely be a good way for me to practice PHP.
• post expiration date (I do intend to have time sensitive info on the site I’m planning)

As of this moment, I’m truly happy with my decision to go with WordPress (and since I’m already writing a walkthrough in non-geek speak for it – it will come in handy for schooling my writers). Yipee, back to work.

A while ago I learned a new word. I forgot to write it down, and then, today – when I needed to remember that word – I couldn’t and I sounded like a complete ass when my sentence started with:
“the word had les in it…”

Since I knew I wasn’t going crazy, here it is:

lesmerized™ (lez-ma-ris-ed): when a woman (typically a heterosexual woman) is in awe of another woman’s physical assets or aesthetics, inspiring a lesbian-like attraction.

Big thank you to girlwonder for this one

I’ve said it once before, but I’m gonna say it again – this addiction to blog reading just ain’t healthy. And then Paul, going against all better judgement, went and created yet another awesome blog that has been burning a hole in my feedreader.

I actually like reading his blog. It’s like he scoops all the “blog news” (news about blogs) and puts it all in one place for me – thanks man. I’ve even gleaned a few nuggets of wisdom already and the blog is only a few days short of brand new.

Dude – no more blogs – please – I gotta work.

I design websites. Not necessarily for the money. Just because I like it. I learned about this amazing thing called a “computer” a few years ago through a dear friend of mine. He was always playing with something he called “Photoshop” and then, it all started with two little words “what’s photoshop?” – the rest was sort of history. I kind of just let it sit on the back burner for a while, then a miracle happened and I came across a site called CSS Zen Garden.

From that point on, I wanted to make pretty designs like those and the next thing you know, I was teaching myself those cool nifty CSS things. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread – until I realized that IE was the ultimate crappy browser and now, today, AOL is taking it’s place. Yes, I know that AOL uses the same IE rendering engine – but it seems they somehow made it worse. I didn’t think it could be done, but they did it.

I designed a very nice site for a client (if I do say so myself, and of course, I’m basing this off the compliments I received from my site reviewers) and EVERYTHING seemed perfect. I finally – after hours of nearly pulling out each strand of hair from my head – got the site to look the same on all the browser platforms (Mac and PC).

I even managed to get the transparent PNGs to display properly in IE (well, all except Mac which sees nothing at all by way of transparent PNGs thanks to this nifty thing called display: none) – anyhoo, I digress – never once did it occur to me to check it in AOL because I figured AOL uses IE6.

How much more wrong could I get? I’m about to break down and just do the damn thing with a giant table and tag soup.

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! If AOL were a physical product, I’d beat the holy crap out of it!

Sorry for that – I just needed to vent.

UPDATE: I know I really shouldn’t have threatened tables and tag soup. That was wrong of me. I was just upset and frustrated, and I know that’s no excuse. But I was strong though and found a plausible work around – however, my CSS no longer validates – oh well, I call this taking one for the team (the team being what’s left of my sanity).