Palfrey's life

<lj-cut text="Techie stuff">Been up to a few things recently, mostly of a techie nature. Most of you should be aware that this is effectively a standard disclaimer on my journal entries, but "Warning: techie stuff alert" applies (heck, I was thinking #include <std_disclaimer.h> while writing that, but if you get what that means I guess you don't need to worry)

*Finally* got around to thinking of and registering a domain name. I am now the proud owner of tevp.net. All the good variants on 'palfrey' and "Tom Parker" were gone, so I was down to my initials. tevp.com is actually owned by someone else (not quite sure *why*, but hey. I wanted a .net anyways). Now, for those of you who haven't done this before, a piece of advice. Don't do this at 1am. Or, you get a bastard provider like 1&1 who doesn't appear to be easily amenable to pointing the A record at *anywhere* but their servers... ok, they are providing mail forwarding for whatever@tevp.net to my bits addy, and http://tevp.net/ does point at my homepage, but it's all being done with frames, so everything fucks up a bit. Bastards. Have sent shitty email demanding they either switch the A record or I'm getting my domain transferred to a less crappy provider.

Found some fuckwit on a random message board was directly linking to one of the images on my site as his avatar pic. Now, I think that the legal shit against deep-linking to a page on a site that has the appropriate links back to the main site and so on, is a bunch of dog shit a mile high. But, direct linking a pic, with no attribution to the providing site, chews up my provider's bandwidth, without giving me anything back. IMNSHO, there's an implicit social contract here. If you want to see something cool on my site, you should at least be aware it's my site you're looking at. Egoboo is the only payment going on here, but that only works if you know the source of your enjoyment. So, I decided to find a technological measure against this. Found out we didn't have <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a> installed (and I couldn't be arsed recompiling Apache), so found some stuff with <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_setenvif.html">mod_setienvif</a>. Now the only allowed referers to my images are either my site or a blank referer (various reasons for allowing that, but should at least fuck up most of the assholes)</lj-cut>

Got around to subscribing to LJ. Figured that I was making enough of a demand on the system, and it's pretty much my only social thing right now (more on that in a second) so I can afford it. Means I get to do things like have a few more icons, and see my <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/palfrey/friendsfriends/">Friends of Friends</a> page, which is pretty cool. Searching for a decent Defiant pic/making my own screencaps soon....

As I was looking through my referrer logs anyways, decided to have a quick look and see how people were finding my homepage. The search requests were somewhat interesting. Here's a few of the best examples:

they must die software
gutting imac to pc
IMAC can't boot
parker's jeans
cruel and unreasonable quotes
sky of blue and sea of green in our yellow submarine
Merle Meacham
imac fishtank
"THERE IS NO HELL, THERE'S ONLY FRANCE"
TOM PARKER SEX
eire ireland and schizophrenia
Joseph Stalin and related quotes
parker and stack
BBC tom parker

I *swear* that every one of these is genuine. The capitalisation and quotes are exactly how I found them...

Saw "The Last Samurai" last night. This has been my *only* social thing in these last two weeks (I'm driving myself up the wall right now), and it wasn't the best of choices. Ok, it's a pretty good film (American social guilt over the american indian massacres, and a last attempt at saving samurai culture as a semi-redemption of one person's involvement in that. Despite my general "all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy shit" opinion on most things trying to stop progress, and the basic dichotomy of attempting to merge pacifist Buddhist beliefs with the brutal nature of fighting that is the point of the Samurai, I still like the whole Samurai thing), but trying to watch something that has large chunks in Japanese (which my knowledge is basically zero), subtitled into Dutch (which I can only vaguely understand), isn't the best of choices. Especially when you've gone to see it on your own. Despite my occasional thoughts re: slagging off the AEGEE wednesday evening things, and their parties as well, I need that social interaction badly. It may not be quite what I want (where are the sci-fi ppl??), but it'll keep me sane until I find a better option.

Maybe I should put a want ad: Wanted, 1 social life. "Good bloke" geek seeks intelligent conversation, fellow sci-fi geeks, and a social circle that isn't just international students. Has braidable hair, in-depth knowledge of british culture, can probably fix your computer, and a deranged sense of humour. Time wasters welcome, as that way he gets to stay sane until better options come along.

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