That’s where the humor of writing the vitriol posts comes for me. Most of the time I’m calm and want to stay calm. Occasionally, I can get my self riled up and angry about a topic, but I’d rather not. So while these vitriol posts seem to amuse everyone and are very popular, they won’t be getting any more frequent. Really, most people don’t like to be needlessly angry and I’m no exception.

The second portion of writing them is that it is quite amusing to me just how very therapeutic it is. Most of the time it is too therapeutic. By the time I get done writing one of my angry posts, I’m generally completely calmed down. Take yesterdays entry for example. It takes me a while to get all my anger down onto the computer in a semi-directed fashion. Between the time taken, and the therapy of writing itself, I was 100% calm and collected afterward. In fact, I’m writing this post directly after that one.

While I dislike doing so, in order to keep the vitriol post nice and hateful, I have to force myself to keep angry. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is a switching for more of a low loathing with some extra swearing. I feel bad, but I want to be honest with those that read it. Plus I’m curious, is it obvious? Maybe If I start calming down, I should go play the game that pisses me off some more… give me more to be angry about. Or maybe when I start to get calm, I should just add a conclusion and call the article finished (even if somewhat abruptly).

Anyone have a preference?

BRB or “Be Right Back” would be fairly obvious in its meaning, you are leaving, but you’ll be “right back”. The real problem is, what does “right back” entail for a given amount of time. The most basic use is “BRB Biobreak” or “BRB BRB” (meaning: bathroom break), and that is a minute or two tops. Other times, I’ve seen people say something like “BRB McDonalds”, and unless the Micky D’s is across the street – that is probably going to take some time. Is there a limit on what “right back” should be? For me BRB maxes out at 5-10 minutes, anything more than that must be an AFK. It’s all subjective, which is really not helpful.

AFK or “Away From Keyboard” is also fairly obvious, you are going away from the computer. This is more indeterminate than BRB, since AFK simply means that you are gone – that’s it. Sometimes I’ll include an expected ETA such as “AFK 20″, so others will approximately when I’m to return. Even though the return is unknown, by saying “Away From Keyboard” one generally expects that you will return, at some point in time.

So in the end BRB and AFK serve the same function. The real problem is where you draw the differentiating line. You could “AFK” and be back in less than 5 minutes. On the other hand you could “BRB” and be gone for 8 hours. How do you, the reader, separate BRB and AFK? Do you have specific requirements for the use of each of these wonderful TLAs? Or do you use them interchangeably? Or maybe just one over the other? Or maybe you think this is a stupid waste of time and you want the 5 minutes you spent reading this, back. Discuss.

Does anyone out there still buy things locally when you can get them on Amazon for cheaper? If so, Why? (Note: I realize some things aren’t necessarily economical to get shipped – like LCD TV. But for smaller stuff)

Update: For some reason this got set to one day previous – its now been fixed.

As for my server… I thought I’d share a quick run down of some of the stats I collected. I’m sure I’ll have more info later. But here’s the quick version

Google Analytics Report (For yesterday 2007-09-28):
- 7,095 Absolutely Unique Visitors
- 7,150 Visits
- 72% of Visitors Used Firefox !! (IE got 14%)

My Internal Stats Software Says:
- 218,132 Hits
- 354.29 MB of Bandwidth Used

Just for the record. Thats about 400 times more hits than a normal given day. As its been pointed out though, most Digg users don’t visit more than once. I’ll be interested if anyone stops by again.

Update: Sorry for the Dupe. Don’t know what happened there.

Update – 2007-09-28 @ 16:43 While I’m still getting a good amount of traffic from Digg, Apache hasn’t crashed in a few hours. I’ll keep an eye on things, but it seems like the worst is over. Please don’t tell /. about me.

You thought I was going to say porn, didn’t you? Well obviously the internet isn’t for porn, its for bots. God damn my site has been hammered to hell the last couple months. I made some more ban changed mid last week, namely banning the entire internet. If you are reading this, you are in one of a dozen countries that I specifically allow to access my site. I’ve banned everyone else. Mainly because the bot traffic against my site is out of hand. Last month my site received some 55,000 hits. In the “heyday” of my blog when I updated every single day with useful information I normally didn’t receive more than 20,000 hits. So obviously there is something wrong. If that isn’t enough proof, as of right now I’ve already received more 10,000 hits to my site this month (Yes, as in the last 3 days). As of now, 98.5% of the traffic against my site is receiving a 403 Forbidden message (aka BAN HAMMER). Hopefully this will help reduce the traffic against my site as comment spammers slowly learn that its a waste of bandwidth. Luckily the 403 forbidden page is rather small, so even with several thousand page views a day, my bandwidth usage is negligible.

I’m hoping to get back up to at least 3 posts per week (m,w,f). I’ve managed to do that a few times, but I’d like to get back to a regular posting schedule. Recently I’ve been spending alot of time at work on our anti spam solution (MailScanner + SpamAssassin + etc). So I hope to be posting a bit about that, and the results I’ve been finding.

To those people that complain about these security measures, like the lady that they interviewed (who was really pissed when she had to throw out the 80$ make up). YOUR AN IDIOT. The TSA may be retarted, but they aren’t doing this for fun. THEY ARE DOING THIS FOR YOU, THE FLYER’S, SAFETY. You should be thanking them for not banning electronics, or carry ons all together. And maybe, someone will invent Transporters and we won’t have this problem any more.

Life is strange that way.

Edit: 20minutes latter, brown outs begin. Looks like I spoke too soon.