Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Phelps claims that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq because God is punishing America for harboring gays. I didn't know that America harbors gays. 'Give me your tired gays and lesbians, wretched trannies yearning to breathe free...' Since when has this country been a safe pink port in a storm? Phelps acts like America is just one big gay men's choir or lesbian softball league. I wish that I lived in the country that he believes is here." -- Margaret Cho, 2005-08-29 (thanks to ladyteal for pointing it out)

I got curious. Then I got a little obsessed. So it was probably a good thing I only had eleven days of logs at my fingertips. A little judicious massaging with 'grep' and 'sed' and 'sort' and 'uniq' and 'vi', and I see that the top two pages on my web site are still what they were the last time I looked, and that I should be less surprised that the CE/BCE definition page gets me more hate-mail (and more praise-mail) than any of my other pages, since a lot more people are reading it than I'd realized. I wonder how many places it's linked from, or whether it's just absurdly high in the search engine rankings. (Oh ... it is. How did my little page get ranked in between major sites like the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance and Wikipedia in the top three on Google for that search?)

I did some merging, trying to get translation-service hits on a page grouped in with the hits served directly. And I lumped all the referrer strings that made my eyes water and which looked like search engine stuff into one pile. This is all based on referrer info on hits to a one-pixel transparent GIF that I've got on all of my pages specifically for this purpose (I get detailed logs from the site where the images are hosted; just bare number-of-hits/number-of-bytes totals for all my pages put together from the site where the HTML is hosted), so any hits from users with text-only browsers or image-loading turned off are left out (unfortunately), but this makes me wonder why search-engine results are showing up in this list (shouldn't they be the referrer for the page the logging GIF is on, not for the GIF itself?).

I should get around to downloading a proper web-logs-analysis tool, or writing one. Eventually.

When FTP mysteriously stops working (and by "mysteriously" I mean with an error message of "Unknown error number"), it is quite reassuring to know that my preferred telnet program supports Xmodem/Ymodem/Zmodem/Kermit, and to notice that my ISP bothered to install 'rz' and 'sz' (Unix host tools to upload/download via Zmodem). *whew*

Now if I knew why 'uniq' and 'sort' let me down earlier ...

Half a month ago, I wrote about the ivy covering the wall of a vacant house behind mine turning bright autumn colours. Well ( I finally got around to pulling photos off my phone... )

It doesn't really bear enlarging any from this size, alas, so y'all aren't getting the full effect. (But I don't think the phone was ever really meant to capture a lot of detail at a distance anyhow.)

State of d'Glenn: Unwell. Not sure whether this is the fibromyalgia, migraine, or both playing tag using my body as a playground. (A lot like a nasty flu minus the fever, all the snot-related symptoms, and four fifths of the nausea. Weak, trembly, exhausted, joints & muscles ache, dizzy. Add hyperacute hearing, and sharp noises -- regardless of volume -- being very painful. Stir, and chill. The result is how I feel.) Plans for tonight postponed. Hoping for sleep.