jr conlin's ink stained banana

For the record it's:
82 That's My Blogs to the mile,
302 Memoirs of Hydrogen Guys to the kilometer,
32.3 Dave's Picks to the hogshead,
1024 Jeremy Zawodny's Blogs to the astral unit,
(2048 Derek's Rantings and Musings to the parsec),
27 1/2 rhapsodic.org's to the hectare,
2 Lynne ydw is to the cubit,
46 Matthew Davey Onlines to the decible,
and an infinite Ink Stained Banana to the lepton.

All measurements are accurate to the nearest approximation.
(Not to be used for gambling purposes)

i have only myself to blame, but i still say i'm innocent.

This past weekend, we had some friends visit us from Davis, and since it was Memorial Day and we didn't feel like commemorating the brave sacrifices of those that gave their lives in the wars by buying mattresses, we headed over the hill to Santa Cruz. (Ok, Capitola, really, but nobody knows where that is aside from some Cement Boat fanciers.

Naturally, i wore long pants, brought a jacket and wore no hat nor sunscreen. This is because, having lived on the California coast for a few years, i know full well that our coast is the greatest source of natural fog in the world, and even more so during holidays and weekends. (Remember that really bad patch of fog you had a few years ago? The one that screwed up traffic and made everything miserable? That was probably imported fog fresh from our coast to you via fleets of covert tankers. What? Like we want any more of it?)

So, naturally, i got a sunburn.

Mind you, being mostly of Irish decent, my body is physically incapable of producing melanin (except for various tiny splotches of it sometimes referred to as "freckles" but in reality are nothing more that my body taunting me into thinking i could actually sit outside). Again, this is because of countless generations of bog dwelling ancestors who would run in terror when "the great yellow orb" appeared in their beautiful gray sky and make a sound similar to howler monkeys coming off of a three year vow of silence.

The odd thing is that i don't really tan so much as get "a dirty glow". No lie, i'd go out, get a bit darker, then take a shower and be back at my normal death-like pallor that makes all the Goth kids happy to hang around me.

Of course now that i'm bereft of follicle based UV protection, i'm even more screwed.

Fortunately, i'm not lobster-hued since i spent a fair amount of time avoiding the effects of being 93 million miles from a rather large nuclear reaction, but it still sucks.

And next time, i'll be sure to wear proper sun-screen, a hat and other bits of radiation protective materials the next time we venture toward the sea.

Mostly so that i'll be warmer as i sit beneath a thick blanket of unharvested fog.

Although i really never wanted one, i finally have a 404 page.

Because i wanted to make sure that even folks who were getting lost could manage to find their way around my site, i'd previously redirected folks to the top page instead of giving a 404. For the blog, i did something else. If you passed it crap parameters, i simply ignored them and punted you to the top page.

i did this for a few reasons, one being that the worst thing you can give hackers is feedback, or at least the right feedback. Likewise, yes, i was trying to be "helpful" and shunting folks to the main pages certainly seemed like a helpful thing to do.

The problem was that several search engines were, apparently, not paying attention to that "HTTP-Status" line in the header and i was winding up with urls like:

http://unitedheroes.net/blogs/jr/archives/p/www.eecs.harvard.edu/

~yaz/en/archives/cat/http%20://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/ww
w.geocities.com/jrconlin/www.geocities.com/jrconlin/http%20://www.
radwin.org/michael/blog/pages.ebay.com/ebay_toolbar/www.mattres
s.com/www.mattress.com/pages.ebay.com/ebay_toolbar/www.eecs.ha
rvard.edu/~yaz/en/www.m-w.com/tools/toolbar

plugging up my access logs.

and that's a shorter one.

So, now i have a 404 page that should be less than useful to almost anyone. i'll probably change it so it's a bit more obvious what it really is, (hint, read it, then try using the tab key), and i'll also be interested in seeing what effect this has on my pages.

Because i sure as hell hope it solves my access log problems…