Well let me tell you.

Well it’s my 29th birthday in 28 minutes, if only I’d written that a minute ago eh? I’m moving house this weekend and will be having a house warming party the weekend after. I’m getting shit loads of 419 emails and I mean loads. Sparkes gave me his Digital Alpha Server 800 today and I gave him 2 486SX laptops for him to play with Minix 3 on. I might have a look myself to be honest. I still have to work out how to get the Alpha to boot from the Debian CD, it’s not apparently straight forward.

I’m still busy at work, ploughing along with the daily admin tasks while trying to catch half an hour or so to play with Xen, Python, tape backups (!= fun), moving people over to my new mail server and so on and so on. I downloaded the Dive Into Python book and printed it at work as it had work related benefits. I don’t like reading from a PC screen too much, but I now I have a 5 or 6cm thick pile of treeware. Now I know why PDFs are called the portable dekstop format. I haven’t had much of a chance to read to yet though.

As for the house move, I have single handedly moved most of my stuff to the new house. The only things left in my current house are my PC equipment, my desk, bookcase, bedside table, clothes, TV, toiletries and crap likes alarm clocks and bedside lamp etc. I’ve filled almost the entire floorspace in what will be my home office with my unsorted crap. I overheard my housemate say down the phone that, “Adam’s got so much crap its unbelievable.” And to be honest, I have. I’ve got loads of books, boxes and computer paraphernalia. I don’t know where it all came from.

I think I’m going to have to move my blog hosting. Sparkes was kind enough to provide this hosting for me, but I think I’m outgrowing it, either that or I’m getting spammed out of existence.

I moved to using Spam Karma 2 as recommended by The Mysterious Cities of Bald to deflect the evils of blog and comment spam since Spaminator stopped getting developed and wasn’t much more than 50% effective. Well since then the amount of comment spam that I have to moderate has dropped to 0, seriously. It’s all still sitting there in the background, but Spam Karma 2 is filtering the lot out so I don’t know it’s there. I’ve been checking it quite frequently and there are no false positives, its great.

The problem comes from the fact that my data transfer has increased 10-fold in the last month, I’m hitting my bandwidth limit and I’ve only got about 8 MB disk space left since I uploaded my LUG Radio Live photos to my gallery. Now I think that’s mainly to do with referral spammers. For the non-techies it’s a long story, but for the techies, all of my top 20 referrers with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 are referral spammers. With no technical understanding of either approach, I’m guessing that Spaminator just stopped the communication process when it decided the comment/trackback/referral was spam and Spam Karma allows the process to complete and just drops it in the spam hole before deleting after the specified amount of time. I might be completely wrong here, as I said I have no technical reasoning behind my theory, I’m just scratching around for an answer to how my bandwidth usage has increased by 1000% in a month. I can’t suddenly be that popular, I haven’t written anything that interesting recently and I know I’m not getting linked from elsewhere that much. I can’t think of another reason. So, I’m thinking of moving my website, blog and gallery to new hosting. I work for an ISP so it shouldn’t be a big deal, it’s just that I’d prefer a dedicated machine rather than shared hosting, that way I can afford to play a bit more with stuff without putting any of our other customers at risk. We’ll see on that one.

Oh erm, I gotta go, it’s late and I’m up early in the morning 🙁