We just got home from seeing Odysseo, and man that was one of the most beautiful looking shows I think we've ever gone to. I had heard nothing about it until I heard this WBUR story last week, and told Natalie that this was probably something we should look into. So beyond "It's horses, and acrobatics, and huge", I still knew nothing going in. The show was definitely all of those things.
As with Cirque du Soleil shows, there really are no bad places to see. Despite the size of the tent (Largest ever blah blah, biggest traveling yadda yadda ever), there are still only 2000 seats, so it still feels small and intimate. We were in theoretically the worst possible spot, 3rd row from the top, all the way to one side. You could see everything from up there, and it was all amazing and beautiful.
I could not believe the level of control they had over these horses just with voice commands, or even with no one in sight. They knew exactly where they needed to be and those horses Did Work. The "Horse People" in the audience cued us non-horse people as to what was really over-the-top cool and especially clap-worthy :-)
The integration of the ribbon performers was especially excellent and beautifully choreographed. I do maintain though, "White ribbons, Really? In a horse rink with dirt and mud and whatnot? They'll be filthy!"
Anyway, go. Go see this show, it's really pretty neat, huge, and choreographed. Get the cheapest un-obstructed view tickets you can and you'll be fine.
I know that if we'd put 10 minutes thought into it and brought my mom, she definitely would have been barking in my ear the whole time with "DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO MAKE A HORSE DO THAT!". A lot of that is lost on me as a Not Horse Person, but I knew when I should be amazed. I really feel kind of ashamed that we didn't think of it with her coming for a week like, tomorrow...everything just happened so fast.
Promo video:
And also, this is a thing I saw this week, via JWZ:
(PSA: You might know me to take lots of photos from shows, but hey, assholes, if a venue or performer explicitly says "NO photos, NO video, NO phones", don't take photos. Just enjoy the experience, and maybe /write something down afterwards/. I wish they'd bounced some of the people in the stands taking photos during this thing. As much as I think my stuff would have come out great, there is a matter of safety and annoyance of other audience members. And I'm sure someone on a trapeze must love it when they get flashed in the face by some moron with a cellphone while hanging from one foot 30' off the ground and spinning at like 80rpm or whatever)
Due to the unique way my brain works and the size of my CD collection, whenever I hear a song by one artist that I know I have different versions of, I have to queue up all the other versions and get the whole shootin' match.
This morning, I heard versions of Wild One (Real Wild Child) from Jerry Lee Lewis, then Iggy Pop, Lou Reed (different song but I still had to) and Brian Setzer. Now I'm on Honey Don't, first by Carl Perkins, now (Memphis band we met at Sun Studios) The Gunslingers, and next Wanda Jackson.
Videos!
Jerry Lee:
Iggy:
Lou Reed:
Brian Setzer:
Honey Don't
Carl Perkins (But actually, Ringo!):
Gunslingers:
REDEX - But, I strongly suggest you take a trip into historical times and listen to this track on Myspace. This was a super fun bonus of having gone to Memphis, was grabbing this guy's CD at the end of the Sun Studio tour, they were good.
This is just what the world needs, another smug mac owner. Since people seemed not to believe I do my homework and continue to offer me platform advice, I went and priced up an HP with the same specs as my new Pro.
All said and done, including stupid $250 for AppleCare, my new machine was $3248, delivered. The HP equivalent, a Z420 Workstation, was $3,707 + $45 shipping. That's for 6 core Xeon, base 6GB of memory (CRUCIAL...), 1TB 7200RPM drive, 1GB ATI card.
So $500 more for a machine with an OS I hate dealing with, sounds like a pretty good bargain. Oh, and it says right on the page that the NIC won't work with Windows 8, so that's pretty swell.
Lenovo would sell me a similar config, with a 4-core 3.30Ghz CPU for only $100 more than my machine, I couldn't get exactly the same 6 core Xeon in the S30 workstations I was looking at.
I think I'll take the bargain Apple product, thanks :-)
Overall though I'm pretty happy. Moving the software-RAID1 set between machines was just "move the drives, they work", which I didn't really expect.
Last of the big V8 Interceptors. I had to grab a new Pro before they decided only to sell those insane coffee magnets with no internal drive bays. Last one lasted 7 good years, here's to another computer in 2020.
I'm no longer forwarding cookie thieves to Natalie's site. I had been fussing around trying to make IPTables block all the botnet machines, and when that didn't work, I was just using deny rules in Apache, which sucked, because my include file of blocked hosts was 100,000 or so. That's in addition to the default "Block all of China, India, Eastern Europe" rules I apply. It also sucked because I'm still serving pages and so there were tons of ESTABLISHED, FIN_WAIT1/2, etc. connections, most of which were holding open Apache processes, which was crushing my machine.
The reason IPTables wasn't working turned out to be because of the VPS solution used by 1and1. There is a hard limit of 400 rules on the host, and I can't work around that, so I can't use IPTables with huge blacklists, at least, not that I've figured out.
What I'm doing now though is to use the LimitExcept directive to only allow GET requests in the virtual host which does the rewrites for nataliecurtiss.com. So now those fuckers are all just getting 403's or, in some cases, 500's (don't know why that is).
So yeah that was fun. A case has been opened with SquareSpace, since this attack traffic was all really directed at them. And the only logical thing I can think of is that the attackers are trying to guess session cookies of site admins who aren't explicitly logged out of their site admin tools. This would let the attackers exploit any XSS inherent in code generated by SquareSpace, or use the targeted site to infect more end user machines for this botnet.
Still, it's an awful lot of trouble to go to just to get your hands on Natalie's what, 12 legitimate users per month?
Now I just have a zillion connections in TIME_WAIT, but at least my site seems quick, all my services seem to be working at full speed ahead, and I'm going to stop thinking about this shit for a while. I'm not going to bother figuring out why I can't set tcp_tw_reuse to clean up all those TIME_WAITs.
Update:
The 500's are because I didn't set an auth-type for the user to be able to POST. Well, fuck 'em, they get 500's, since I never want anyone to ever do anything but GET, everything else can DIAF.
This is an odd Saturday. I got up at 7:15. That's not right. I'm still not supposed to be awake yet.
My site has been having problems this morning, serving pages, running cron, delivering mail... turns out that even though I don't host Natalie's site, I do redirect "nataliecurtiss.com" to "www.nataliecurtiss.com". So far today I've served 252,974 (presumably malicious POST request) redirects to her site. She has had 975,000 page views so far this month. That's also not right.
While looking that over, I checked my flickr stats. 900 flickr views so far today on really odd referrers, like "http://www.flickr.com/photos/xrayspx/with/9093592988/", usually I do around 50-100/day, not that busy.
Right now I'm flipping a quarter until it lands on its edge. Later I'm gonna go buy some lottery tickets.
Update:
Mmmmmm, cookies, hundreds of thousands of cookies:
POST / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Length: 500
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Host: nataliecurtiss.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: SS_MID=162751ed-f2cf-4fdd-8b7c-814881282033hiwadjls
If I'm glad for one thing that Facebook has given me, it's that it has shown me which people who count me as their friend are consistently racist, homophobic and sexist.
Al Jourgensen has just cured me of a huge crush I've always had for Amy Mann. I was reading some press interview for a book he apparently just released, and he comes out with the claim that Voices Carry was written about him. That's obviously pretty far fetched, and clearly completely wrong.
``Yes, we`re rational people. But we are also really sensitive artists who have a lot of pain to express.`` Most of it is Mann`s. For the songs on Voices Carry, she excerpted chapters from her own troubled love life, dwelling on the heartaches and heartbreakers. No More Crying, for example, ``is about Al Jourgensen (keyboard player with the synth-pop band Ministry) and nothing else,`` Mann says.
I'm a huge Ministry (RevCo, Lard, Homos, etc) fan, but man, that shit don't wash off...
Much like Evan Dando did when he tarnished my Juiliana, I find myself largely cured.
If anyone tells me anything horrible about Tanya Donelly, I might just hang myself!
I am in the market for a new computer. Apple has left me seriously disappointed with the new Mac Pro, what with its inability to hold many 3.5" SATA drives, and has driven me to the iMac after all this time. Internal storage and the fact that the iMacs of the time (2006) sucked was the main driver for me getting the Pro I have now in the first place. However, time marches on, I have a 32-bit EFI and can't upgrade past Lion, and the install is getting kind of crufty, and so I end up having to bounce the machine every so often, which sucks.
So the new Pro is out, might as well go with a maxed out iMac. I had two questions:
Am I going to see much difference between the i5 and i7?
Do I care about 2GB of video memory vs. 1GB
I asked a friend about the CPU thing. His response was "HP will sell you a way better machine for half the price anyway". Was that what I asked? Do I give a fuck what HP sells? Have I not already proven this to be false when I bought this Pro in the first place?
If I roll up in a BMW 535i, is your first reaction going to be "You could have bought a v6 Nissan Altima for half the price and only lost 30hp". No.
I have very specific needs, which Apple meets much better than Microsoft + HP (or whoever), my reasons are not "Because it looks cool" or "Because I am a hipster".
My reasons are:
I am not an Apple fanboy. I am a Unix fanboy
Use Cygwin, it's just as good
No fuck YOU, I don't like rewriting every goddamn little bash script every time I deploy to a different platform, the differences in output between GNU and BSD toolchains are annoying enough, I don't want to deal with MS tools on top of that.
Don't like Windows? Use Linux!
If Linux was a serious option, I wouldn't be ditching a perfectly good 4 core 2.66Ghz machine with 16 GB of memory just to get an iMac. Photoshop does not run on Linux. Illustrator does not run on Linux. I run many things on Linux, my wife's primary home machine is not going to be one of them.
Well dual boot Linux with Windows!!!
Explain that to my wife, and explain to her how her workflow must change because we're using Windows now because we're cheap.
Why should I reboot my machine, ever?
What if I want to quickly get a unix environment outside my work environment for testing, should I remote reboot into Linux? Manually change boot menu options before rebooting? Sounds like a waste of time.
But GAMES!
But I don't care about games. Anything I want to play I can either play on my HTPC or in a Windows VM on the Mac.
