Biking Mulholland Drive
August 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson
I took a bike ride today, and I think I about died at five or six different points. Every once in a while it's good to take a ride that absolutely just knocks you down a peg, just to keep an honest opinion of your riding abilities. This ride was one of those for me.
Basically Kathy's back in Michigan until the 26th. Normally I ride to church with her, but this week I was on my own to figure out how to get myself there. The problem: I go to Bel Air Presbyterian, which just happens to be on the entire other side of town, and on top of a mountain. It's not too far away, though, so I figured I could probably make it on the bike. — Continue Reading...
One Less Day of Classes?
August 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson
I realized today that one week before classes start back at USC, it might be good to check in on my schedule and make sure no classes I'm signed up in have been cancelled or otherwise changed to make them not fit my schedule. It doesn't seem that's the case for any of them, but it looks like my one Monday/Wednesday/Friday class (Latin III) is now a Monday/Wednesday. If that truely is the case that's perfect, since it was my only thing on Fridays. Still no professor listed for that one, though.
I realized today that I have no clue what my PIN number is to get into the USC apps for seeing balance due, registered classes, etc. For four years it was my birthdate (the default, which they gave you an option to change and I never did), then one day it popped up a "you have to change this now" box, and I changed it. I don't think I've used it since. The way they give to get it reset is via faxing a request to the Registration office. I guess I'll do that tomorrow.
Another Step Against the Spammers
August 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson
So the spam killer hit a little snag today when the comment spammers started making the request for the blog post and the comment come from different IP addresses, and the initial request not come with a referer. So I'm still blocking lots of referer spam, which is nice, but some comment spam came back.
Then I realized that all of the IPs I was seeing were actually open proxies. So I started looking them up on DSBL, and they were there.
Normally I'm all for anonymous proxies, but in this case I hate comment spam more than I care about people having to hide from the government to browse this blog, So I added a DSBL IP check to my blocking mechanism. I have it in the same PerlPostReadRequestHandler still, but you could block based on IP even earlier, so I might break it out and do it there. Now I just need to start grabbing the DSBL zone to secondary so that I can have a local lookup.
Oops
August 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson
I just realized that in my Apache upgrades the other day I broke mod_php4. It took me this long to notice because I only use php on the frontpage of ericrichardson.com. And, well, I never see that page. I should read my website more often.
In order to get mod_rewrite to do proxying, I had to grab the apache source package and compile mod_proxy into the binary. I guess that broke something the stock php4 module depends on, 'cause it segfaults on me now. I guess I need to build that from the source package now too. Ugh.
August Midnight Ridazz Comes to My Part of Town
August 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson
The August Midnight Ridazz was tonight. The theme was Tron, which I was pretty excited about. Not excited enough to actually figure out any sort of costume, but excited none-the-less. I had patched my front tire earlier today, so I was all set to ride.
Turns out the ride, or at least the part I was on, went through Downtown. I wrote about that over on blogdowntown. We went down Hill Street, then took a pass through Central City East, and finally circled the Caltrans building a few times. Then it was back through the 2nd St. tunnel to Echo Park, which we circled before just hanging out for a bit.
I show 14.93 miles from leaving my apartment to my return. Average speed shows up at 9.3mph, but I can't say if that's accurate; I did a lot of speeding to the front and then stopping to either take pictures or occassionally to stop traffic while the ride went through.