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Mailbag, July 2002 |
| Selected emails sent to the site in July
2002, with additional comments and perhaps even some humor here or
there.
Away we go.
It's always nice to hear from the readers, with good or bad comments. Generally they are good, but I'm not adverse to constructive criticism. Just so long as I'm not blamed when whatever Ryan is securing is stolen while he's reading one of my page updates. On his final comment, I do just the opposite. I never post my realm names anywhere, and I have reduced my old account flux_diinet to mules only, and let others that had variations on "diabloiinet" in them delete, since I would get recognized when I played with them. I don't really mind if someone knows who I am (other than the people who have tried to PK me since they "wanted to get a famous ear", as they said) but I don't want to seem to be trying to get attention or notoriety from the site. The other reason is that people use my name, and the d2 site's name, to try to rip people off, or get free stuff. Here are a couple of examples in screenshots people sent in to me at the d2 site. Neither one are us, obviously. I asked a friend at
Bliz to delete the diabloii.net account. I hope the impersonator
didn't have much stuff on it. *evil laughter*
Here is a reply to a tech support mail I sent to my hosts. It's typical tech support bullshit, using basic explanations of how the Internet works in an effort to throw off a person. My actual question and examples were totally ignored. Hey, what do I want for $8 a month, right? The issue, which I mentioned in a blog at the time, was solely in my uploading to the server. I could surf it fine, and download fine, but I was finding it impossible to upload. I'd try, it would start and go at 8k/sec for about 2 seconds, then nose-dive to a crawl, literally 50bytes/sec, or something like that. This made it impossible to upload anything bigger than about 25k, since it would always time out with like 18k uploaded in 30 seconds. Uploaded files to a website aren't partially viewable, if you are wondering. Images may be, but HTML pages that are 99% up aren't normal-looking, with just the bottom 1% missing. It's all or a bad link error, there isn't any in between. I could DL fine from the server, via browser or FTP, and I could upload fine to the d2 site and a friend's site, but not to this site. And it wasn't that I couldn't upload at all, I could do small things, just not bigger ones, since the speed would die after a second or two. Anyway, this tech support's bullshit reply aside, the problem which had been awful to unusable for two days was totally fixed the afternoon after I sent this mail, so perhaps they got enough complaints that they finally looked into it and found some simple thing to fix.
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The emailer here is interesting. He mailed me at the D2 site, asking what the URL to my home page was. The guy, Cannonballs, was a webmaster on another D2 site long ago, years ago. He then worked on some other Bliz gaming sites, and may still, for all I know (I don't surf any of them other than the one I work on). How he came to know that I had a site, but didn't know the URL, is a mystery. I mailed him the URL, and he obviously looked around and this was his next mail. He prompts a good point, that I should have some more info on the images. I did have it mentioned on the site design page, but I've since added info about it a couple of other places, and put in links on the Site Map page. There isn't any archive of them, but there is a different one on every type of page on the site, so you can just click the links on the nav bar and see them all quickly enough.
________________
No offense to the mailer, but this is like my nightmare. I put off getting a domain name for a long time since I knew I'd have to use my real name and information to register one. Well, that's not why, the fact that it's very easy to look up the owner of any domain name is the problem. Companies have a business address and legal people listed, so they don't care, but individuals usually don't have an office or lawyers to hide behind. If you read my updates regularly, you can probably get a sense of how much I like to socialize with people in real life (as little as possible). I get along fine with people at work, I just don't have any desire to see them any more than I do. I talk to lots of friends online, I just don't have any desire to meet them in real life. Yes, I'm lonely and miserable and a hermit and even when cute haircutters all but hand job me in the chair I let it slide. All that being said, please, don't call me or come see me at my work. That goes for everyone, I'm not in any way picking out this one emailer. Now I have no objection to replying to emails and chatting about this or that, and it's possible that I'd go from that to meeting in RL, but there would be a considerable courtship beforehand. So to speak. I'll waste hours doing nothing online, but for some reason in real life I'm really selective about how I spend my time, and with whom.
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Now this is the best email I've yet received here, but since I posted it on the site the day after it arrived, and discussed it then, I won't do that all again here. Click this to read it in the August 29th update. He mailed back a few days later, technically in August, but we'll post it here for continuity.
He should have a blog, he's got more to say than I do?
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Their site is here, and there's nothing to it. Just a CGI page to enter your domain name, and other contact info. I assume this is an email they have a bot send out to basically every person on earth. No idea what they would offer for the domain name here; it's not like anyone else has any use for it. Maybe they just have a way to renew domains for very little money, so they squat thousands of them and hope that in eight years someone will want to make a movie that they happen to own the name dot com for?
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The really bizarre thing was that I'd read that article elsewhere a couple of days before he mailed it. I found the whole thing just really unpleasant, and also quite suspect. (Seems way too sensationalistic to be entirely true.) Despite those obvious bonuses, I still didn't post it on this site. Click the link in his mail and go read it now if you are so inclined. It's about kiddy directed porn in the Amazon. He had a couple of other good comments in his mail, but I posted both of them in the update on the 31st, so I won't repeat here.
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This is a weird one. I recall posting about a news article on space elevators months and months ago. They seem like cool things, though they are very much conceptual now. The idea is to make super strong cables and stretch them to some sort of space station in low orbit. You would be able to use some sort of elevator device to actually lift payload up the wire, and it would be faster and much cheaper than the rocket launches we have to use today. Anyway, cool and all, but I posted about it in maybe May or April, and got this mail the last day in July. Obviously I came up on some sort of search engine for them to mail me, but god knows how or why now. I didn't reply within seven days, so now I'll never know.
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