Not going to bank on it but I think I might get decent sleep tonight, even if it means taking ½ a pill, the type of which I endeavor to not need or use, though I am certain to renege on that promise to myself.
I did not make it far outside this domicile today. The idea for an epic long walk sounded fine until I remembered rain coming, and until I discovered that the event on 18th Street to which I intended to walk did not occur tonight but is in a couple of weeks. Well then. I do need that long walk, though. As my drinking friends have suggested, vigorous exercise would let me get away with a lot more drinking. Hah.
I’ve connected to some classical music peoples through that Internet thing. It’s gotten me back at the piano enough that I’m reconsidering an idea I briefly entertained over the summer: Move the piano over near the computer, so I can have easier and more connected access to it and the Internet at the same time. I looked up furniture designed for combination piano/computer desk, and found surprisingly decent work in that realm. It’s nothing I could afford or, more likely, use. The desks are designed for lighter weight synthesizer type keyboards, not real digital pianos with weighted keys and all that my Roland piano includes. I can totally where such a desk, with a slideout piano keyboard, would be useful for composing and just playing stuff off the screen to see what it sounds like. But I don’t do that much composing, and the options for MIDI connectivity seemed strangely limited in the desks I looked at.
It’s not about so much connecting the piano to the computer, since that already happened when I plugged the piano into a Lenovo Horizon 2 Windows tablet. It’s about not letting the computer keyboard continue to dominate my energies when the piano could be a more meaningful and satisfying outlet for me. I, of course, have played piano since childhood, made something like a living at it for a while, but willingly and without regret withdrew from the livelihood and the lifestyle. These days I think I could find a place out there, not in performing or even composing but in radio or publishing. Or maybe I could just die.
Today I got to spend an hour figuring out how to stop one total fucking asshat individual from downloading my entire website using one of the crudest, most damaging scrapers I’ve ever seen. He (I assume it is the same person) sent an e-mail asking Hey, can I have all the content of your website? He then added that he couldn’t figure out how to download it all. I should have thought of it sooner but after a while I thought, what if he’s going ahead and ripping it off anyway? I tailed at the access_log and sure enough, someone (I assume it was him) was automatically hammering an old CGI search script on the payphone site at a rate of something like 20 queries a second. That’s an old script from the 1990s I would have retired long ago except that it has held up so well over the years. As proof of that the script in overdrive use today did not do what a CGI of yore might have under such circumstances, which would have been crash the entire webserver. I know, I know, I mentioned a while back that I wrote a scraper. I did not feel altogether good about it but I did it respectfully, spreading the accesses out over minutes, which caused the process to take weeks. But I didn’t care if it kept me under the radar and prevented me from getting banned from accessing the servers.
I banned the IP address and user_agent from which the queries came but I took it further and just removed that old CGI once and for all, putting in a private location where I and select others can use it but no one else can. I also looked at the dumbassery of his scraper scripts and find that of about half a million records he might have downloaded 15 percent of them, and much of what he got is completely obsolete anyway, though I can’t be sure that matters since I don’t know what his intentions are in hijacking all the content from my website.
Here is a random picture of Walter’s Washland, from my film SLR. Walter’s looks like it lasted about 10 minutes at this location on 30th Avenue near 41st Street.
Walter’s Washland
