\t\t\t\t The a\/c situations is not as bad as I thought. Somehow the dial got turned to \u201cwarmer\u201d. I don\u2019t know when or why that happened but I turned it to \u201ccooler\u201d and things are fine. I don\u2019t have to go for long rides on buses to keep cool. I wish I could do more work from such places, though. I really cannot do the type of coding I do much of anywhere but at a computer with at least two screens. I may have never noticed it but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen anyone at a coffee shop with a spare monitor plugged into their laptop. <\/p>\n
\n Today I debated the ethics and best practices of screen scraping, a practice I\u2019ve always eschewed, and which in the past I\u2019ve attempted to prevent happening to my sites. Of late I\u2019m sure my sites have been ransacked time and again by villainous scraping marauders looking to screw up my link rank and make money off my content. But I still get a solid quantity of pageviews per day, so I can\u2019t be as bad as I think. Or can I? Pageviews don\u2019t mean too much, do they? I don\u2019t even remember. I hate this business.<\/p>\n
\n So I set up a mini-scraper just to plan how I would unleash a bigger one, and how to build the URLs. It\u2019s almost fun and all but really, why am I not writing bad poetry or composing middling piano music instead? Some of that I can do at the same time, or at least I used to be able to do that. <\/p>\n
\n At the BakeWay on Broadway in Central AsLIC. I did not drink last night and do not know if I will tonight. Took another panic pill around midnight, and slept reasonably well after playing AlphaBetty past 2am. <\/p>\n
\n It is a different kind of sleep sans booze and I am starting to enjoy it. This kind of sleep actually keeps my mind engaged, versus shutting it up or erasing itself upon consciousness. I guess I never would have thought of it that way, that sleep would be more fun if I was more actively engaged in its passage. <\/p>\n
\n I would likely think differently of this sort of thing if I had anywhere to be the next day, and could not just sleep until I felt like waking up, as has been my wont for over 15 years. Yikes. <\/p>\n
\n In the new sleep I feel objects settle into my states of half and more than half consciousness. These are composite objects from conversations and correspondences. Last night it was some kind of metal frame that resembled a big old cassette tape, a cassette far larger than any that I think ever actually existed. It contained spools of tape as well as a little ant farm, a radio tuner (but no volume dial) and some room to store a knipl. That object lay across my chest for much of the night. I tried to push it away but it settled in, where I swear the cassette tape started to play but I could not turn it up to listen because there was no volume dial.<\/p>\n
\n And I continue to hear music being made between the intermingling of the Honeywell air filter and the big Lasko box fan. The tune those two blowing machines make is actually becoming familiar, though I still cannot remember it when waking. It reminds me of Dr. John.<\/p>\n
\n I made a bit of a weird discovery regarding that mailbox locator. I set up a new and self-described \u201cEnterprise Level\u201d search engine, unlike any I\u2019ve ever used. It has tab after tab of features and toys, most of which I will probably never use.<\/p>\n
\n But its strangest revelation has been its logging of search queries by site visitors. I discovered that I can see everything they type in, matched up to their IP address. <\/p>\n
\n For the most part that tells me nothing, except that someone from a Dallas, TX, IP address is looking for mailboxes in the Dallas area. No shocker there.<\/p>\n
\n But then there are those who, for reasons I did not understand at first, type in what appears to be their complete home address, sometimes down to the apartment number. I naively thought people who typed in these full addresses already knew where the mailboxes were located, and just wanted to check pickup times. But no. They are entering their exact street address thinking that my little site will tell them where the mailboxes nearest to them can be found. <\/p>\n
\n That feature is actually on my list of post-site-scrape things to do, I just have to have more geospatial data. That\u2019s a goal of the site scrape.<\/p>\n
\n But just for the hell of it I looked up one of the street addresses of someone who was looking for mailboxes in El Paso. There I was, zooming down to StreetView level, looking at a recent image of what could only be the apartment building of this individual who had just searched for mailboxes nearest his street in El Paso. It could not have taken much more effort to get a name of someone living in that place. Maybe I\u2019d stoke the fire of my inner anarchist and go \u201cDark Web\u201d on this person, ringing their telephone or posting their name and address to the web site as an example of who just searched for what. <\/p>\n
\n I did not do anything like that. And I never will. I have not looked at hit reports in any detail in years, so the discovery that this new search engine had something like this built in felt like I was looking through a window that should have stayed shut.<\/p>\n
\n But I don\u2019t mean to sound like this precision of identifying people through what they likely think is an anonymous Internet search query is news to me. It\u2019s just not something I personally see so clearly as this. I don\u2019t even have hit reporting at all for the .MOBI, and if I ever get going with Flaneur.NYC that should remain true. The only site where I pay attention to traffic at all is the payphones, and that\u2019s just at the top level to see if there was a random traffic spike for some reason.<\/p>\n
\n We all litter the Internet with evidence of our travels, but the big kahuna involving this sort of thing was the great AOL search dump, when millions of search queries were dumped into the public domain with what turned out to be easily identifying handles for exactly who made what search query. \u00a0Lots of heads rolled at the AOL search department on account of this data dump, as well they should have. These poor AOL users were suddenly being ridiculed on social media for searching into whether contact with frogs causes hemorrhoids. I made that up about the froggy hemorrhoids \u00a0but it was that kind of weird search query that came back to haunt countless AOL users after their search data was released.<\/p>\n
\n More elegiacally that person in apartment 33 Serves as a kind of an eye-opener to remind myself how completely random lives can be reached (and reached into) with nothing more than a little old web site. I never would have thought someone living in apartment 33 in what looks like a pretty crummy apartment building in El Paso would be hitting up my web site. I guess I just take it for granted after all these years that the Internet is, well, the Internet. The network of networks. It almost makes me want to clean up my act, or at least do better web sites. But I\u2019ve been wanting to do that anyway. <\/p>\n
\n Whoosh.<\/p>\n
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The a\/c situations is not as bad as I thought. Somehow the dial got turned to \u201cwarmer\u201d. I don\u2019t know when or why that happened but I turned it to \u201ccooler\u201d and things are fine. I don\u2019t have to go for long rides on buses to keep cool. I wish I could do more work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-1VM","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}