Maru's Mun Journal

I really don't know why the 'Liberals' (=neo-cons in favour of the capitalists raging freely) don't like black and red cats canoodling and put up posters against them.



It happens in my kitchen every day, and I like it.


For non-Europeans: there are to be elections soon in Germany, which is at the present ruled by a government made up from the two main moderate left and right wing parties (the so-called 'big coalition'), which means middle of the middle, and utter stagnation. Red is the colour associated with the Social Democrats, black the one of the Christian Democrats -- guess which party they are! The Liberals (yellow, by the way) hope to become the smaller partner in a coalition with the conservatives; others hope for a return of the red-green coalition of the Schröder years -- Green party is green anywhere. Other possible options might be a 'Traffic Lights coalition', or even a 'Jamaica coalition' - puzzle that one out for yourself, and yes, it does occasionally exist on a local level. Then, there is the properly socialist Left party, which might lead to red-red-green. Others get frustrated and vote for the Pirate Party.

There is no viable alternative to that shitty dilemma, even though the elections are still a few weeks away. Everybody has been sighing and claiming we want an Obama; but with the political parties the way they are, none is forthcoming. There is no real alternative. German politics suck Ankh water.-

It really pisses me off that putting up an advertisement like this is still thought a) acceptable and b) funny. The post I link vigorously protests against it, but an ad agency came up with the bullshit, that organisation is paying for it, and thousands of people are probably finding it funny, not only thin people, and people that 'successfully' fight their own body to stay thin, but fat people of varying degree as well, because they of course (almost) all internalised that they shouldn't be what they are, and all ridicule heaped on them is their own fault.

I have left that building a while ago, and never really looked back.

( Where did I go? )

( What did I learn? )

( Where am I now? )

Last night, poor bigfluffball couldn't get onto LJ at all, as she told me via IM; she finally went offline, frustrated, in the hope it would work in the morning.

Now it is morning, I turn on my computer, can't get on LJ either! I asked moons_storm, and she says she can.

Hmmmm.

This partial nonexistence of LJ, combined with the fact that the 404 comes suspiciously fast, suggested to me that it's a DNS problem. If Alice's domain name look-up tells my computer that LJ doesn't exist, of course my computer believes her.

So, switched to OpenDNS.

Bingo!! LJ exists again.

So, logical conclusion: the mega-wankers* that are after one certain blogger have started feedingthe DNS system false information about LJ (and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, presumably) which starts spreading these dark spots in the internet from which these services can't be reached. DNS servers aren't administered centrally; instead, they keep talking to each other, exchanging current lookup tables. After you switch a domain name from one version of a web site to another when you go live with an overhaul, it always takes a few hours until everybody you want to see the new version can get there, because the DNS information, as provided by your web hoster, takes time to disseminate.

This is what's happening with the apparent total LJ outages. I'll stick to OpenDNS for the time being, and recommend that anybody for whom LJ disappears apparently completely (while there are still people for whom it works, plus the notable speed to the appearance of the 'site not found' page) should do that as well**. DNS servers is all that this commercial company ever does, so they'll be damn careful whose lookup tables they allow their servers to use; and the attacks on LJ, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are well known and in the mainstream news.

* And it's really just one giant case of wank! Somebody who can afford to pay a botnet, or whose buddy runs a botnet that's not too busy due to the crisis, it being summer holiday time, etc., and has it out for that one bloke from Georgia, used that botnet to simply silence the channels he is using. It's part of the larger Russian-Georgian wank, of course, and I'm looking forward something fierce to feed my take on this into the Georgian forum and messageboard scene via the colleague with the Georgian wife on Monday; but basically, this is classic wank shooting cannons at sparrows, aimed ultimately at one person. It shall go down in history as the Largest LJ Wank Ever!

** Rule of thumb: anybody able to comprehend the very simple instructions on the OpenDNS site is able to use the service. Whoever finds the idea scary and needs help for it, shouldn't.

Dear World,

you have about five hours to be stopping this deluge already. Or I shall be infinitely pissed off.

Please??

- Maru

ETA: It's still raining now in the afternoon, and icy cold. We're not going. I'm REALLY pissed off!

Okay, question to the flist: does anybody know where I can complain to LJ about some specific advertising? I AM willing to see ads instead of paying for my account, but enough with the Muslim Brides and the weight loss ads already.

I find both deeply offensive, for different reasons, and need to tell LJ that I do! not!! want!!!

The advertising is especially targeted, so there must be a way of de-target that offensive drivel away from me!

Today is March 24th, right? Next weekend, daylight saving starts in Europe and all other places of the northern hemisphere that had not been Bush'ed, right?

Why, oh why, is it then snowing in fat white flakes that even stick to the ground outside the paths, coming down exactly like a burst feather duvet? My little black cat is jumping as high as my head at the french window in the kitchen, trying to catch the flakes drifting past or even hovering in an updraft.

On March 24th! It ain't natural!!


ETA: Now with pictorial proof: a picture the Nazgul took of the snowfall in her courtyard, right now:

So, I was going to go to the mineralogical museum yesterday, in order to pinch a few factoids on crystals so I would have a bit of a background and one or three fun things to mention when asar_suti  gets to give his magical take on crystals to gone_byebye .

They have a wonderful web site, with the opening times enumerated systematically and clearly.

They completely failed to mention that the museum is closed until June 6th because of renovations. Argh!!

As I was going to meet the Nazgul, I just hung about the area, which has has interesting book shops and so on that I hadn't been to for quite a while.

Still, I'm still out of factoids. Well, retry next week..

Grrr.

I burninated my left hand in the oven again. Just as I did in December. I must be an utter idiot.

I slapped on algae gel again and still have the hydrocortisone stuff my mother gave me when the last burn got bad. But can't I be careful, dangit? I do know ovens are hot and hurt.

Just now I tried to access some of the "Maglor in History" stories that rcfinch has listed on her web site.
(Go look at the stories, by the way, they're about my favourite Elf ever...)

Well, that particular story was posted on fanfiction.net. When I arrived there, that site showered me with a plethora of popups, as usual - but this time the popup was an Evil Popup from Hell and actually tried to install an effin' dialer on my computer, and when I refused tried handing me a trojan!
( Warning! If you click on this, you will witness Princess Yakalskovich swearing rudely, loudly and extendly! )