Monday Ramble

Well, it's Monday, my day off, and I think I'm just going to crash today. Yesterday was our St. John's Chicken BBQ, and we drew a big crowd. Didn't get the exact figures, but it was a big crowd. People ate down in the church basement. Carry-outs were handled from my garage— which I also get cleaned out for free before every one of our church dinners, nice side benefit. Crafts and bake sale, also plants, in the old German schoolhouse over on the other side of the church: I came away with yet more plants, my study here in the house is now overflowing with plants.

The chicken was barbecued out back, in the brand new shelter which was built just this past week. Very nifty shelter, four large BBQ pits set up inside, vent running the length of the roof, tarps set up around the open sides of the shelter due to the raging wind we had this weekend. Now, when you consider that this shelter is not much more than 10 yards outside my back door, I think you can guess where I'm going to be sitting many an evening this summer.

Slept soundly last night, except for when I woke up once in the middle of the night and spent some time rummaging around online, tracking down yet more bandwidth leeches who are hotlinking to my pictures. Found one who hotlinked to a picture of mine just two or three days ago, and that picture has already gotten over a thousand hits on their site. Well, I put a stop to that. I can't afford that sort of bandwidth loss. Really, people, I am highly sympathetic to the notion that information wants to be free; I don't mind someone borrowing my pictures, as long as:

• it's for noncommercial use
  
• they don't try to pass my images off as their own work
  
• they host a copy of the picture on their own webspace instead of hotlinking to me

I suspect I ought to make another try at writing up a .htaccess file, that would be the ultimate fix for this sort of nonsense. However I've tried before, and have run up against the quirks of my webhost, I suspect there's something in their configuration that works at cross-purposes with what I'm trying to achieve. (They're a subsidiary of FortuneCity, if you've ever noticed how quirky FortuneCity sites can be when it comes to displaying pictures.)

Today I'm just going to sit around. I have various personal tasks that are waiting, but they'll just have to wait. I have a new Linux release I'd like to install on my computer, but not until a day when I'm better rested and clearer in the head.