Dec. 12th, 2005|07:05 pm: Friday: Hung out in the Portland airport for 7 hours! Did lots of laptop-type things, had Wendy’s, browsed the stores, etc. Jammie arrived at 11pm and we went home.

Saturday: Breakfast at the little restaurant behind my house, went to a few shops in downtown. I think Saturday is when we watched 3 O’clock High on DVD. In the evening we went to a dinner theater in downtown Albany which was really fun. The place was called Flinn’s and had a buffet and bar. Both the acting and the food wasn’t great but the whole thing was really fun. The play centered around Christmas in the 19th century.

Sunday: Breakfast at The Original Breakfast. A bunch of laying around and doing nothing all day. We watched Ghostbusters 1 and 2. It was a very 80′s couple of days with our 80′s movies and the uh…Christmas in the 1880′s play. In the late evening we drove back to the airport, dropped off Jammie and then I went back home.

Dec. 9th, 2005|07:47 pm: Emily is student of the month! I went to an assembly this morning where she and a few other students accepted their awards. I’ve never seen Emily so worried about how she looks. Last night she had clothes layed out, ready to wear to accept her award. And this morning she was completely patient while I brushed her hair, which is pretty unusual. She mentioned how much she hated walking up there in front of everyone. (She was student of the month last year too.) As we were getting ready to leave, she wanted to change her mind about the clothes she was wearing. I told her no way, we were leaving. The award thing was fun, I got some pictures and went home. And I finally got to meet both of their teachers.

Bob came over with a dresser for the kids and a couple of bikes, which was really nice. I’d planned to buy them bikes this Spring but I guess now I don’t have to. They really needed a dresser too. Now I just need to find them beds and get a dresser for myself.

At lunch time, I went back to the school and had lunch with Emily. Since she’s student of the month, she gets to have a parent have lunch with her. Plus she got to eat ice cream in front of a lot of jealous classmates, which she shared with me. Payton’s teacher saw me there so he let Payton out of class so he could sit with us during lunch. Then I hung out with Emily for recess. When I left, Payton was having lunch so I said goodbye to him before leaving. The whole school experience was really fun. Payton’s teacher told me that Payton acts middle-aged in the way he speaks to everyone. I guess he means by Payton’s impatient and snappy remarks.

Today Jammie is coming to visit me from New York again. Right now I’m sitting in the Portland airport, just killing time. Jammie thinks I’m insane for arriving at the airport seven hours before her plane gets here. I just wanted to get out of the house for awhile, though. I was going to take a train from here into Portland and find something to do. Instead I had supper at Wendy’s and I’ve been typing on my laptop ever since then. I just finished taking a break to visit a few of the shops in the airport, then fixed some major security issues on phonelosers.org from the new Shoutbox I put up. Only 3.5 hours until Jammie arrives!

The carpet in this airport hasn’t changed in over 11 years. I should know since I used to live here and got to know the carpet quite well from sleeping on it and sitting on it for days, typing away at my laptop for hours at a time. I wonder if the new parts of the airport have the same hideous pattern. It sucks that they only let ticketed passengers past the checkpoints anymore. A lot of the coolest stuff is past the checkpoints. Anyway, it’s ugly-ass carpet.

Dec. 6th, 2005|01:04 pm: I was in Burger King on Sunday, eating lunch with the kids and I noticed that Carol of the Bells was playing throughout the restaurant. That made me smile. And if you don’t know why, you should listen to this.

Today I went to the post office, then the other post office, then Wendy’s for lunch, Goodwill in hopes of finding a cheap dresser (no luck) and some other little junk shop down the street from Goodwill. The owner talked to me nonstop during my entire 15 minute visit there. He just rambled forever. I would ask him the price on something, he’d tell me, and then he’d go right back into whatever thing he was rambling about. Soon after arriving in the store, he says, “I’m sorry about it being so cold in here, but a man tried to kipnap one of my girls the other day which you probably read about in the paper…” And 5 minutes later he finally got to some kind of conclusion on how that related to their furnace being broken. Which I don’t even remember.

He gave me a nice deal on the books, though. Nine books for $3.00, since that’s all the cash I had on me. Oh yeah, that’s another thing. He said they don’t take credit/debit cards anymore because identity theft is a big problem these days and once somebody did something with credit cards that cost the store thousands of dollars. Or something like that. So their brilliant solution was to stop accepting credit/debit cards forever. Hearing him ramble about identity theft was even funnier than the attempted kidnapping/broken furnace story. I plan to go there again just for the extreme story telling.

Dec. 4th, 2005|06:34 pm: A couple years ago, I think it was Kristine that sent me this article. I printed it out and saved it but I never shared it with anyone like I meant to. It talks about alternatives to spending hundreds or thousands of dollars every Christmas on everyone you know. Lots of great points are in it to rationalize being a big cheapskate. Which is what I’ve done for the past 2 or 3 years now. I only buy for my kids now, and then a little something for my parents and girlfriend. Screw everyone else. A $2.99 pack of generic Christmas cards is about the extent of my holiday shopping. It’s a good read. So go read it.

Remember my weird issues with those web sites who were mirroring my webcam page? Well I noticed today that it’s not even framing MY site within it’s site. They’ve just copied my useless webcam pages and hotlinked to my 3-year-old webcam images on my site. So they didn’t really send 50,000 extra users to my home page, they actually made 50,000 users access the images on my webcam page. But since the page refreshes, it was actually quite a bit lower than that.

I still don’t know WHY my outdated webcam page and nobody offered me any ideas in my last post about it. I thought maybe it had something to do with them needing fresh content for their new sites so that Google would crawl it and give them a good search engine ranking. But that’s a dumb theory because my webcam page is OLD and there’s nothing on there they couldn’t have written themselves. They took the time to steal the html and content from my page when they could have just as easily created original content themselves. They also took the time to add my URL in front of the images in the html code to ensure that the images would load from my site. And they changed all of the links on the site to their own various URLs for different things. So I dunno.

Anyway, instead of disallowing hotlinking on my site, I just changed the images that they’re stealing from me. Check out their URLs below! Caution – tub girl. Let’s see how long it all lasts.

mycam.freeownhost.com/
privcam.freeownhost.com/
owncam.freesuperhost.com/
myhome.freesuperhost.com/

Also, I fixed the guestbook on my page so nobody can add URLs to their guestbook entries anymore. That should eliminate most of the spam there. The spam was worse on there than on phonelosers.org. I just finished deleting it all.

Brad Carter – Battling Spam Since 1997!

EDIT: Here’s the numbers I just got from my log. It comes down to about 500 unique visiters a day hitting those pictures. But those 500 people are loading the images about 13,000 times. There are 3 images on the page so divide that by 3 and each person is reloading my cam page (the page refreshes automatically) about 26 times before leaving the page. So by this time tomorrow, approximately 500 people will be grossed out by the image of tub girl, all because of me! I rule!

Also, my theory of them trying to get higher up in the search engines is stupid. They’ve obviously got some major traffic going to their web sites, for them to be able to send 500 different people to me per day. Who knows how they’re driving all that traffic there. If they have that kind of an audience, why are they showing that audience my outdated webcam page??

Dec. 3rd, 2005|10:51 pm: Went an saw Yours, Mine and Ours today. Not too bad of a movie, I suppose. Completely unoriginal, of course. Stopped by Fred Meyer to get an outdoor trashcan – my trash has been piling up outside for a couple of weeks now. Nothing too interesting has been happening this week. We set up the Christmas tree, put some lights on it and some cheap decorations. I let the kids each pick out an ornament like they do every year. Then I bought a box of cheap ornaments for the rest of the tree. Also got a couch this week!

Dec. 1st, 2005|12:10 pm: Looking in the access logs for brad-carter.com today, I noticed that a few extra thousand people had visited my site for some reason. I checked the referrals and I found these 3 sites…

mycam.freeownhost.com
privcam.freeownhost.com
owncam.freesuperhost.com

Each site is a mirror image of my webcam page. But why?? I haven’t updated my webcam page since last summer. And that was to explain that I never update the webcam page anymore. Who created these sites and why would they link to my dead webcam page? Anyone have any ideas?

Speaking of access logs…the #1 visitor to brad-carter.com is somebody on Comcast cable from Oregon. They’ve viewed 163 pages on my homepage. And they’ve made 4,360 hits. That’s hits mostly to images, probably, which is the result of visiting my LJ a lot. The #2 visitor to my homepage is somebody from Charter cable, also in Oregon. They’ve visited 103 pages within my homepage and made a total of 2,197 hits. Wonder who it is… Kcochran? Colleen? Just some other completely random person who happened upon the page? I sure didn’t get this many hits from Oregon when I lived in Illinois. And nope, it’s not my own IP address. For just being my homepage, that’s an insane amount of hits to be from each of those IP addresses. Like…there’s quite a large gap between the number of hits from the #1 & #2 visitors and then the #3 visitor. Whoever you are…hi!

Finished War of the Worlds the other day and I started on Mentally Incontinent which the author sent to me in the mail. Thanks, Joe!