C0rk.W0rd: *huff* *huff* *huff* ... What A Weekend

Monday, February 23, 2004

huff huff huff ... What A Weekend

This was an interesting weekend to say the least. Friday and Saturday nights were both spent at the Main Street Pub, but it was Saturday afternoon that held the most peculiarity...

After a few cups of coffee in the morning, my dad brought in the mail and tossed a folded mailer in front of me. Enclose within was a check for $13.98 which was my portion of the RIAA settlement over a class action price-fixing case (see prior post for additional details). Check in hand, I typed out a post regarding the letter/check for this blog. While doing so, I heard a banging coming from the laundry dryer. I opened to inspect, and discovered my cell phone. Though looking "physically" pretty clean, the internals were shot. For those of you keeping track, this is the second cell phone I put through the laundry. The first was my old Nokia which after I dried out and installed a new battery, fired right up and worked fine until my contract was up for renewal, and I could secure a new phone. Nevertheless, this dead yet 'clean' cell phone problem needed to be dealt with...

I have insurance on my phone, since it is a semi-pricy camera model manufacuter by Sony Ericsson. I think it was voted "Phone-Of-The-Year" by someone in 2003. Phoning the insurance company was pretty simple and painless. The girl on the other end was knowledgable and swift with a nice sense of humor about the whole thing. She said my phone would be ready for pick-up at the Cingular location I had requested. Before leaving the house however, I decided to finish up my post regarding the RIAA check, and drop a line to SlashDot, thinking they might be interested...

...I got a new phone...Same as the old phone…

... I returned home and checked my TypePad site stats. This blog had over 5000 hits in less than 2 hours Saturday night. It turns out SlashDot had picked up my submitted article. I had been foolish enough to include links to my blog-article, and it wasn't long before hits were coming in to the tune of 20-25 a min. Though I would normally revel in the popularity, I seemed to have underestimated the appeal of my own article. All SlashDot submissions are reviewed before posting, and I thought it extremely unlikely that my submission would be selected. Before I knew it ... the main page of SlashDot has a big header titled "One Man's Check From the RIAA" submitted by c0rk.

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I should have foreseen this onslaught and taken steps prior to the SlashDot publication to reduce the size of this site, as not to exceed my bandwidth quota on TypePad. Needless to say I didn't... but luckily I discovered the slew of visitors soon enough to thwart additional attempt to link to this site. I republished the image and the post referenced, effectively breaking all the SlashDot links to C0rk.Blogs.com. This knocked hits down under 1000 an hour and eventually below 100. SlashDot readers would have to edit the URL manually to gain access to the site, and the re-named article. Luckily MOST weren't that dedicated. The next step was to distribute the bandwidth. I made all the images on the mainpage reference external image storage locations so that the bandwidth being used was not entirely TypePad's. By late Saturday night, hits were hovering between the upper double-digits and 100 per hour. By Sunday afternoon I was down to between 10-20 an hour, and it eventually came down to 5-15 per hour. My normal hit-rate is between 5-10 an hour, but the average has remained elevated because refferring address information shows that many SlashDot readers are deciding to repost corrected links in their own blogs and self run message boards/forums.

What about the bandwidth? Did you go over? ...

Contrary to the opinion of many SlashDot commenters, I did not exceed my bandwidth quota, nor have I incurred any monetary penalties. Though this did result in the highest month of bandwidth usage by my TypePad account since I purchased the service in August 2003, I have not yet exceeded my quota, nor does TypePad/SixAppart have a billing policy regarding bandwidth overuse. (Meaning: I'm not certain I would have been billed had I gone over because although there are quota's listed by TypePad, there is no documentation regarding how to purchase more, or how you will be billed in the event of an excess.) TypePad is a very recent (August 2003) startup of the SixApart Company known for developing the popular Blogging Software MovableType. The lack of a bandwidth policy is more than likely due to the infancy of TypePad, though hardly cause to disgrace SixApart. TypePad and SixApart are both remarkable products for which the company has received numerous accolades. I'm proud to have been such an early adopter (I'm invoice #58) of the service, and relieved that I was able to thwart the events of this weekend to avoid putting anyone in a difficult position.