Tone Parsons

We woke up this morning to a couple of inches of snow!

Yay!!

Of course, I can’t exactly shovel the white stuff away (bad back and all).  Not being able to do things like that drive me a little nuts.  I woke my eldest son up early to take care of it (he didn’t… and that caused a scene… but I’ll not get into that).  My youngest son stepped up to the plate and did the best he could with the time he had.

They’re calling for up to one more inch today.  Perhaps my eldest will get a chance at redemption.

Thanksgiving 2007 has come and gone, but we had a great time at Casa de Tone.

The grand purchase that I wasn’t allowed to talk about earlier was a formal dining set for 8, including the serving table and china hutch (pictured below). We really needed it, as we had 12 people come over to eat huge amounts of dead bird and all the trimmings.

We baked a turkey, and my brother-in-law, David, brought a second bird and a deep fat fryer. We’ve never had a fried turkey before, but it was pretty damn good! It also cooked amazingly fast (about 1 hour for a 15 pound bird!). Here’s a few images of David (and his father, David) outside doing the bird (click the thumb to view in a new window/tab).

After we gorged on food, we spend the evening paying games and having a most excellent time! For those who couldn’t make it, we missed you and wished you were here (we certainly had more than enough food!!!).  While I didn’t take any pictures of us eating, here’s an artists conception of the event.

Today was fun!

Ignoring the fact that it’s been raining most of the day and there are winds around 30mph (48kph), I’ve been out and about for most of the day. Kind of…

I went to the hospital to have a bone scan done today. For those who aren’t familiar with such a thing, I shall explain. First, they inject you with a radioactive isotope, then tell to you go kill time, drink several glasses of water, and come back in 3 hours.

Once you come back, they first ask you to pee (oh… to have a Geiger counter at that moment…. as I was passing radioactive particles!), then you get into a gown, lie down on a hard (and cold!) metal slab, hold your hands behind your head, and lay perfectly still for 35 minutes while a machine slowly turns around your body! (image below)

Good times!

By the time it was finished, both of my hands and arms had fallen asleep and I had quite a bit of difficulty getting up (they had to help me).

The idea behind getting this was to show if I have any issues with the bones in my spine (infections, ect.) that may be causing the back pain I’ve been dealing with.

So… how was your day?

MySpace users are the worst of the worst when it comes to hotlinking.

They will link directly to an image on your server to be displayed on their site, using up your bandwidth every time it’s viewed. As I pay for my sites bandwidth… this is a very annoying thing. I’ve tried posting that they shouldn’t do it, I’ve begged, I’ve pleaded… then I was driven to action!

A while back, I showed you how to add a little code to your .htaccess file (in the root of your website directory) to change the image that they get:

# Begin MySpace hotlink surprise
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ hotlink/tp_poo_hotlink.gif [L]
# End MySpace hotlink surprise

For example, no matter what image they request from my server, they get the one to the right. While this makes me smile, it still uses my bandwidth to display the picture.

I knew that there had to be a better way to deal with it, and today I found it (courtesy of jibble.org).

Simply put, it’s possible to use the .htaccess rewrite rules to send them something that’s not an image… but rather, a URL. While it won’t redirect the page they’re viewing, it can cause hilarious results if you use it to redirect to the correct URL…. the one that logs them out of MySpace!

All you need to do is place the following into your .htaccess file:

# Force MySpace image/bandwidth thieves to log themselves out
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://([a-z0-9]+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.jpg$ http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=signout [R]
# End MySpace log out

Here’s how it works: when a MySpace user views a page that someone has hotlinked an image from your server to, it sends the request to log them out. They don’t notice anything has gone wrong (other than the image didn’t load)… until they click any link…. then they’re “mysteriously” logged out and have to log back in. This will happen to them EVERY TIME they hit that page!

It’s evil, and the technical term for it is “Cross-site Request Forgery”. I’m just giving you the information… what you choose to do with it isn’t my responsibility.

*giggle*

Note: you can change the rewrite rule to include other image types by adding them in. For example: RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)