Mercwear.com – Curtis Morris

I am sure that most of you reading this blog know about the recent release of Sony’s Playstation 3 game console, if not just click this link. Due to the high demand and low supply of the units there were 1000’s of money hungry sleaze bags lined up all around the country with plans to buy the units only to turn around and sell them on E-bay for huge profits. I have to admit, I was even thinking of doing this until I realized that the launch had turned into an all out dash for cash instead of a bunch of eager fans waiting for their favorite new console.

There were reports of people getting robbed at gunpoint and shot and kids getting mugged only minutes after buying their systems. I firmly believe that this launch has driven the final nail into the coffin for midnight releases and camping out to get the first few systems. My prediction is that the next console release (other than the Wii!) will be done exclusively online, which is sad however with the increasing amount of greed in our society I think it’s the only way to go.

I don’t put all of the blame on society – some of it belongs to Sony for being too slow on getting the systems out. There is a bright side of this whole thing – the people selling them on E-bay are not smart enough to realize that by over saturating the market they are going to make nowhere near the profits they are hoping for. I have even seen a few systems selling for only a few hundred dollars more than what was paid.

So I go to check my web stats yesterday with Urchin and find a weird anomaly in my traffic, it has more than tripled for the month of December. My average traffic use is around 15GB a month, for December it’s going to be about 50GB, this of course worried me. Having worked in the web hosting industry for the past 3 years I know what a traffic spike usually means: You are hacked.

Luckily this was not the case in my situation, after about 3 hours of sleuthing I found the culprit that was causing my traffic spike: A single image that I posted over 1 year ago. An image of Jason Alexander (George on Seinfeld) wishing everyone a happy Festivus. The traffic came from a both Google image search and myspace.com, I am guessing that someone at Myspace went to Google and did an image search for the word “Fesivus” and hot linked the image from Mercwear, sucking down my bandwidth at an average rate of 600k/sec.

It is amazing how fast the image spread at Myspace.com, I did some traffic sniffing on the server and noticed over 30 hits in 25 seconds from different profiles on the site. The evil part of me wanted to replace the image with something vulgar however the cheapskate in me did not want to pay for even more bandwidth.

Below are some of the Urchin pages that show the traffic:

Total hits for the image file:

Total hits from Google and Myspace:

Total transfer over the last 5 days for the image:

404 error count since I enabled the hotlink protection:

I found that the best way to stop this was to simply disallow hotlinking to Mercwear, I did this by utilizing a tool called Hotlink Blocker from www.helicontech.com, if you use IIS for your webserver I highly recommend checking it out.

I also use my Robots.txt file to exclude all of my images from being indexed by Google, this will cut down on the possibility of this happening again, adding the following code to your robots.txt will stop the Google image crawler from indexing your images:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

I just got back from a fishing trip to Padre Island National Sea Shore with my dad, it was a great trip and we caught a lot of fish:

Sting Ray ———– 3
Red Fish ———— 6
Black Drum ——– 1
Trout —————- 3
Skip Jack ———– More than 10

The Bull Red fish in the images below were 41 in, 42 in, and 36 in (mine was the 36 and my dad caught the other 2).

While fishing off the Jetties the first night we arrived at the end of the island we had what can only be described as an amazing night of fishing, this was when my dad caught the 2 largest fish and we hooked some stuff that we had no chance of ever landing (Probably very large sharks).

We fought one of the “mystery fish” for an hour and 2 minutes only to have him break the line, another one was hooked about 20 minutes later that ended up taking all of the line on my reel forcing me to break the line so as not to loose every inch of it. We knew these fish were big not only from the fight they put up but the fact that they ate about a ½ pound of cut bait at the end of our line in one large bite.

The night that I caught the fish I am pictured with below was VERY rough, we had huge waves crashing over the jetties we were fishing off of which was a very scary situation, one of the waves knocked out the lantern we had leaving only a flash light for us to navigate back to camp with (over about 300 yards of Jetties made of solid granite rocks that are VERY un-even and dangerous). After I laded the fish and my dad jumped into about 4 feet of rough water to net it we decided that the fishing was not worth the risk and called it a night.

All in all the trip was a complete success and we had a lot of fun, click on one of the images below for the full album:

Yep, you read that correctly – I am engaged, I asked Andrea to marry me on September 16, 2005. We have been together for over 7 years now and for the last 2 or 3 months I have really been thinking of how to ask her etc, what I came up with is below.

I took her to a brand new PF Chang’s (opening night) at a new open air shopping mall near our apartment for dinner. I knew she had a big test coming up so I made up a story about winning a free meal in order to make sure she would go. Our reservations were at 9:30 and I had gone to the restaurant earlier in the afternoon to plan things with the staff and pickup a few fortune cookies.

The way I planned to ask her was to create my own message and stuff it inside a fortune cookie, this worked out quite well (I did it without breaking a single cookie!). After picking Andrea up from school at around 7:00pm we headed to our apartment (I had the ring and cookie in my pocket), we took about 45 minutes to get ready and headed out.

Andrea had received a few discount offers in the mail from a store she likes so the first thing we did upon arrival was visit Express. Andrea was totally unaware of my plans so she was as cool as can be, I on the other had was worried that someone was going to bump into me and crush my cookie.

After leaving Express we checked out the rest of the shopping center (The shops at La Cantera) which was very nice (I am sure we will be spending a lot of time there with Andreas shopping habits). Of course all this time I am still trying not to bump into anyone or anything for fear of damaging my cookie.

At last 9:15 rolls around and we head to PF Chang’s, after being seated I headed to the restroom to make sure the cookie survived (it did!). When I got back to the table we both ordered our drinks and food, then Andrea headed to the restroom – now was my chance to hand the cookie to our waitress. I asked her to place it on a plate and bring it to Andrea telling her that in celebration of opening the new restaurant they were giving away prizes and that the cookie was the game piece. Andrea took the cookie, opened it and read my message. I put the ring in front of her while she was reading the note and the rest is history.

We won’t even begin to plan our wedding until after she is done with law school, but rest assured that the engagement party is right around the corner!

I will post pictures of the ring here soon.

Our flight was canceled due to some sort of hole in the tail of the aircraft. At this point I am not sure what to think, I am glad that I did not get put into the air on a faulty plane but I really want to get home.

America West (our airline) gave us a flight in the morning at 6:22am on American airlines, a hotel voucher and two $5.00 meal vouchers. The only problem is it’s 2:15am now so by the time we made it to the hotel we would need to leave in about 2 hours. So at the moment I am typing this while laying on the floor of the airport, oh joy!

It looks like we are about to leave!! Once the maintenance team takes a look at a “small problem� on the plane.. Sounds comforting huh? I should be home in about 3 hours – I’ll post pictures of the trip tomorrow.

Total wait time at the Las Vegas airport: 5 hours 30 minutes

I can’t remember the last time I was this excited to get back to San Antonio.

Well it is 1:19 CST (11:19 in Vegas) and I am stuck at Las Vegas airport because our flight has been delayed for 2 hours. I don’t think this is a coincidence, it seems that this place has a lot of delayed flights (mine is not the only one) and I am sure they don’t mind the extra revenue that they get from the people sticking more and more money into the slot machines that adorn the terminal.

At least the internet here is free… But good luck finding a plug for your laptop.

It’s been a while since my last post but I was saving it for something exciting. Let me start out by saying that I am an avid road biker, I love the sport and the days were not so hot here in Texas I would probably ride every day. I have been lucky in the sense that I have never had a real wipe out on my road bike, well my streak ended this morning at around 11:30am CST.

We (myself and the 2 guys I ride with) were on our way back from a morning ride that totals around 32 miles. I was weaving in and out of the little tiles in the middle of the road and then it happed… At a speed between 18 and 20 miles per hour I lost control of my bike and basically did a summersault on the bike. The only thing I heard was the front tire of the bike exploding with an impressive “Boom�, I escaped with some cuts and bruises which I have included images of below (click the image for a full size version):

I learned 1 thing and confirmed another having lived through this:

* When you get bored on a down hill coast DON’T try to weave in and out of the tiles in the road (Learned)
* Gloves will save your ass, I have always suspected this and a co-worker (Harris) has told me. Had I not been wearing my gloves (which are totally ruined now) my hands would have looked like hamburger meat PERIOD.

As for my bike – It escaped with only some minor scrapes and an out of true front wheel, all things considered I was very lucky.

I never really noticed that Samuel L Jackson dies is just about all of the movies he is in. Entertainment Weekly has posted an article showing his top 10 deaths, if you are a Jackson fan like me you will like it.

Story

**This has been found to be a Hoax!**

This is great, 42 midgets thought that they could take on a lion.
Just read the story.

The full text of this story is getting hard to find so I am pasting it below:

Spectators cheered as entire Cambodian Midget Fighting League squared off against African Lion. Tickets had been sold-out three weeks before the much anticipated fight, which took place in the city of Kâmpóng Chhnãng.

The fight was slated when an angry fan contested Yang Sihamoni, President of the CMFL, claiming that one lion could defeat his entire league of 42 fighters. Sihamoni takes great pride in the league he helped create, as was conveyed in his recent advertising campaign for the CMFL that stated his midgets will “… take on anything; man, beast, or machine.”

This campaign is believed to be what sparked the undisclosed fan to challenge the entire league to fight a lion; a challenge that Sihamoni readily accepted. An African Lion (Panthera Leo) was shipped to centrally located Kâmpóng Chhnãng especially for the event, which took place last Saturday, April 30, 2005 in the city’s coliseum. The Cambodian Government allowed the fight to take place, under the condition that they receive a 50% commission on each ticket sold, and that no cameras would be allowed in the arena.

The fight was called in only 12 minutes, after which 28 fighters were declared dead, while the other 14 suffered severe injuries including broken bones and lost limbs, rendering them unable to fight back. Sihamoni was quoted before the fight stating that he felt since his fighters out-numbered the lion 42 to 1, that they “… could out-wit and out-muscle [it].�

Unfortunately, he was wrong.

Link to site

I’ve been thinking of buying a road bike for awhile now, given that I ride (on the road) about 3 times a week with friends. I considered the purchase to be more of an investment in my riding stamina, the only thing holding me back has been cost. The bike that I was riding up until I got the new one is a full suspension mountain bike, something that it great for the trails but leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to the road.

After talking myself into spending the money I headed out with Andrea and a few friends on Wednesday (April 27th) to make the purchase. We visited 3 bike shops around San Antonio before I decided on going with Planet Bike, they had a nice selection of bikes and the staff was both friendly and eager to help me with the purchase (and they were NOT on commission). Before talking about the purchase I would like to explain why I did not go with the other two shops, if you don’t really care about that then please feel free to skip ahead.

Shop Reviews

I am going to rank the stores in 4 categories which I have explained below:

• Staff knowledge – How much the staff really knows about bikes and the products they sell.
• On hand bike selection – The selection of complete bikes (ready to ride) that the store has in stock.
• Price – The average price of the category of bike I am looking for (road).
• Overall experience – The overall customer service experience I received from the staff.
The ranking will be poor, mediocre, and excellent

Stop one: Britton’s Bikes

* Staff knowledge: Excellent
* On hand bike selection: Mediocre
* Price: Poor
* Overall experience: Excellent

Review:
I found out about Britton’s from a friend at work, he had them assemble his custom bike and was very pleased with the service. I visited their website (http://www.brittonbikes.com/) before going to the store and while I was not too excited about the site design I thought I would give the store a shot. When I first arrived I was greeted with a friendly welcome from the staff and once I told them my budget and what I was looking for they showed me (the very few) bikes that they had in my price range. I quickly realized that this was a specialty shop that almost exclusively catered to the hard core rider with a fat wallet.
The staff was VERY smart and judging by the size of their legs and the passion they had when discussing the sport they probably biked A LOT. After about thirty minutes of looking and talking to the staff I realized that this was not the place for me, I did however get a free measure of my inseam which was great since I had no idea what it was (54.4).
All in all Britton’s was a great store with a smart staff but was too far out of my price range, if I ever decide to custom build a bike they will probably my starting point.

Stop Two: Bike World

* Staff knowledge: Mediocre
* On hand bike selection: Excellent
* Price: Poor
* Overall experience: Poor

Review:
Bike World is a commercial business that had been established in South Texas since 1971, I have heard a lot of bad things about them but wanted to check it out for myself. When I first entered the store I noticed that there were quite a few staff members on hand however they were all busy talking to each other in the back of the store, so I started to look around. After about 5 minutes in the store (the only people in the store are me and my friends) I am approached by an associate. I explained to the associate what I was looking for and my price range to which he promptly replied “Not gonna’ find it�. This frustrated me since I had seen offers online that fit both my budget and equipment requirements. I looked at a few (over priced) Trek bikes and quickly left the store, probably never to return.

Stop Three: Plant Bike

* Staff knowledge: Excellent
* On hand bike selection: Excellent
* Price: Mediocre
* Overall experience: Excellent

Review:
I had visited Planet Bike a few months ago when I first started looking for a road bike, the staff was very nice and the price was about where I wanted to be. There were a few things I was looking for in a new bike that I was trying not to deviate from (they are listed later in this post) and they came the closest to meeting them all while maintaining a decent price. I did a few test rides on some Specialized bikes (that’s a company that makes bikes for those of you that don’t already know that!) and ended up taking one home that night.

The new bike

The bike I chose to purchase was the Specialized Allez Sport, the total cost (including uncle Sam’s cut) was $862.98. I had secretly promised myself not to spend more than $1,000 on the bike so I felt pretty good about the price. The two features I wanted on my new bike were a carbon fiber front fork and Shimano 105 components. The Allez sport has a carbon fiber front fork and seat post along with a rear Shimano 105 Derailleur so it was about 85% of what I wanted.

So far I have logged 38.1 miles on the bike and have loved every one, when compared to what I was riding the trip is like night and day. A link to the full spec sheet of the bike along with some images are below, all in all I am very happy with the purchase. I ended up going back to Planet Bike today to buy an accessory bag (seen on the back of the bike in the images below), a spare tube, chain and gear lube, and a pump that will support the special tube that the bike uses.

Full spec sheet (will open in a new window)

My pictures

Mercwear had a hard drive failure today – luckily I did a full backup of all content on the 15th of April so the only things I lost were the comments and posts from that day moving forward. I was able to salvage the post about my new bike from cache however I wont be putting it back up until tomorrow.

For the time being the database is back up and I am in the process of putting all of my content back online (Images / Video / Etc) so bear with me.

What is comical about this whole situation is that I was just thinking about how I have not used the “Being Dominated� category just yesterday.. This certainly fits the bill.

Over the past several months Mercwear has become a victim of a fast growing blog epidemic: Comment Spam. We all think “Oh it wont happen to me� or “A little spam never hurt anyone!� well, it’s time that you open your eyes – comment spam is a headache causing, time wasting problem that is here to stay.

For those of you that are not familiar with comment spam let me take a moment to fill you in:

Comment spam is not a traditional type of spam such as the unsolicited emails that flood your inbox each day, it’s a far worse and even more devious type of spam. The way that comment spam works is the spammer visits your blog and sees that comments are open to the general public, this allows them to add your site to an application that will continually bombard your site with ads for a variety of different things (mine are mainly links to online poker sites asking people to play).

At first thought you probably think that these links are there to solicit readers of the blog to visit these sites, while that may be PART of the reasoning behind comment spam it is NOT the main goal. Comment spam is popular for one reason – Google ranking. How you ask? Well Google ranks web sites from 1 to 10 based mainly on how many links to the site being ranked are found on OTHER sites around the internet. This means that if a comment spammer sets their spam program to go out and create 50,000 fake comments on 50,000 different blogs containing a link to a site, the next time those blogs get crawled by the Google bot (the program that Google wrote to search internet sites so Google users can find them when they search from Google.com) the site that the spammer was peddling will gain a higher ranking. Higher site rankings in Google mean that more people will find and visit the site resulting in more $$$ for the site owner.

There are a number of ways that people have come up with to combat comment spam, I for one have been using a system that analyzes each comment that is submitted and searches it for key words (like online poker) and if the comment contains the words it is placed in a queue for me to approve or delete before it is displayed on the site. This solution will keep the comments off the blog and does noting to help the spammers however there were two main problems:

1) If someone spams the blog with a comment that does not contain the key words that will cause it to be quarantined before being posted it is automatically posted to the site.

2) There is a lot of work involved in clearing out the queued up comments, on average I get about 20 fake posts a day from spammers and I for one do not like having to login and delete 140 fake comments each week!

So what I have done is created a custom solution for my comment spam problem, when you post a comment you will be prompted to type in a string of text that is displayed as an image, if you type it in correctly (and the comment does not contain any of the key words that spammers use) then it is posted. On the same token if you fail to type in the text correctly then the comment is not posted. This method is simple and adds an element of human interaction to the comment posting process (it is VERY hard for a computer to interpret the text of these type of images).

Please feel free to try out my system by posting a comment to this article, any feedback you have is appriciated.

A co-worker sent this to me:

Happy Easter!

We were on the last few miles of a 23 mile ride today when I noticed this card laying face down on the ground, I had yet to find anything worth writing about so I stopped and picked it up. The card was laying in the turn lane of a major road so, as you can imagine it’s not in very good shape (see the pictures). My best guess on how the card ended up in the road is that the owner fueled up their car and set the card on the roof before driving off.

I hope that Natosha C. is a bit more careful with her credit cards, most of the time theses “gas� cards only have a limit of about $500 on them so if someone with ill intentions were to find it she wouldn’t be in too much trouble. I did not take the risk of seeing if the card would work, after all I am sure that is against the law and the last thing I need is a cop asking me what I am doing with someone else’s gas card.

Stats and Pictures (with the card info removed):
Estimated Value: $250.00 (this is assuming that the limit is $500.00 and the card balance is $250.00)
Condition: 4/10

Front:

Back:

This dude summoned a creature from a high level area of the game (Molten Core) to a VERY low level highly populated area of the game (the auction hall in Iornforge) once he released the pet it exploded killing almost every player in the auction hall.. This is by far the best World Of Warcraft video I have ever seen – it even made the screen savers tonight!

Watch The Video

I was sent a link on Monday of this week about this story, I will summarize what happened below :

Two robbers in Atlanta, Georgia decide to rob a popular store in the area only to find that the owners are packing heat. Both criminals proceed to get their asses handed to them by getting killed by the owners.

Take a look at the image above of the store owners – they look pretty though.

If you would like to read the full article click here.

Looks like Lycos has found a way to launch Ddos attacks against spammers – and they are saying it’s LEGAL!

Full Story

Today I finally drove out to Devil’s Den here in San Antonio, for those of you that have never heard of “The Den” it’s the mecca for all San Antonio off roaders. People have been telling me about the den since I got my jeep, however I had never actually gone, now that I have I will be a frequent visitor!

The Den is located at Ingram and 410, right by Ingram Park mall, this was a surprise to me because it’s only about 8 minutes from my apartment complex – to think that a major Texas off-road spot is basically in my back yard it still a little strange to me

I took some video and pictures while I was there which are posted below, the videos are of a couple other Jeepers that were there – Scott and Cliff . They were both very nice guys who were happy to explain the inner workings of the Den to me. Most of the Den is flooded from the recent rains that we have had in San Antonio – I believe that it acts as a sort of flood basin for the city so you can imagine how much water is collected there.

After chatting with Scott and Cliff for awhile, I followed Scott down a few trails and he showed me a few other places in the back of the den that are great off-road areas when it’s dry (They were all under water at the moment).

All in all I had a great time and finally got to push the Rubicon (my Jeep) further than I have in the past, it succeed with no problems.

My accomplishments at the Den included:

• Deeper mud than the Rubicon had seen
• Forging water for the first time that was anywhere from 1 to 3 feet deep.
• Meeting up with more San Antonio Jeepers

Click Below for the videos and images:

Videos

Pictures

This is how my day is going:

I am the bicycle.
(Thanks for the pic Choe)