What is it on my site that’s frequently googled? A blog post? a static page? No, it’s this little clock showing eight: .

Paraphrasing a bit: Then shalt thou count to eight. No more, no less. Eight shall be the number of the counting, and the number of the counting shall be eight. Nine shalt thou not count, and neither count thou seven, excepting that thou then goest on to eight.Ten is RIGHT OUT.
Inexplicably eight it is that gets found through google images.

Maybe I should license my 8.gif? OK, today I am in a generous mood, so here’s the deal, you get all twelve fancy hours on my marvelous state-of-the-art clock for an unbelievable price of none:

During the weekend I upgraded the firmware in my dsl router. I then started experiencing timeouts, so I tried to downgrade - no can do. The geniuses at AVM didn’t consider that an option. “You have newer firmware - go away”.

So I called the dsl provider. It turned out that coincidentally just after I upgraded, the network went down. The router firmware was not the cause of the problem, then. And afterwards router was working fine.

But the problem remains. I don’t really care whether there is an extra-seekrit way to downgrade. After all the years of doing bios upgrades on my home pc, and flashing the graphics card, I treat being able to undo that kind of process as a given. If it is not possible, I want to know it upfront. Jeez, they didn’t even bother to put it on their website!

IMHO, any decent upgradable thingy should be also downgradable. If it’s not, it’s wrong. If it’s not and there is no indication that it’s not, it’s plain dumb.

But hey, I can understand you, guys - a brain is not downgradable, when there’s nothing to downgrade to.

For some time now I was wondering why every month my 404 redirection page is getting a fair share of hits. Clicking through back and forth I wasn’t able to find anything. Today as I looked in the icon cache of the feedreader that I use, I discovered that my own icon contains my 404 page.

So, my 404 page was definitely getting redirected from non-existent favicons.ico. My 404 page gets robots.txt too. Mystery solved. I wonder if there are any other types of files that are implicitly sought by clients???

Update: Now that I know about it, I looked into the apache logs directly, instead of those generated from awstats. And there one can see clearly what the problem was.

A while ago I wrote about the CDs I ordered. I got one then, and was waiting for the other (Wolfgang Press; Legendary Wolfgang Press and Other Tall Stories). Surprise surprise - it’s more than 4 months now, and I am still waiting. Well, actually I doubt I will ever get it, since the CD is “out of print” (hmm. how do you call it in case of a CD - “out of burn”?). Anyway, they don’t make it anymore. No big deal.

Just that every week or so I get an email with a link which I have to click, to acknowledge that I want to continue waiting for the CD. I stubbornly nurture my relationship with vivid.pl’s order-processing system. 4 months and counting. If I don’t blow it one week, I will eventually win with the machine.

* An explanation - Rotten Fodder is from Wolfgang Press’ Standing up straight