Digital Wanderer

Глубиномер мне привезли timex helix, потому что casio закончились. Меряет он оказывается и в метрах тоже. Но - с точностью до метра, что очень забавно. Поэтому я всё-таки установил английскую систему величин, и в результате наблюдаю свои достижения в футах. Но это как раз достаточно удобно, а вот температура в фаренгейтах просто убивает. Впрочем, температуру timex helix показывает весьма приблизительно и сильно оптимистично.
  Итак, вчера я нырял на котловане в Ругелях. Вода там прозрачная и растения красивые. Но было ветрено, а вода была довольно прохладной. В итоге я не смог войти в медитативное состояние, требуемое для фридайвинга. Но главное - глубина у берега невелика, а заплывать далеко при ветре тяжело, да и запрещено. Причём буйками служат пятилитровые бутылки из-под кваса, выкрашенные в красный цвет. В связи со всеми этими условиями, установленный сегодня личный рекорд - всего лишь 14 футов, или 4.3 метра.
Недавно я спрашивал, на сколько может нырнуть человек без приспособлений. Вопрос был некорректный, поскольку одно приспособление всё-таки используется всегда - это груз. Так вот, согласно Википедии рекорд среди мужчин - 80 метров, а среди женщин - 55. С ластами результат увеличивается до 108 и 86 метров соотвественно. А мировой рекорд с дополнительными приспособлениями (но без воздуха, естественно) составляет около 200 метров.
Есть куда стремиться.

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However, a rather amusing thing happened to me in the virtual world. It is, of course, of a slightly technological nature, but it provoked a storm of emotions in me.

The backstory goes like this. A month ago, my site Radio Archive was written about on the well-known blog dirty.ru. Registration there is by invitation only, but they easily give them to those whose sites were linked. As a result, I started occasionally dropping by dirty, and commenting. (By the way, if anyone needs an invite, I can send one).

And the story itself started yesterday. I should mention that the show "FM Dostoevsky" is recorded for me by a robot, that is, a program located in the exact same place as the "Radio Archive" site itself, meaning on the server of an American hosting*. And so yesterday the program couldn't record FMD, because it was treacherously killed. (That is, turned off by someone or something). When I went in to see what the matter was, it turned out that all the programs I had running were being destroyed after 2-3 minutes, or even sooner. I was already about to write angry letters to customer support, but decided to first use my head, which is always useful. I looked at the CPU load: "Holy mother of god"! Most of the processor is being devoured by my site. And this is despite the fact that there's a ridiculously powerful server installed there, and before that my site was less than a mosquito bite to it. That's how I figured to check the site's visitor stats.
And experienced A VERY REAL SHOCK.
Over the previous 2 days, the site was visited 120 thousand times, and the number of unique visitors was about 40 thousand.
Thus, I surpassed the traffic of not only  Zvuki.Ru phoneme, but even Goblin's Tupichok.  And if I had been registered in the  Rambler top-100, first place would have been mine. And if by this point you have no questions and suspicions about my sanity, then you are either an idiot or a saint. And the question goes like this: "Why on earth did 25 thousand people from all over the world suddenly rush to listen to two Russian radio shows?".
The answer sounds mysterious: "Not of their own free will". But who forced them? Now that is a completely different question, to which a detailed answer will now be given.

The reason for all this is the already mentioned dirty, or rather, a visitor of theirs from Estonia. On dirty there is a special section called "Leprosorium", for chatting on free topics. It turns out to be much more interesting than a forum: one person writes some nonsense, and a hundred or two comment. And so this visitor shared the following: in one of the strains** of the Bagle virus there is a link to his site. That is, it's a thing everyone knows about, when a virus (or rather, an internet worm) forces a sick computer to visit some internet address (usually the address of a porn site). But specifically in this strain for some reason there was a link to his site. However, the guy didn't really need these thousands of visits, and he decided to share them with the people. It's done elementarily - a redirect is set up to another site, and that's it. And in the comments, owners of all sorts of tiny sites about little animals and other trinkets started asking him to do them a solid.
The result is extremely amusing - counters going off the scale and top positions in ratings, hosting providers bewildered by the huge load on tiny amateur sites, crashing servers. Having read the comments, I decided to experience the hurricane of visits personally, but, possessing some fraction of reason, I asked to turn on the redirect for only 5 hours. However, the barrel organ has been churning for three days now, and there's no end in sight! Reminds me of the Russian folk tale about the magic pot, and the Greek one - about Croesus.
The result on the one hand is interesting, and on the other - sad. It's interesting in that my hosting easily handles 70000 visits a day. Sad in that now all the real statistics are ruined by forced visitors. By the way, the French are the most numerous, apparently they are the most careless and don't suspect the existence of antiviruses.
And the worst part - I couldn't record the show. It turned out that limits on the use of the processor on the server came into effect. That is why my programs were dropping like flies. But the hoster promised that there were no limits on processor time.
In any case, it turned out to be a very educational experience, so I'm satisfied.

*Hosting - a place where sites are located. Usually this is a server or a system of servers (cluster)
**Strain - a slightly modified version of the same virus

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