2009 Obama (left) vs 2017 Trump (right) Inauguration photos in Washington DC. AP. The Obama Inauguration holds so many more people that you must say he was more popular.
Wondering, I am, about the truth in today’s news. US President Trump says something, the press refutes with facts, then he doubles down and continues to insist his version is correct. And this, from a US president. I find it odd that someone of such a high office would do and say such “alternative truths”, as he puts it. Really, there are no alternative truths, only truths backed by evidence. There are different conclusions made from the same original evidence, but no alternative truths. Alternative truths are close to a lie. What do we tell our kids, after years of us espousing everyone to tell the truth, when people in high office begin to lie.
Xie Yang, a Chinese Lawyer, tortured in Changsha, China, Jul 2015, is still in jail in the Changsha City Public Security No. 2 Detention Center. He has not been released.
Here I am, in Toronto, Canada, reading this translation about the torture of a Chinese lawyer, a human rights lawyer, Xie Yang 谢阳, in Changsha, China. I’m just not used to this kind of abuse on another human being. Yes, I’m soft. Under Canada’s legal system, torture in order to get a conviction would lead to the exclusion of all documents and evidence gained while under torture. This is just and fair. Evidence gained while using torture cannot be considered credible nor truthful. When someone fears for their life or the lives of their family and friends, they will admit to anything if pushed sufficiently hard. Truth is more important than just getting a conviction, as you may be convicting the wrong person.
The IP address 66.194.234.66 visited me today. It was not a unique visit and did not arouse any suspicion, but when my automated lookup script ran its IP lookup it returned the error message “;; Warning: Message parser reports malformed message packet.”, along with 54 host names. Very odd.
66.194.234.66 [24/Jan/2017:14:03:53 GET /something.jpg HTTP/1.1 200 177820 https://www.google.com/ Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 10_0_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14A456 Safari/602.1
2016 Honda Fit, after removal of the splash shield, The oil filter is blue, the oil drain plug is more rearward. Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
My 2016 Honda Fit told me it needed an oil change. This is my first oil change. In order to do an oil change I needed to remove the splash shield. The splash shield covers the bottom of the engine bay from road debris and dirt. Because the Fit only has 5.5″ of space under the splash shield, I needed to make ramps in order to gain more space under the Fit. Convoluted for the first oil change, yes, but hopefully much easier for the second oil change.
2016 Honda Fit on DIY wooden 2×10 ramps. Toronto, Canada, Photo by Don Tai
I do love the car, but my 2016 Honda Fit does have some “beauty spots”. Going to the dealer, like others have, may have resulted in parts of the car not being reinstalled correctly, and then falling off. If the splash shield was designed properly I would have probably considered going to the dealer.
We Canadians are always overshadowed by the 10 larger in population US. If at all possible I like to highlight our accomplishments, or in this case, sophisticated comment spamming from Canada. Bad, Canada.
Comment spammers on my site usually use a single IP to first read the post, determine if they can submit spam, then submit the spam comment. This shows up in my Akismet spam comments. They are simple to identify and ban.
It is always good to see international cooperation amongst different nations in this great world. However, when China, India and Russia cooperate to try to break into my site, forgive me when I get a little upset. While I usually file complaints to internet host providers, in this case the complaint would fall on deaf ears: hosts in China, India and Russia ignore abuse emails. Then most hosts from all over the world ignore abuse emails.
Number of login attempts: 417
All the user agent names are the same: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0
Lai Jeng-jer, a gay rights activist from Taiwan, at his Beijing cafe, Two Cities, 2012
Yes, I have lived in China for a number of years. There are quite a number of situations that completely shocked me, coming from Toronto, Canada, a democratic country. While people in China and Canada are people, people who eat, who work, who play, there are subtle differences in society that only hit home when you are in China, experience it, and think to yourself “What just happened”?
Today I received a massive 1,000 line scraper attack from spbot, from OpenLinkProfiler.org. The ip address is 138.197.47.148, a Digital Ocean IP, which I have banned. I’ve also added spbot to by robots.txt. Sent a complaint letter to Digital Ocean at abuse@digitalocean.com:
Hi there,
Today I received a 1000 line scrape from one of your IP addresses:
138.197.47.148
The UA is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; spbot/5.0.3; +http://OpenLinkProfiler.org/bot )
Please have them cease their scraping activity as it unnecessarily uses up my bandwidth and CPU time.
I have included today’s log entry with their activity:
