So I’m looking through my http access log this evening (a log of all the computers that have visited my Web site), and I come across the following entry:

62.193.231.242|-|-|06/Aug/2005 20:48:51|GET /blog?p=26 HTTP/1.0|301|311|-|Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1)|pteranodon.local

For the uninitiated, this translates roughly as: “At 8:48pm on August the 6th, 2005, someone at the Internet address 62.193.231.242 visited your Web site (pteranodon is the name of the computer hosting my Web site), going directly to the address /blog?p=26.”

Thrilling, I know, but there’s a bit to be wierded out about here. First is the IP address of the visitor. I ARINed the address, and it belongs to a British Internet Service Provider called AMEN LTD. IP itself is from a network cloud in France.

Now, this by itself is not particularly startling. So someone in France made their way to Uncle Andrew Dot Net, so what? The wonders of the Information Age and all that. The conceptual stumbling blocks for me are 1) their final destination; and 2) the lack of a referrer.

This person came into my blog at a specific point, namely /blog?p=26, which happens to be a rant I wrote called “God Told Me That Men Don’t Wear Skirts“. They didn’t go to Uncle Andrew Dot Net and search for that article, just zeroed right in on it.

Furthermore, the lack of a referrer suggests that they didn’t get there by way of another Web site, search engine, etc. If they had, the site through which they had found me would show up in the log as a referrer.

And this isn’t some kind of attack or comment spam offensive, either. If it were a security hack of some sort, the log would reflect the offending computer’s requests for vulnerable scripts or DLLs in hard-to-find directories, or else page upon page of gibberish intended to result in a buffer overflow; it certainly wouldn’t make so inocuous a request as, “show me the blog entry at p=26, please!”

And if this were an attempt at comment spam, it would not contain a GET command, which only requests data, but would instead contain a POST command, which attempts to send data, in this case spurious blog comments regarding Herbal Viagra or Texas Hold ‘Em.

In other words, by all appearances, some anonymous person in France opened up their Web browser, typed or otherwise entered http://www.uncle-andrew.net/blog?p=26 into the address window, and let ‘er rip. Seems like a pretty strange thing to do.

This is the kind of thing that keeps geeks up nights.

UPDATE: Figured it out. Some folks had found an unsecured pingback-enabled blog entry they could use for the purposes of pingback spam; a scheme where the site in question establishes a false pingback link to thousands of unwitting blogs in order to increase their page ranking in search engines. Finally saw the light when I noticed some new direct visitors to that very same blog entry, only these fuckers were nice enough to leave referrers: Texas Hold’em and Party Poker, indeed. Bastards! Chicken diddlers!

So, off go the trackbacks again. Damn, and just when I thought I had this whole spam thing under control…..

About a year ago I traded in my ridiculous Hot Wheel of a 4×4 Mazda pickup truck for a 2004 Subaru Forester. This vehicle is everything the pickup wasn’t: practical, comfortable, stable, and fuel-efficient.

I only got the truck as a rebound vehicle, when my adorable little Ford Festiva was beaten to death in a rear-end collision with—this is a little embarassing—a Corolla FX. Total writeoff. (Note: the Corolla read-ended me, not the other way around.) After the accident, I wanted to get the biggest, burliest car I could afford, and a four-wheel-drive pickup truck seemed to fit the bill. Since then I have come to my senses. Fixed-differential four-wheel-drive is great in three feet of snow, but horrible on slick pavement. A vehicle with no weight over the drive wheels is always perilously close to laying a patch or spinning out of control. And pickup trucks are one of the most profitable segments of the auto industry for a reason; they’re built cheaply, with little of the safety features and extra reinforcement that come standard on so-called “passenger” vehicles.

One of the many features I truly love about my new car is the automatic transmission. For many years I felt that a standard transmission gave me “more control” over the vehicle than an automatic, and from a truly empiric standpoint this is probably true. However, having more control over your vehicle can either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how good you are at controlling it. Other than downshifting when descending a hill, I’ve never used my extra control over my truck’s manual transmission to any good effect, and often used it to my detriment, lugging the engine during a poorly-timed upshift or popping a jackrabbit start when a light changed abruptly. I figured that, all things considered, having the car, constructed as it is by highly-trained engineers and designers, decide when it should change gears was probably a step up. Between that and the all-wheel-drive—you feel like you’re velcroed to the road, I’ll never own a car without it again—I feel like my car is taking care of me, looking out for its and my best interests. Which sure as hell beats leaving this up to me, whom I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw me.

And then of course there’s the question of traffic. In case you do not live in the Northwest, lemmetellyou, traffic around here can be a truly horrid experience. I generally don’t have to deal with it, since most days I telecommute. However, once or twice a week I drive south about 90 miles to visit the office, and the trip back is invariably anything from nasty to outright torture, particularly in a manual-transmission automobile. I clearly remember coming home some days with my left leg shaking and throbbing from two to three hours of clutch-in-clutch-out. Now that I have my Subaru, traffic is almost no big deal; I can catch up on my long-distance correspondance, listen to music, take a nap—er, scratch that last one. Nope, never do that, nosiree.

When I got my new car, however, I made a solemn pledge, both to myself and fellow travellers on the road: never would I fall prey to the Curse of the Automatic Ankle.

People who have driven nothing but automatic-transmission vehicles all their lives tend towards a truly aggravating behavioral trait on the road. Without getting into a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo—which I probably don’t understand anyway—the key feature of an automatic transmission is that you do not need to disengage and re-engage the clutch in order to shift gears. In fact, there is no clutch; a device called a torque convertor handles the transition from one gear to another. Since there is no clutch, a driver with an automatic-transmission car does not need to concern him/herself with the revolutions-per-minute (RPM) of the engine, in order to decide when to shift gears.

The upshot of all this is that drivers of automatic-transmission cars can accelerate as s-l-o-w-l-y as they like, and often do. This is what I call the Curse of the Automatic Ankle.

You know the situation: the nonagenarian behind the wheel of the Crown Victoria in front of you at the traffic light, who, as the light turns green, accelerates at a glacial one-mile-per-hour-per-hour. Civilizations collapse and stars go out in the time it takes for these people to get up to 25 MPH. Meanwhile, drivers with manual transmissions unfortunate enough to be stuck behind them are lugging and jerking and bouncing along. Their vehicle cannot accelerate slowly enough with first gear engaged to keep from overtaking the ‘Vic, so they have to throw in the clutch again, or else risk stalling their engine. Lather, rinse, repeat, until the old guy finally gets up to a first-gear-friendly speed or a passing lane becomes available. In the case of the latter, those drivers of lesser age or maturity tend to indulge in rapid—even dangerous—acceleration, socially unacceptable digital sempahore, or quite possibly both.

In the off-chance that someone who suffers this malady may be reading this, please take note: those drivers who peel back the pavement as they screech around you at the nearest opportunity may be assholes, but they also have a valid point. They don’t merely want to accelerate faster than you care to; the vagaries of physics dictate that they need to accelerate faster than you care to. Modern automotive technology requires a car with a manual transmission to accelerate in real—rather than geological—time. Please bear this in mind when you take to the road.

This has been a public service announcement.