Pursuing the Peace Prize with
Tariffs, Sanctions, and War Crimes?

Maybe the Donald is playing 5D chess in his quest for the peace prize. He has certainly brought the non-western world together like never before as they unite in an effort to cope with US bullying. Their unity was on display this week at the SCO, the China celebration of the end of WWII, and the Eastern Economic Forum. Meanwhile in the west there was an impotent meeting of the so called coalition of the willing in France. The US illegally blew up a suspected drug boat in its effort to stir up a war with Venezuela, and the big pharma shills in congress attack RFK and his reforms.

Afternoon folks!

It's another great week and here are your blues. Starting off we've got a 70's album from one of the 3 Kings of the Blues, guitarist Freddie King, followed by a 90's album from Chicago blues harmonica player, Billy Branch. After that is an album from New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair. In the blues-rock category we have a live album from Mike Bloomfield and we finish up in the diversity category with a live album from John Prine.

Enjoy the tunes and have a great weekend!

Good morning, good people!

I hope you are all in fine fettle this morning.

As we watched an old movie this afternoon, I was attending to an ant sting on my hand. The movie? "Them!". I had no idea what it was about. JtC is so funny, huh?

Things are happening quickly in my life as I struggle to tie up many loose ends. There are so many things I need to get in order around the house and yard, among a myriad of other things. Hopefully I tied up a big one yesterday, c99. Fingers and toes crossed.

In my many efforts to troubleshoot the site's problems I had shut off the database logging because it can be a resource hog. When I turned it back on, some days later, I saw that c99 was being hammered with database requests by, let's just say, unwanted actors, be they spammers or even more nefarious denizens from the dark side of the net. One particular country was the origin of most of the database requests. Can you guess which country that was? There's a prize waiting for the first person that guesses correctly in the comments below.

I'll stop short of calling it a full blown DDOS attack, but it was enough to bring the server to its knees.

After much deliberation and as a last ditch effort I implemented a CDN. It greatly helped to decease load times and to block unwanted database requests. Cloudflare is used by millions of sites around the world, it's the largest and best known that's available. It's had its problems in the past but that's supposedly been corrected.

It can take up to 72 hours for the CDN to work fully as it needs to propagate the www's DNS. That's why you were seeing the error pages with all the strange hops that it was taking around the globe. That's how a CDN works.

Things were still a bit dodgy for a couple of days after it was implemented. The loading times got a little bit better but still wasn't optimal. I was about to give up after day two. That night, right before I went to bed, I paused the CDN, essentially shutting it off, to see what would happen. I woke up the next morning and the site was down, I couldn't even access it. I reactivated the CDN and voila, it was loading like it should. It took three days to fully propagate the DNS, as was predicted.

Like it or not, it brought the site back from the dead. You can see the results for yourself. There are certainly other issues afoot as well, but that seems to be the big one.