Modern Vespa

So you're a mutant. Explains a lot

It's a curse not a blessing. I didn't even get my own cartoon series.

BMWs are your kryptonite then?

I'd argue it's my wallet.

Opening Night - 10:00PM EDT. Hope I can make it.

Go Guardians!

Chris from CLE

Taking MIL through some of the big spots in Italy later this year.

Planning a half-day trip from Florence so she can get to Pisa.

Realized the train goes thru Pontedera and the Museum is like 2 blocks from the station.

Welp.

Make that a full day trip now.

Great!
Not far from Pisa is the city of Lucca, quite a place, medieval feel.


What's cheering me up today: Studying the route of the "De Ronde", Tour of Flanders this Sunday!

armedferret,

The Italian authorities are again grappling with the Leaning Tower to keep it upright. Hopefully it will not fall over before you get there.

There are many destinations in Italy that are both historically unique and beautiful. I was fortunate enough to live there for several years. I thought Piza was beautiful - but not somewhere I would go back to.

You could spend two months in Rome and not get to everything. I was underwhelmed with Pisa - not much there and you can cover the whole place in under one hour.

Having said this, I went to go see the famous leaning tower. It just would be lower on the list behind Venice, Florence, Rome, Amalfi Coast and Sicily.

Happy trails and buona fortuna

Bob Copeland

I think it is the tower in Bologna that is in real current danger of collapsing, anytime now. Right in the middle of city.
Major, expensive bracing is in place, a popular local "fund me" has been set up and, is quite active, I understand.

Curious, I looked: 25+daily trains between Pisa and Lucca.
Gotta experience Italian trains. "Binario due, binario due...Tutti al brodo!"

While we've been to Italy numerous times, it's MIL's first and she's 76 and will be in a wheelchair (if Google says something's a 10-minute walk, I can assure you that's at least 30-45 for her). So Lucca won't be in the cards with her but it's on the list for us eventually.

No they're not - it's been stabilised and good for many years to come. Apparently the lean is back to where it was in the early 1800's. A Brit led the engineering team starting in 1990 - John Burland.

Jess, what exactly are these Bots trying to achieve ?

The original Sampson is destroyed and I believe out of a total of 4 this is the only one flying. One of my all time favs besides the Pitts Model 12. I used to work on the first Model 12 but never hear from the owner anymore. I think the Sampson is the most bad ass Pitts ever made. Always cheers me up.

Oh, just look at that.

It's a good question.

Some of them are looking for weak points in the server software, attempting SQL injection attacks and other hostile behavior.

Some of them are attempting automated spam, trying to register a new account so that they can spew hundreds of messages about god knows what shady business proposition. Related to that, some subset of them are obviously looking for any kind of semi-anonymous comment system that they can belch their salted pork product into.

Some of them are trying to do high-speed scraping, literally copying the entire website as fast as they possibly can. The motivation for this category is pretty murky, though. Some of the scrapers might be looking for something specific, such as links, or images that are copyrighted. Some of the scrapers might be SEO-oriented, building a list of backlinks so that they can emulate or otherwise reverse engineer Google's PageRank system. Some of the scrapers might be AI-oriented, and need to suck up as much language and human communication as possible in order to train the AI language models.

The SEO industry is pretty mature at this point, and the big players there generally have their bots identify themselves appropriately -- just as the search engines themselves do. So I'd guess that there are less of these SEO players represented in the unidentified category.

So if I had to guess, a good chunk of this last category -- the high speed scrapers -- are AI oriented. The industry is still fairly immature, and they're "moving fast and breaking things", a phrase which some asshole used to say but no longer seems to believe.

And then there are all the entities that seem to originate from SE Asia -- mostly China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The current dimwits operating out of the Alibaba datacenter fall into this last category, but fuck if I can figure out what they want.

Given the pages they request, the number of back-to-back duplicate requests they make, and the fact that they don't seem to have figured out that they are only getting errors back from MV, I don't think they know what the fuck they want either.

nope

High speed scraper is now added to my lexicon.

Thanks Jess for all that you do.

So if MV was a house they are trying to break in an attempt to steal your address book and what they can't steal they will try to fuck up with malevolence on their way out with no sense of responsibility ?

Yes, that's more or less it. Though to continue the analogy, some of them want to take photos of everything you own so they can build an identical house on the other side of town, and some of them just want to have a look around for no discernible reason.

And the ones that came from Alibaba seem to be bumbling around in the hall, bumping into the walls repeatedly.

Salutes.

Wait. Are they made by alibaba or purchased there? Because that analogy works for hoth scenarios.

Indeed.

Grey day but still cheered me up

Scooter Pic of the Day! (Post 2674216)

Added three nights onto our February 25 trip to Venice so we can punt down to Naples and hit up the Bourbon Tunnels and Cappella Sansevero. Couple statues I wanna see.

Last night I restrung my classical guitar. I usually let stuff sit for a day or two and acclimate, so when I was done I picked up my balalaika. I tuned it up and pretended my name was something cool like Vladimir or Dmitri or something. Then a piece fell off. It's old, so no worries. But since it's open now I have a great idea. I'm going to hot glue a pickup inside and drill a hole for a jack so it can be an ELECTRIC balalaika.

How cool is that?

Very!

The weather was great yesterday and my wife and i rode 80 miles on our new scoots, grabbed a burger and a beer on the way. Soooo glad we're back!

Building an electric balalaika from scratch is on my list of things to do.

Gesundheit.

Today was the best skiing conditions of the 2023/2024 season. Just an epic bluebird day at Lake Tahoe. And after a slow start to the snow this year, the snow pack is above average in the Sierra Nevada. Good news for keeping drought conditions at bay. This cheers me up today!

The silence in the UK at the moment.

It's the Holidays so all the schools are closed so everyone with a family has left the country.

No rush hour to speak of. It's divine.

I love going for a ride on a holiday morning. Quiet roads that are usually bustling with traffic. There's nothing better. Makes you want to just stand in the turn lane in your underwear and tube socks, baring your teeth into the wind listening to the silence ...

Perhaps I've said too much.

My Kawasaki KLV has been sold.

What's cheering me up? That seamus26 posted his message in this forum and not the picture forum!

The Gauteng Toll-roads system has been abolished - because 93% of users simply refused to pay.

In 2013, a number of existing freeways in the province of Gauteng were declared toll roads. This was done in order to recoup the cost of upgrades to them. The entire methodology was tainted by disinformation, misinformation and poor management by the authorities. The Gauteng provincial government wanted to fund the upgrade and ongoing maintenance of all roads in the province using a 12c per litre levy on all fuel sold within the province (about the size of Belgium). In terms of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, National Government is the only level of government that may impose taxes and levies, but National Treasury refused to ring-fence any fuel levy income for Gauteng's exclusive use. The levy idea was therefore dropped in favor of a road toll system on the freeway infrastructure in Gauteng.

The toll system was unpopular from implementation, as the cost of the toll bridges was funded by an Austrian company who were contracted to provide the infrastructure and entitled to a large percentage of the income to recoup their investment. A publicised cap on tolls per day for users never came about. As the toll cameras used vehicle registrations to bill users, trucks and trailers were billed twice as the horse and trailer could be registered to different owners. User resentment grew rapidly and resistance erupted. Users in their hundreds of thousands simply refused to pay their toll accounts. Only 7% of road users complied.

Again due to the Constitutional issues, the SANRAL roads agency (appointed by National government to run the system) was unable to force users to pay on penalty of de-registering their vehicles - because vehicle registration is a provincial competency and Gauteng government did a tit-for-tat refusal to force collection of tolls that were not ring-fenced. Other provincial governments did likewise. The boycott continued for over a decade.

The situation regressed until SANRAL was paying over 80% of the meagre toll income to the infrastructure supplier to pay for the infrastructure and the balance for administrative costs in SANRAL. Historical user debt prescribed under South African law and had to be written off after 3 years. Effectively, no money was accruing to National Treasury from the system at all ! The finger-pointing between levels of government became a party political election issue.

Zoom forward to 2024 and the system is finally being abolished at midnight on April 11th - ahead of national and provincial elections in May. The toll gantry infrastructure will now be used for law enforcement and vehicle monitoring.

A victory for unhappy citizens uniting against heavy-handed government.

A simple cheering, but it's effect is accumulative.

Monday last...

Tuesday last...

Venice was a disappointment for me. But Naples. Bellissimo. For statues in Naples don't miss "The Veiled Christ". I could probably spend few weeks there. It has the first Pizza place in the world. Not the best Pizza I've tasted, but I've eaten Pizza from the first Pizza place in the world. Then there is Pompeii next door.

No Road Tax, No MOT. Cherished Plate. Go figure.

Made it to work this morning.

Got a pile of wet, slushy snow yesterday. Melted on impact when it hit you, but still piled up. The 4 lane highway was down to one lane yesterday, 30 mph. By this morning, however, roads had been mostly cleared as I headed off to work on the usual back roads.

I was driving in a thin layer of slush, moving along fine, until hit a stretch of deeper stuff, wasn't too worried, but I must have been a couple of inches off track, and the slush did it's thing, pulling me off towards the ditch. I held the wheel and awaited my fate. Next think I was on the embankment looking at a heavily tilted horizon muttering"Oh, s#%t" to myself. There was a driveway ahead with a culvert that I was sure would stop me, somehow, when I got there, I'd slowed down enough, there was no impact, and I hit the gas and drove out of it. When I got to work, I reached for my bags on the driver's side rear seat only to find them on the floor on the opposite side.

I only have a handful of crazy driving events in my lifetime (nearly all snow-related), but this one's on the list.