So where does Rorschach from the Watchmen turn to when he needs advice about girls? How about Teen Beat magazine (from 1976 1978)!

I’ve just blocked a bunch of IP addresses.

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed a fairly odd pattern in my referrer listing. Every morning (my time), I seem to get a request that appears to originate from http://nitrocandy.com. Yesterday I decided to do something about it. I checked the extended logs and found that that particular request comes from a set of IP addresses beginning with 124.115.0.*. According to this post and, consistent with my own logs, this is a gateway (or similar) in China. I’m also not the only one who is a little upset about it. Bots Vs. Browsers tells me that at least one block of this IP range belongs to the Soso search engine, whose spider is presumably responsible for these hits. The rest of the IP block is also owned by Chinanet Shanxi province.

The problem is that the bot is insistent, doesn’t obey robots.txt, seems indiscriminant and, I think, doesn’t honestly report its referrer. So I’ve followed the lead on this site and blocked the following ranges:

220.181.61.
124.115.0.
208.36.144.
124.115.4.
220.181.32.26
58.61.164.
220.108.7.
220.181.
221.194.
202.108.7.

I realise this may block one or two legitimate readers but I can’t see any other way of doing it.

Well, this is the first time (that I’m aware of) that one of my posts has been lifted word for word. The so-called “Indian Autos Blog” lifted my article on Ten Cool Facts about the New Nissan GTR for their article here.

They have a section at the end of their article that mentions ’similar’ articles about the new Nissan GTR. I can only imagine that when they say ’similar’, it means they’ve stolen the content from those articles on the Nissan GTR also. They write “THIS ARTICLE WAS COMPILED BY IAB” but I know where they copied (STOLE) their material from.

I wrote mine almost a year before they wrote theirs. Plagiarism is such an ugly word, but that’s the only way I can describe it. I would have thought that a site like Indian Autos Blog that’s obviously trying to make a name for itself would have a go at writing their own material instead of plagiarising and stealing the content of another site. The people who run the Indian Auto Blog should think very carefully about what they’re doing.

Indian Auto Blog, you are nothing but thieves.

So I was flying home on Qantas the other day and it occurred to me that ages ago I began a series of posts (an EPIC series of posts) about runways from around the world. I thought that now might be a good time to continue this EPIC collection, this cavalcade of landing strips. The downside is that I’m afraid I don’t know where most of these landing strips or airports are located. If anyone does know, please feel free to leave a comment. Regardless, I hope you enjoy these pictures. I have more to come.

This approach looks like some sort of resort or other closely-held landing strip. Note the Cessna right next to the private home in the bottom left hand corner of the photograph.

This one must be a bit of a favorite for aircraft landing photographers, based on the sneaky photographer at the bottom of the photo. Our local airport does not allow photographers to get so close to the landing strip. The restricted zone extends quite some way beyond the end of the apron.

Again, I’m not sure of the location of this airport. It’s not Sydney, Australia I can tell that. But it sure looks like a crowded situation, with one taxi way and one main runway!
This is probably quite a legitimate airport but for some reason I’m strongly reminded of the drug baron’s private airstrip in the James Bond film, “Licence to Kill”. I can’t see much in the way of urban development beyond the trees, unless most of it is sitting below the treeline.

This airstrip is obviously designed by someone who enjoys computer games. Too far? Bad luck. Too short? Bad luck. Why place an airstrip right there? Who knows, but you absolutely MUST land your plane there or the entire world will suffer at the hands of millions of brain-eating zombies.

Note to self: make sure you land on a runway and not a highway.