Hard to believe, but the leaves are already starting to change and drop here in East Tennessee. A year ago, we were just starting construction on our house, and with all that behind us, it's time to enjoy the important things in life: NFL football. Green Bay had an embarrassing loss in the Week 1 opener at Minnesota, but there were also a few glimmers of hope in that game, and Week 2 had an overtime win after an almost just as embarrassing first three quarters against the Jets..

Regardless...

It's been an eventful two weeks, but it seems we are definitely now back to baseline performance, and maybe a little better..

Nerd-talk warning...

I'd been using Apache's mod_evasive module to try and trap the bots, but that didn't distinguish between a page load and an image load within a page. People reading a screenshot thread or doing a file search with lots of thumbnails to display would hit the limits in place to catch the bots largely because of the image loading....

Hope everyone's having a great summer. Ours has definitely had a little adventure and drama.

We currently live above a Norfolk Southern mainline, lovingly referred to as the Rathole but officially known as the CNOTP Second District. One of our resident historians, Jerry Sullivan, spent many hours inspecting these tracks when he worked for the Southern Railroad. The railroad has been good neighbors to us, and last month they took things to a new level -- a 24+ hour bonfire, complete...