Thought Distillery

The following is a post drafted in early 2005. At the time I didn’t want to give anyone paranoia that I was tracking their browsing habits of this website. I’ve long let go my server log obsession, as I have plenty of other useful actvities to occupy my time. I bring this draft to life to possibly amuse the 1 or maybe 2 readers that still follow this stagnant site.

ha·rass   
tr.v. ha·rassed, ha·rass·ing, ha·rass·es

1. To irritate or torment persistently.
2. To wear out; exhaust.
3. To impede and exhaust (an enemy) by repeated attacks or raids.

I admittedly take a sometimes obsessive interest in who or what traffics this website. So I regularly read through long lists of webserver log files. For all ye non-techies out there, this is the kind of information I see:

156.56.126.27 - - [10/Jan/2005:15:12:47 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 22676 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12"

What we have here is the IP address of the visitor, the date and time, the requested page (/), and a bunch of extra text telling us about the webrowser the visitor used. Thats it. This kind of information is generated every time you visit any webpage. Your tracks are left, but they are still quite anonymous tracks. Of course we can do a little digging to maybe get a clue of who it is that visited. Lets see who owns that IP address by using a simple hostname lookup shall we?

dial-126-27.dial.indiana.edu

Well, how about that? A visitor from what appears to be someone using the dialup modem pool of my former Alma Mater, Indiana University. Most likely a vistor from Bloomington Indiana. My oh my, and they are a black sheep as well because they (like me) are using the Safari web browser on an Apple Machintosh computer!

Why do I bring all this up, you may wonder? Well, one starts to notice patterns after sifting through thousands of lines of webserver logs. The pattern I noticed several months ago was almost daily visits from somebody using the IU dialup pool with a Machintosh computer. No big deal, I know of other people who visit on a regular basis but I have NO CLUE who this person is! You see, all my friends from IU (to my knowledge) have graduated and left. Since I refuse to fool myself into believing that this site is captivating enough to grab the regular attention of complete strangers, I am naturally very curious who this mysterious visitor may be. A long lost friend perhaps? I don’t know.

Being the occasional programming junkie that I am, I began adding special messages to Thought Distillery’s home page that would only be displayed to Safari browser visitors coming from IU dialup addresses. Over the last two months I have literally PLEADED to this visitor to give me a clue to who they may be, or at least acknowledge if they are a stranger or not. I know that they have seen my messages as the visits have continued, but what have I received? Nothing! Nothing but repeated torment and paranoia generated within my own mind of who this could possibly be and why they refuse to give me even one word after I’ve given hundreds! I am exhausted from the whole debacle.

I see this whole situation as a strange form of harassment. Though this person is doing nothing but passively viewing this website, they are indirectly causing me persistent thought torment which is wearing me out from the repeated visits. Well, it shall be no more! I hereby publicly decry this ludicrious situation and wipe my server log obsession clean! Go on, keep visiting. Remain invisible. I will no longer know or wish to know. I just want my sanity back, is that too much to ask? Is it?! … Say something!? Anything?! Please!!!!