Quality knitting time

Tony and I watched "The Matrix" last night, which we hadn't seen before. Yes, I know that we were like the last two people in the world to see it. It was a good 2 1/2 hours of knitting time, thought Tony swears that there were scenes during which I stopped knitting! I kind of doubt that!

Tha answer Alison's question: I have a certain amount of bandwidth, or amount of information, that I am allowed to transmit from my host server on a monthly basis. My host also has a control panel that I can use to go and see where my traffic is coming from, and who is linking to my images. (Like my SiteMeter, but with a lot more detail) In it I discovered that I was getting a lot of hits from a message board for the band Level 42. Huh?

So I followed the link (I had to sign up for the board to find out just why I was getting hits from it), and lo-and-behold! In one of the messages was the steaming tea pot that I have on my home page. And it was copied over and over again in replies to the message.

Now I don't own the image, I didn't create it, but I am hosting the image on *my* server. What this person did was look at the source code for the page and linked it like this: <.img src="http://tea-ramblings.com/img002.gif">, the picture was showing up in his message, but the image was still hosted on my server, so he was using *my* bandwidth! This is known as "hotlinking" an image, and when you don't have the biggest amount of bandwidth in the world, a pretty unhappy thing. Heck, it was showing up as the #4 referer for the past week to my site!

I sent a note to the manager of the board to make her aware that it had happened, and to ask her to maybe let people know that it's not a nice thing to do. I received a really snippy note in return. I'm going to keep a really close eye on my statistics for a while.