16527
 
time.apple.com


16188
 
www.google.com


4513
 
weather.wapp.wii.com


4235
 
ad.yieldmanager.com


2315
 
news.wapp.wii.com


1907
 
www.symantec.com


1852
 
ad.doubleclick.net


1612
 
105.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa


1347
 
cfh.wapp.wii.com


1320
 
202-177-19-148.kdd.net.hk.jessecole.org

Ok, we can see we have several very popular sites. The first is not quite what you’d expect, its time.apple.com. You don’t think about it but every computer and device you own likely keeps itself synchronized with a time server. Every time it goes to synchronize, it has to do a dns lookup. Actually this number is a tad distorted by the fact that my router decided it should update its time 10 or 11 times a day, (thank you Dlink). I actually got sick of it a made it use the ip address for time.apple.com instead of the hostname so hopefully that number won’t go up so much.

The next most popular query is for www.google.com. No surprise there. Every time you type in the website or use the search bar in your browser and possibly even just visiting certain websites will cause a query to be performed.

The most interesting out of all these though is the fact that, in my top 10 queries, 2 of them (ad.yieldmanager.com and ad.doubleclick.com) are well known ad servers. What a waste of time and bandwidth that is. In the future, i may start blocking queries to well known ad sites just to avoid giving them stats on us.

The long story is that I was tired and didn’t feel like looking into it right then. I ran spinrite overnight (really aught to buy a legitimate copy of that) and went to sleep. The next morning spinrite came up fine for all my hdd’s, system still wouldn’t boot. So, i booted up my knoppix disc and did a file system check. My / partition had a few errors which it fixed. Reboot. Still won’t boot. The system would come up to the point where i would usually see the 3 second timeout for grub and just do nothing. This is where i decided to reinstall grub and see if that fixed it. I booted into knoppix again ran grub and issued these commands.

root (hd0,0)

setup (hd0)

quit

hd0 is my first hdd. ,0 specifies the partition (i have my /boot on sda1 and my / on sda2). This fixed it and now i’m back in business.

I don’t think anything could prove more that i’m a geek than my top clicked sites being things like wikipedia, thottbot (a world of warcraft database site), and tldp.org (the linux documentaion project). Leave a comment if you think you’ve got one better (or are even reading this).