Space & Rocket Center

Published on March 23, 2008 in Geek, General and Photography. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.

The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…

More photos from Savannah trip: Museum of Aviation

Published on March 23, 2008 in Photography. Closed Tags: , , , .

On the drive back from Savannah, Charles and I quickly stopped in to visit the Robins Air Force Base Museum of Aviation. Didn’t spend very long there, but it wasn’t too much out of the way for the drive back and had a chance to take a few pics. There were some more unusual planes there that I’d meant to go back and look up info on, but obviously hadn’t since I only just pulled the photos off my camera a few days ago with the rest of the photos from Savannah.

Savannah

Published on March 19, 2008 in Photography and Work. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Took a trip for work back in December to provide cluster training for some of the engineers at Gulfstream. Seems like we also did some very minor maintenance on the cluster we administer there. Anyway, I brought the camera along and had a chance to take a few pics while wandering around the riverfront. Only got around to pulling them off my camera today, so here they are:



garfield minus garfield

Published on March 15, 2008 in General. Closed Tags: , , .

Ran across this site recently, and I’m not sure I could describe it any better than the site itself does:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Check it out!

#define alcoholiday

Published on March 4, 2008 in #define and General. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

An occasion like Hallowe’en, April Fool’s, or Father’s/Mother’s Day. Though not categorized as an official holiday, is often used as a good occasion to get a good drunk on with friends.

“Shit dude! It’s Hallowe’en, my favorite alcoholiday! Let’s get done up as Zombies and get druuuuunk!!!”

[Source]

We were in CU this past weekend to close on the sale of our old house (yay!). Seems we hadn’t realized it was “Unofficial” St. Patrick’s Day at the UofI. If you aren’t from the CU area, you’re probably not aware of this particular alcoholiday. Seems several years back, Cochrane (the beer baron of campus, owning 10 of the major campus bars) decided he was missing out on a lot of income since St. Patrick’s Day typically fell during spring break and thus students weren’t taking that opportunity to drink heavily in his establishments. So he instituted “Unofficial”, which comes a couple of weeks before spring break so that students can ditch class on a Friday and get trashed all day long.

In some sense, stuff like this just seems like it’s part of the college experience, but it makes campus a little crazy for those that aren’t choosing to partake. For example, Amanda and I wanted to go to Papa Del’s while we were in town because you just can’t get anything resembling good Chicago-style deep dish pizza in Huntsville. I’d talked to some folks about meeting there on Friday night, only to find out it was Unofficial. Since we didn’t really want to fight our way through all that, we figured we’d go to Pasha for some Mediterranean and hit Papa Del’s up on Saturday night. Talking to some friends, we found out Cochrane realized he was still not making enough money, so he went ahead and extended it a two day party starting this year. So Saturday was out too. Fortunately Sunday night worked out though, so we did get our pizza fix. I’m waiting for the day I hear they’ve extended Unofficial to be a week-long thing like Mardi Gras.

Sample coverage of this year’s activities: Not everyone celebrates alcoholiday… (News-Gazette)

To be honest, this isn’t the first college-wide booze party I’ve come into contact with. While I was at the University of Rochester, there was a day-long party known as Dandelion Day, or more commonly D-Day. Another example of students getting up earlier than they normally would in order to get thoroughly trashed by 10am. Managed to dig up a History of D-Day that gives a bit more background than I can. Talks about how things were substantially toned down during the 90’s with stuff about no open containers. As things typically work, this translated into “you can’t walk around the quad with an open beer bottle in your hand, but if you pour your beer/hard liquor into a plastic cup, you’re good to go.”

Web migration complete… well mostly

Published on February 29, 2008 in Geek. Closed

So my hosting provider (was textdrive, now Joyent) is working on retiring all their old FreeBSD servers they were leasing. Yeah, it hadn’t occurred to me that you could lease a server like that. Anyway, they’re buying up fancy “Shared Accelerators” (8-core Opteron boxes with 4GB RAM/core from Sun running OpenSolaris) backed by SunFire x4500 Thumpers running ZFS.

I’d started off with this provider a couple years ago as part of a VC campaign (give us a large wad of cash, and we’ll give you an account for as long as we’re in business), and I’d upgraded at some point when they had a similar campaign that bumped up the specs on my hosting account and added their Connector service (group email, calendar, etc services with their own chunk of attached storage) and Strongspace service (large reliable online backup storage accessible via sftp/rsync over ssh/web over ssl). Anyway, all of this translates into my having the equivalent of a “Premier” service (see here). Long story short, I’ve got a lifetime account with the following specs:

  • Connector: 100 users/100 GB
  • Strongspace: 100GB
  • Hosting: 50 websites, 20GB Disk, 60GB Bandwidth, 100 databases

Considering what I paid for my initial VC lifetime account, and later the upgrade that added Connector and Strongspace, and the fact this level of account now runs $100/month, I think I got off like a bandit. I wouldn’t even get close to a year of service with what I’ve paid, and that’s for “lifetime” service at the above levels.

And the Premier level account means there’s 14 other accounts/virtual servers on my Shared Accelerator, so it should remain nice and snappy for me. So far it’s been much zippier for my sites as they were getting kinda bogged down on the old box. I’m not sure what all was going on there, if they’d simply oversubscribed the box or were starting to have issues with their storage backend for the old servers since they were pushing hard to move away from them, etc.

Now I just need to take some time to finish some of the manual migration for changes from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris, and fix up some stuff that was broken a while back due to a Wordpress upgrade. I’m also taking this opportunity to start picking up Ruby on Rails, and am vaguely contemplating ditching Wordpress in favor of something of my own creation built on RoR.

It’s still early (i.e., I’ve got a lot to learn about Rails), but so far it looks like a really sexy web framework and I threw together something resembling a blog after watching a 15-minute screencast that runs through the process to getting a basic app up and running. It’s still very basic but functional: add posts, edit them, list all posts, add comments to a post, and some of the unit testing framework in Rails. I’ve started thinking about what all else is really needed, and there’s a fair bit: authentication (so only I can post to the blog or edit stuff), more advanced comment handling (akismet for spam, etc), categorization/tagging, searching through posts, and of course actually putting some style into the whole thing with CSS. But what I’ve got’s a start and now that I’ve got my performance issues sorted out following the migration, I’m not in as big a rush to dump Wordpress.

Merry Christmas, Movie-House!

Published on December 25, 2007 in General. Closed

It’s that time of year. Time to watch favorites like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (the real one, not that live-action debacle starring Jim Carrey and directed by Ron Howard) and “A Christmas Story” (they looked at me like i had lobsters crawling out of my ears!). Seems like Christmas has rushed up to me before I had a chance to notice. Fortunately I was able to get the little bit of shopping I wanted to do done yesterday, and no it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. The week or so after Thanksgiving was much worse, although I’ll admit I didn’t bother with any insanity like Target or Walmart which can be a little crazy all the time. I was disappointed if not surprised to see that CompUSA has yet to be really marking anything down by enough to make it interesting. 5-10% off does not a chain-wide store-closing make. Perhaps after the holidays they’ll get more desperate.

Anyway, the real reason I started this post is to write about a couple of entertaining tidbits I heard kids say in church this year. The first dates back to Westminster in CU when Pastor Laura was asking the kids about communion, what’s the significance, what do we do, etc. One rather astute child stated quite plainly that “we drink blood.” I suppose that about sums it up. Wasn’t sure whether her grandma was going to laugh or cry after that one. Second one happened a couple of weeks ago here at Grace in AL. Some of the youth from the church were leading children’s time and trying to contrast Jesus with the images the little kids associate with other kings. Instead of jewels you have the crown of thorns, etc. When they asked what kings ride, the kids piped up with a horse. But when they asked what Jesus rode, the kids were a little stumped. Finally one of the more vocal youngsters announced that “Jesus rides a monkey”. He was quite adamant that he has seen Jesus ride a monkey.

Not sure where else to go after that one, but I hope this finds everyone in good spirits and I’ll wish everyone happy holidays!

More photos from Alabama: Cathedral Caverns, Autumn at Monte Sano, and pumpkins

Published on December 16, 2007 in Photography. Closed

I’m finally getting around to sifting through some of the photos I’ve taken over the past couple of months and uploading them to Flickr. Here’s the one from the first batch taken at Cathedral Caverns in Scottsboro, AL:

And here are some shots I took of the Autumn trees from up on Monte Sano:

And a few shots of our pumpkins from Halloween:

#define trite

Published on November 27, 2007 in #define. Closed

Main Entry: trite
Pronunciation: trahyt
Function: adjective
Etymology: < L trītus worn, common, equiv. to trī- (var. s. of terere to rub, wear down) + -tus ptp. suffix
Date: 1540-50
1 : lacking in freshness or effectiveness because of constant use or excessive repetition; hackneyed; stale: the trite phrases in his letter.
2 : characterized by hackneyed expressions, ideas, etc.: The commencement address was trite and endlessly long.
3 : Archaic. rubbed or worn by use.

[Source]

Feeling old

Published on November 26, 2007 in General. Closed

Today, I am officially old.