ever so gently rambling, rambling at my chamber door
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.
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:
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.
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.”
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:
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.
www.flickr.com
|
