#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.

Gmail and IMAP

Published on October 27, 2007 in Geek. Closed

Looks like Google has finally decided to support IMAP in Gmail. Now I just have to wait for them to roll it out to my account…

Life in Alabama

Published on August 25, 2007 in General and Work. Closed

We’ve been here in Alabama for 2 weeks now. Things seem to be going pretty well so far. We somehow survived the move and I don’t think left anything too critical behind. The truck full of half our stuff (and pulling the Civic), the CRV full of cats and guitars, and all the occupants got down here safely and relatively uneventfully. The POD full of the other half of our stuff arrived this past Thursday and we’re slowly working on unloading it. Moving in and unloading the POD has been a little slow since it’s been 100+ just about the whole time we’ve been here. For an idea of just how hot it is, the TVA shut down one of the nuclear plants near here due to the heat/drought and apparently that’s a first for the US (article). Otherwise, things around the house have been slowly progressing:

  • All utilities are set up, but we’re still waiting on a replacement garbage can and a recycle bin
  • Got bundled cable internet, digital cable tv + HBO + DVR, and phone service
    • (dvr was a free screwup on their part)
  • Ordered and received a new fridge, washer, and dryer
    • (seems the outlet for the dryer probably wasn’t wired up right, so an electrician is coming on Monday to check it out)
  • Already made use of the home warranty to get the downstairs AC fixed this past week after the fan motor quit
  • Amanda put up curtains in most of the windows and has them ordered for the remaining windows
  • Amanda has started the complex task of planning and installing shelving, hanging rods, etc in the closets
    • Did I mention not a single closet had any of this when we moved in?
    • Did I also mention most of the closets are REALLY WEIRD shapes? I’ll have to remember to scan the floorplan Amanda drew up for the master closet and post it…

I’m enjoying the new job, and they’re definitely keeping me busy. Seems like I’ve gone pretty quickly from manual lackey (help load these new drive trays into the rack) to taking the lead on new projects (go figure out how to set up grid computing so we can jump jobs between the supercomputers here and the clusters down at UAB). I’ll probably go into more detail about what I’ve been up to at work, and what I will be getting up to in another post.

I think Amanda’s settling in to doing her old job at the new location. Things haven’t been entirely smooth, but she can finally get into the building without needing the secretary to buzz her in. Amazingly enough, her computer made it to the local office for her first day here, but they’ve still got some technical issues to iron out if they want her to actually be productive. Unsurprisingly, shuffling lots of data from Huntsville to Bloomington across the internet is 4-5x slower than moving it within their intranet in Bloomington. But at least she can access data in Bloomington and get work done, even if it isn’t efficient.

Since we didn’t have a fridge till this past Wednesday, we’ve been eating out a lot so we’ve had the chance to sample several local restaurants and have found a number of good places to eat. I’ve also picked up some Southern slang that I may have to document for everyone’s amusement. :)

Photo usage

Published on July 30, 2007 in Photography. Closed

Apparently it’s been a busy week for my flickr photos. I’ve had two that were selected for inclusion in various web things.

First, one of my Ireland honeymoon photos was selected for inclusion in Schmap Dublin Third Edition (check out
Literary Dublin: Trinity College). Oddly enough, it was a photo I took while we were wandering around Trinity College. Here’s a little descriptive blurb from their website:

Exploring a Schmap Guide is a uniquely interactive experience: maps and guide content are dynamically integrated, allowing intuitive, real-time access to reviews and photo slideshows for places of interest.

Then, one of my photos from Hong Kong was selected for use in a Wikipedia article: Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23. It’s a picture I took from a trolley of a huge demonstration protest against “Article 23″. For the longest time I’d wondered what the heck Article 23 was about and why it was so unpopular. Jeff and I had asked the guy who was showing us around but he didn’t seem to know. Best guess was it had something to do with encroaching communism since the UK’s rental agreement was about up on HK, and so the PRC was working on stepping in. From the Wikipedia entry, it sounds like an unsurprisingly unpopular bit of legislation that ended up being shelved.

As you may have noticed…

Published on July 25, 2007 in General and Work. Closed

Amanda and I are buying a new house. In a land far far from CU… Huntsville, AL to be exact… or technically Madison, AL to be even more exact (suburb to the west of Huntsville).

No, Derek didn’t graduate. While one could ask “why is he leaving sans-degree”, a better question might be “why is he referring to himself in the third person?” To put it simply, I just got fed up with how things have been going (or not going to be more precise) and decided it was time for a change. And what could be a bigger change for me than to get an actual job-type job and leave academia behind. I ended up taking a job at the Alabama Supercomputer Authority in Huntsville, which sounds like it should be a great place to work.