Category Archives: uncategorized

So, DreamHost (who hosts this site) went down tonight. Hard. Nothing was working. I wasn’t sure what to make of it until I saw this:

Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline. This includes all email, web hosting, etc. A technician is about 15 minutes out from our datacenter to undo this mistake.
I apologize for this mistake. I was intending to be editing our non-live access-list, and edited the live one by mistake.

It would be really easy to sit here and pass judgement, and declare my intention to leave DreamHost, and all that stuff. But you know what? Accidents happen. Typos happen. And I really respect that they were honest about what happened, even though it’s rather embarrassing.

Besides, after the SQL oopsie I pulled at work today, I’m hardly one to judge.

Wow, these are pretty funny. Here’s my favorite of the bunch: Garlic, The Silent Killer.

Okay, so I signed up for Twitter. And then I set up my Twitter RSS feed to display on this blog. And then I installed a Facebook application that uses my last Twitter message (I refuse to call them tweets) as my Facebook message.

And then I got to thinking. Why not use Proxi to set my iChat status to my last Twitter message?

So, yeah. I’m a huuuuuuge dork.

The Freakonomics blog asked some experts to weigh in on the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war. My favorite comment was from Andrei Hagiu, shop assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School:

Perhaps one lesson that this particular war drives home particularly well is this: not fighting in the first place might be a very good strategy to win, if only the contestants could be smart enough at the beginning. Mounting investments in standard wars is akin to a bidding war for a $20 bill: once you’ve decided to participate, you are sucked into a wasteful battle, in which people bid higher than $20.

Certainly true enough.

Great article by a non-tech type dude who wanders into the Apple Store at the mall. Not intending to buy anything, he walks out with a new machine: It was bitter cold, snowing. The mall was quiet. You could actually hear the water streaming from the marble fountain a floor away. But the Apple Store was packed with people–folks laughing, banging keyboards, sampling the rows of gleaming computers and gadgets, like they were in a high tech Disney World fun park. And there were no give-aways, no store discounts; just another (frigidly cold) day at the mall.

Me? I love the Apple Store, although I’ve only been to a couple of them: King of Prussia (David and I made a pilgrimage on its opening day in 2001 or 2002) and Chicago (when I went to PowerSchool University in 2004). Grace still remembers “the cool computer store” we went to in Chicago, even though she was only five at the time and she’s soon turning nine. She just thought it was cool that they had a kids’ section, and that they let the kids try anything they wanted. And that they had bean bags chairs at the kids’ computers.

I do wish that Apple would open a store closer to me. King of Prussia is the closest, and that’s a good 90 minute drive. Ideally, I’d love to see one at Park City Center in Lancaster, but that’s probably unrealistic. Maybe Harrisburg? Or even York? Come on, Apple! There are large pockets of non-Amish across central Pennsylvania!

Looks like Coruscant.

Clicky.

Some sobering insights from a foster care caseworker:
Instead of regularly visiting children for whom I am legally responsible and seeing the truth with my own eyes, I do paperwork. The reason is simple: If the paperwork isn’t completed, the city loses federal funds. The more government forms completed, the more federal money the city receives.

It never ceases to amaze me just how poorly we as a society care for those who need us so desperately.

Congratulations to Dave for being selected as one of three keynote speakers at REAL World 2008.

I knew you could do it, and my friend.

Now all you have to do is come up with the whole 20 minute presentation.

From The Guardian: The quest to decode Beck’s lyrics can finally come to a close. “Most of the vocals on [Odelay] were scratch vocals,” he has revealed to Rolling Stone. “We just grew attached to them.”

It’s still a great album, though. Definitely in the top ten albums of the 1990s, ranking up there with Nirvana’s Nevermind, Toad The Wet Sprocket’s Fear and Gin Blossoms’ New Miserable Experience.