I finally got a Slice, and am migrating my websites to it so that I can retire the ancient PIII 450 that I’ve been hosting my sites on for the last 6 or 7 years. So far I’ve messed up critical system files 3 times (you know, stuff like /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group), and had to rebuild from scratch. Hopefully I’ll be more careful now. And make backups.
I’m really impressed with how easy it is to set up a new machine. And with their prices.
Bo Diddley passed away yesterday. He probably influenced the music you’re listening to right now, if it was written in the last 50 years, even if the folks that wrote it weren’t aware of it.
Over the course of the last 10 years or so, I’ve hosted websites for various of my friends. And I’ve hosted DNS zones. And email forwarding. And … a variety of other things.
Many of those folks have moved on to other solutions, and others have not. Consequently, I have a server with dozens of websites on it which may or may not be active, scores of DNS zones which may or may not be active, and a couple hundred email forwarding addresses, most of which don’t seem to be active.
Every time I try to clean up this decade of cruft, I break somebody’s website.
I’m in the process of trying to move my hosted server over to SliceHost, because the server I’m on is getting less and less reliable every month, and I’m discovering that perhaps the majority of the content on the server is not active. Oy.
A poet is one who says, beautifully, the things that we all think, mundanely, and are embarrassed to put into words.
Ode to the Maker of Odes reminds me of the brief moment I spent visiting with Arthur C. Clarke, and that instant in which we clasped one another’s right hand, and looked in each other’s eyes.
And, yes, I gave him a small toy as I left, and have wondered often what became of it.
Last night we went to see Caspian at the Movie Tavern.
The Movie Tavern is very cool – dinner and a movie, with a table at every seat in the theater. Well worth checking out if you have one in your area.
The movie was excellent, and also a disappointment. It is very loosely based on – one might say only inspired by – the book Prince Caspian by C.S.Lewis. There are small elements of the story here and there in the movie, but most of it is a work of original fiction. It seems that the movie makers felt that the story itself wasn’t good enough, and so they had to fundamentally change not only the story line, but also the characters of Peter and Caspian, by making them do or say things that Lewis’ characters would have never stooped to.
If you haven’t read the book, I expect that you can greatly enjoy the movie. It’s a great show, with fabulous plot twists and great action. If you’ve read the book – particularly if you enjoyed the book – you’ll spend the entire time saying, “that never happened! Why did they do that?”, pretty much from the first minute of the film.
Just over two years after buying my Trek, i have finally crossed the 100 mile mark. Yeah, I know. Pathetic. Right after I bought it, I rode it everywhere. To the grocery store. To the movie rental place. Never to work, thought, because after buying it I decided it was just too dangerous riding down Harrodsburg road.
So, today I rode to work the second time, and just before I got here the odometer turned 100 miles. Finally.
I’m really determined to get to the point where I’m biking to work 2 or 3 times every week.
On a related note, it appears that the Trek site has rearranged their URL schema, and my link to the information about the 7.3FX from my earlier posting is now broken. But I don’t dare update the link, or Habari will mark the article as new again in the RSS feed. Grr. I sure hope someone fixed that bug soon.
The evening event on Wednesday at php|tek involved a XBox, a couple of electric guitars, a drumset, and a mic, and a game called, I believe, Rock Star. And, of course, several of the conference organizers in full KISS get-up. Photos Here.
One of the bands in the contest, Epic Failboat, was quite remarkable, with the lead singer being pretty much perfect. However, the bands were judged on stage presence, rather than musical talent, so the band Unibrow With A Vengeance won instead. Pity.
So, can any OSXers out there tell me what to do about this? top reports stuck processes, and they show up as Z in ‘ps’. I can’t kill them, or kill -9 them. How can I make them go away?
rbowen@wooga26 ~ % ps aux | grep Z USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 195 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z 4:40PM 0:00.00 (netstat) rbowen 194 0.0 0.0 0 0 ?? Z 4:40PM 0:00.00 (perl)
Also, I’d kinda like to know why these processes are starting on a reboot, and getting stuck immediately after boot.
Still investigating …
For a few weeks, we’ve been hearing horrible sounds in the wall, and have suspected a critter dwelling there. We had a critter control guy come, and he charged us a huge amount of money to tell us that, for sure, we had a squirrel, and he put a trap somewhere completely other than where the sound was coming from.
Eventually, as the sounds continued, we moved the trap closer to where we thought they were coming from.
Finally, on Friday, as we drove into the driveway, we saw a HUGE raccoon scrambling across the roof, and, upon climbing up there, saw the place where it was making its comings and goings. We moved the trap up to right outside that hole. The first night, it stole the bait through the side of the trap, and the second night – last night – it got into the trap.
This morning, we called the critter guy, left a message, and he called back later. He said that he wasn’t going to get it off the roof, because he hadn’t put it there, and we had to get it down, and he’d come pick it up.
So … I climbed back up the ladder, and there was a frightened raccoon cowering and trembling in the cage. Our roof is fairly steep, and I wasn’t real excited about trying to get a cage full of frightened animal off of that incline. I edged it down the roof, and the raccoon cowered in the extreme far edge of the cage the whole time, right up until I was about halfway down the ladder and the furthest off balance. Then it lunged at me. I screamed, fell the rest of the way down the ladder, and hurled the cage away from me. It landed on the sidewalk, but didn’t pop open, fortunately. Maria caught me, so I didn’t break everything. The raccoon peed on me as I flung it, but he and I were otherwise unhurt.
While we were at dinner, the critter guy came and picked up the vermin, but we got a few photos first. (Photos Here) I thought, when we got the cage down, and I had stopped shaking, that he was smaller than he had looked while up on the roof. Turns out I may have been right, since there’s still something up there making a racket, so it appears that he had a colleague. 🙁
The last time I went to to the Art Institute of Chicago, I went to see the Escher prints, and was told that I had to have an appointment. So this time, we called ahead, and they got out all the Escher prints in the study room, and we got a personal viewing of them all that they have there. Truly awesome. Here’s the photos of what we got to see.