November 2004 Archives

My partner made a snippy comment about my apparent tardiness during the pre-game, but turned out to be a pretty nice guy - a grad student, formerly from Arizona and Oregon, and new to this area. Northwoods dominated play, but couldn't convert, and the game ended in a scoreless draw.

I forgot my thumbdrive, and need a temporary place for these ride plans:

• Jalama and Cerro Noroeste in one day
• Jalama, Paso Robles, Hwy 58 and Cerro Noroeste in two days
• Eureka

Thanksgiving started with meat loaf at my house with the Casey's, followed by traditional turkey at Ann and Rick's. Jenny was down from Ceres, and Sarah joined us for turkey. The finale was a nice turkey dinner at my sister's house on Sunday.

The bus arrived 40 minutes late, so we ran two 20 minute halves.

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Movable Type 3.1, specifically as part of an evaluation of a new tool called reBlog.

Currently, when I want to cross-post a link I find in Sharp Reader, I drag the link to my Windows desktop, then drag it into Firefox, then use the JustBlotIt! extension to post it. reBlog is a package with it's own RSS aggregator and MT extensions to help automate the cross-posting of links.

I'm still working on it, and it'll probably be a while before I switch away from Sharp Reader, but there are some potential advantages: a) I can read my RSS feeds from any computer; b) I can cross-post without having to drag things around.

I don't apologize for frequenting the local Jamba Juice - and frequenting is the right word in my situation. I figure I've visited the location at Foothill and Rosemead in Pasadena about 250 times in the last three years. I'm on a first name basis with most everyone who works there.

The shopping center there added a Peet's Coffee & Tea in a separate building earlier this year, and the other half of that building just opened as a Greek fast food place that looks good. This was apparently part of a major remodel for the whole center, focused on rebuilding and expanding the Ralph's supermarket. Once it's all done it should look great, but for now everything's a mess. Grand re-opening is set for December 15th. They'll have to hustle to make that deadline.

Here's the current state of the Jamba Juice; the main entrance to the Ralph's is just behind it on the right.

They were in some kind of hurry to get me in and out, so today went as fast as I can ever remember, with a minimum of fuss. I watched Reservoir Dogs, and made it to the point where Mr. Orange was talking to the newly earless Marvin. Gruesome. I go again next Wednesday.

Hikers upset over canyon's temporary piping

By Kimm Groshong , Pasadena Star-News Staff Writer

ALTADENA -- During October's heavy rains, Mother Nature unveiled five waterfalls that had been buried since 1998 when a pipeline-reconstruction project in Rubio Canyon went terribly wrong. But while she was at it, she damaged that same pipeline.

Now, less than a month after the boulders were pushed aside by the flood, Rubio Canon Land and Water Association the nonprofit water company that owns the pipeline and provides water to about 3,000 Altadena customers has installed about 800 feet of corrugated polyethylene piping as a temporary fix.

Some local hikers are outraged that the Forest Service allowed any form of reconstruction in the canyon without public notice and a community meeting.

The Falco clan, including the mysterious Uncle Fulvius, visit Ostia on official business.

My friend Cyndy is coming in today for a week's visit from Spokane. She's staying with Carole at the Oak Tree Inn in Monrovia, which should be more comfortable for her, and helps Jeremy out a lot. I'll enjoy having her around for a while.

Jason turns 24 today. The family (minus Jeremy, who had to work) took him to Tokyo Wako, a Japanese restaurant in Arcadia near the Souplantation.

We sat at the grill tables. Jason had sushi to start, and I got shrimp tempura. For dinner, Jason and I had swordfish, Carole had filet mignon, and Justin had chicken teriyaki. Justin and I got the fried rice, and after he polished off his bowl I shared half of mine. I had to use a fork just a couple of time, mostly with the rice and the bean sprouts. It was fun watching the chef do his thing.

Logan and Alexis are down for a couple of days, mostly to see The Incredibles with us on Friday. "Where.....is......my.....super-suit!" I busted up.

Five of us went hiking this morning - me, Carole, Jason, Alexis, and Logan - in Monrovia Canyon. An ideal hike for the short-legged bunch. The waterfall was cool, but there's still not much water flowing.

First Name: tam
Last Name: COREmania
S/N: 7758164183862021

One of my favorite movies of all time is Grosse Pointe Blank. John Cusack plays a hit man who winds up at his ten-year high school reunion. Anyway, the kids and I have watched it maybe 40 or 50 times. A few years ago, one of the Starz channels ran the same three movies over and over again for a week. We must have watched GPB 20 times the week it was in the rotation.

We know the movie so well, we'll quote random lines as part of day-to-day live. If I have trouble opening up the front door, Justin will tell me "you can't come in', using the bad Jamaican accent that Minnie Driver used in the movie.

Lately, Justin and I had an argument about one of my favorite scenes in the movie. Rival hitman Grocer (Dan Ackroyd) meets up with Blank (Cusack) in the local diner, with no love lost between them. As Blank is explaining something, Grocer says either: "Clip your string, Chatty Kathy, I don't need to know" [this is Justin's version], or "Chatty Kathy, clip your string, I don't need to know" [my recollection].

The argument escalated to the point that I needed proof, so I setup the DVD with captions, and paused it at the right spot:

I rest my case.

I needed to setup my new private label nameservers, but couldn't remember how it went. Abe, a nice tech at HostingZoom, gave me the instructions.

1. Login to your account, or create one if you don't already have one.
2. Select "Manage Domains"
3. Choose the domain that will serve as the private label nameserver.
4. Expand the "Domain Host Summary" box.
5. Click on the "Click here to see details or to modify" link in the expaned box.
6. Enter the prefix (I use ns1, ns2, etc.) of the nameserver, then enter the IP address of the nameserver that you got from your hosting company.
7. Click on "Add New Host"
8. Create the second nameserver (ns2) in the same way
9. Click on "Save Changes"

Here's a selection of some of my favorite election maps:

US Voting by County:

Canada 2.0:

States Sized by Electoral Votes, from the NY Times:

Over the years, I collected a variety of web sites that I either managed directly or indirectly. Back in March of '04, I setup a reseller account with iNetter. The account offered a lot of flexibility, and lots of disk space, for a reasonable price.

Within a week of moving all my domains there, the server I was on became a spamming haven, and was pulled by iNetter's co-location company, which promptly reformated the drives and re-sold it to another provider. I had no backups; iNetter had no backups; there was no way to make a backup. I was not a happy person. Luckily, my old hosting company sent me a backup, so I only lost a few days worth of activity.

Before the server problem, it was easy to get tech support, but as the weeks went by after the crash, it became harder and harder. They had a lot of clients on the server that died, and I think a lot of them left, leaving iNetter overworked and under revenued. I stuck by them - until this week.

Last week, the httpd daemon on the server I was assigned to mysteriously crashed. You could ssh into the server, you could get your mail, you could ftp, but you couldn't view your websites. Now, a few of my client sites are AYSO sites, and this is the busy season for youth soccer. It was a very bad time to have these problems.

To make it worse, it was impossible to get ahold of anyone at iNetter. The phone number listed prominently on their website was out of service (never a good sign); their tech support chat was always offline; help desk requests went unanswered for days, or mysteriously disappeared.

The httpd outages continued for 8 straight days. I had to make a change. Without sufficient research, I found a new hosting company (IncognitoNetworks), and signed up for a basic reseller account. I moved one of the AYSO sites there under heavy pressure, before realizing that most of my help desk requests were taking 8-24 hours for a response. I put in some more time researching alternatives, but there's not a lot out there that fit my needs - SSH access, plus lots of disk space and bandwidth, all for a reasonable price.

I finally found a hosting company I could live with: Hosting Zoom. I signed up for 10gb of disk, 75gb of bandwidth, plus ssh, a full Fantastico (which iNetter didn't support), plus 24/7 live support chat. During the transition I've had occassion to use their tech support, and am very impressed.

I needed to leave bcisys.com at iNetter for the duration, so I setup a new domain for my hosting service: Xoption.com. So far, I've moved all but two domains: bcisys.com, which provides critical e-mail support, and ayso98.org, which is orphaned at Incognito for now, until their webmaster is ready for another host move.

It's always a pain to move websites, especially ones that use database backends, but this has gone smoothly (so far...), and I'm looking forward to having a more reliable server.

Sometimes I'm alone, and other times it's full-up, like this morning. The finger-prick was alright, and the return-line on the left arm was very nice. There's always a little stinging in the draw-line - today was no exception.

I watched Two Weeks Notice, which I've seen on cable many a time. It's one of those movies you can watch over and over - nothing special, but funny and endearing.