About eight months ago, a gentleman with the same first and last name as mine started using gmail. Not a big deal except that the difference between our gmail addresses is fairly small and hard to notice. So every once in a while, I receive email intended for him and I’ll point that person in the right direction. Beyond that, my only real contact with him has been some minimal email communication, usually after I’ve pointed someone new his way. ...
The ISP move went reasonably well. There were a couple of minor glitches. One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky. I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks. Rather than spend too much time with it, I just grabbed the latest post and dumped it into the Dreamhost site and changed the time. ...
Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and my own, I’ve had the following issues: arbitrary version changes with no notification random breakage due to “security upgrades – like the time w e couldn’t do anything with a friend’s account or email because his last name contained the letters “curl random lockouts of service insults from the security “guru because he thinks he knows more about Unix and IT security than anyone else around etc. The last straw for me came earlier this year when a gallery page broke. I tried to login to diagnose the problem and found that they had removed my SSH access. When I emailed, I was to ld there is a “security issue that makes sites with SSH more vulnerable and that they were looking for a workaround and would re-enable SSH by the weekend. Outside of dictionary attacks on passwords, this is really complete BS. Of course, the weekend came and nope, no SSH. Another week rolled around, no SSH. Forget this. ...
So, John Edwards dropped out of the Democratic primaries today. It’s a shame. In one sense, I was more excited about Obama or Clinton as president(ial candidates). Their candidacies would be a) history making for their race/gender respectively; and b) about freaking time! Hell, Turkey and Pakistan have had female heads of state for well over a decade, it’s just embarrassing that the United States hasn’t had a viable black or female candidate until now. ...
Back in August I wrote about a rehab possum that K was taking care of – she was very much a cutie. I was looking through some pictures on the camera and realized that I had a few more of her. Now that she’s all grown up and has been released, I thought folks might like to see them: Here she was back in August: A month later, in September: ...
Last week at work was pretty interesting. On Tuesday, L and I flew up to Dayton for the day to meet with our sponsors. That meant a 6am flight out and originally a 11pm return flight. Fortunately, we wrapped it up a bit early and landed home back around 8:30pm. The meeting went well. We were presenting some ideas that I had to the sponsors and they seemed to like them. Strangely enough, in talking to L, he said that he hadn’t really understood what I was proposing until the meeting. Not bad for a guy who wrote a short paper for the sponsors that described what he didn’t understand! But then, I guess that’s why L’s a full professor 🙂 ...
Okay, slight confession time. I’m something of a closet political junkie. Not so much the “who’s up, who’s down campaigning politics, but the questions of policy, who supports what, what makes sense kind of thing. If I were involved in politics directly, I suppose that would make me a wonk, not a hack. Anyway, K and I were having a discussion last week about the presidential primaries. K’s position was that if Huckabee wins the GOP primaries, we’re all in serious danger because the man holds positions that are bad for women, minorities, basically everyone that’s not a middle class white heterosexual male. I, on the other hand, maintained the position that a Huckabee win in the primaries would be hysterical. 🙂 ...
Is this thing still on? Okay, it’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged anything. As I’ve stated before, this tends to happen when I’m too involved in living life to actually write about it. Fortunately (unfortunately?) it’s nothing terribly exciting. Let’s see: Guitar: my guitar playing has been scientifically shown to have 10% less suck than it did a month ago. However, with such a large amount of suck to begin with, we’re still not at anything that looks like good. I’m getting more fluent with the open chords and can switch between them reasonably well. I’m just starting to learn barre chords – the E barre chord to start with. There are still vast tracts of untouched suck in the barre chords. Also, I’m actually thinking of picking up some lessons – the ones at jamplay.com seem pretty good. Work: still going well. There’s enough to do. I’m still not entirely used to billing by the (tenth of an) hour. Also, not really looking forward to flying to Ohio next week. I’ll only be gone for a day, but, ugh – who wants a 6am flight to Dayton! Break-in update: nothing much new here. Still looking to make it harder for someone to break in. Had a neighborhood watch meeting last weekend – that’ll be good. Turns out this may be neither contractors nor kids. There are apparently some professional (stretching that word a bit) thieves working this area. There have been some eight different break-ins near by. Non-profit work: I’m convinced that whomever coined the phrase “academic politics are so sorted because the stakes are so small never worked with a non-profit. It’s just amazing the degree to which politics enters into the smallest damned thing. New year’s resolutions: didn’t make any – never do. That said, I am trying to exercise more and cut down on my use of vulgarities. Profanity and cursing can wait until another year 🙂 I think that’s about it for now.
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water, is one of my favorite zen aphorisms. Okay, so no hauling water for me – at least not unless the drought gets worse, but there’s going to be a lot of wood chopping in my future. On Saturday, margaretc’ s husband, ‘A’, came by and took out two of the trees that have been worrying me. They border our drivway and both had holes in their bases. Since they’re not small trees (40-50+ feet tall), I was worried that they would either come down on the house, the 500 gallon propane tank, the cars, the well, the power lines – you get the idea. It seemed better to take them out on our own terms. ...
It’s been about a week and a half since the attempted break-in. On Tuesday, I replaced the window they broke out. I called around to a couple of different places and everyone said that they could send someone out to give an estimate, but it would take a few days and then the part would be on order for another 3-5 days. Fortunately, on local glass shop said that if I brought them the sill in the morning, they would be able to replace the glass that afternoon. So I spent the morning taking apart the window. It turned out to be easier than I thought, but I did have to take off the lower sill to get to the upper. ...