I’m starting to think that there aren’t any good Internet service providers. hsarik had troubles with Rimu Hosting. My own ISP seems to be far more focused on (their own version of) security than on usability. At work we’ve been using Pair. I’ve been pretty happy with them until this afternoon around 5pm when our project went dead while we had some 50 people using it. When we first developed the project, Pair was using php4 (yeah, I know – it’s my own fault for using php 🙂 ). Fortunately, they also provided phpwrap to allow cgi access. Okay, that’s not great, but it at least let our project which required php5 go live. Sometime recently, they made the default php5 without phpwrap. If I had known, well great – but I didn’t see any mention of it. Today, right after I went home they broke phpwrap. Easy enough to fix, but still irritating.

you are my mommy Three or four weeks ago, K received a call about a baby possum. It seemed that the mother had died and the finders could only locate this one baby. They brought it to the house and K’s been raising it ever since. Apparently, she’s doing a good job. She (the possum, not K) started off at 23g and is now around 80g. The picture above is her clinging to K while sleeping. Note, this is not good rehab practice, but an individual baby possum is a lonely animal. Fortunately, the possum should “re-wild as it grows up. ...

In the wake of the most recent recall of toys from China due to lead paint, we find that the administration has been fighting the regulation of lead in imports. According to McClatchy, Consumer advocates say the Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach. ...

From skvidal. If you haven’t seen powertop yet, you’ve got to look into it. Arjan van de Ven, one of the linux kernel hackers and an employee of Intel, released powertop back in May. What is powertop? Think of the Unix “top, but monitoring power, not CPU, usage. It tells you how long you are spending in different CPU states, how long at different CPU frequencies, what is waking up the CPU most frequently, and best of all, it makes recommendations for saving power. ...

It’s been a bit strange changing jobs. My former responsibilities as the security officer for a university are so different from what I’m doing now. A few idle thoughts: Life at the university, particularly for management, is entirely interrupt driven. Between the phone calls, urgent emails and meetings, I seldom had time to stop and think. Unfortunately, that meant that a lot of work was done at home. At the new place, work is nowhere near as disruptive. I’m in the office for eight hours and I get eight hours worth of work done. No meetings. No phone calls. Few emails – none urgent. The change has been a little jarring. The biggest advantage is that I’m not trying to actually do all of my work at the end of the day, so I’m leaving and getting home at a reasonable time. The university structures its benefits to the advantage of the highest paid. Everyone has to pay for a share of their health insurance. The 403b, which is incredible, pays progressively more for people at the high end of the pay scale. IIRC, if you put in 3%, they put in ~8% for the first $50k of salary and then ~13% for anything above that – assuming that you are in the better paid category of staff. Hourly employees receive less contribution and have a 5 year vesting period. At the new place, they cap at 4% of your salary, so it’s nowhere near as much in retirement. However, they also pay full health and dental. The upshot is that everyone receives health benefits, regardless of income. Retirement benefits which are typically only used by people at the high end of the income scale are less generous. Overall, a far more equitable system. I’m finding that I’m much more relaxed. I am responsible for the implementation of a decent sized project, but because it’s only one project, there is much less stress and I’m not working in the evenings. Which gives me time to find great things online. Like the following from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s: “via ovicipitum dura est or “the way of the eggheads is hard.

Done. Finished. That’s all she wrote. Yesterday was my last day at the university. Sometime before I left, I started thinking about what, if anything, I wanted to leave on my whiteboard. The obvious came to mind: “So long and thanks for all the fish. But that’s a little too obvious. My next thought was to crib a few lines from Jonathan Coulton: I fear nothing Anymore See you all in hell ...

One of my favorite things is really good bread. Back when I was in school, I bought a book on making bread. It started from a home made sourdough starter that had no commercial yeast. It was basically water and flour with a few grapes tied in a bag to give it some extra yeast. The bread itself also called for no commercial yeast. So the whole loaf was made using whatever yeasts happened to be in the air. A friend of mine, a German woman named Margrid Krueger, made similar bread a gave me a few of her tips on how to solve bread problems, etc. ...

I’ve got about three weeks to go. Unfortunately, my list of projects or things to get done seems to be growing longer, not shorter and I’m losing my motivation :-/ I think the hardest thing about leaving is resisting the urge to tell people the truth about what I think of their ideas, or their meetings, or the organization in general. Resisting that urge gets harder every day, even though I know that it would be entirely pointless. It might make me feel better to vent for a bit, but what would it accomplish? I would aggravate some people off, burn some bridges and no one would actually listen to what I was saying – no matter how well reasoned or explained. ...

When I was taking the dogs out last night, I noticed that we had a visitor. A bat had decided to hang out on the front porch. I’m guessing he was resting before going to work eating the insects in the area. I called K, let the dogs do their thing and came back in for the camera. Fortunately, he stayed put while I took a few pictures. From our field guide to mammals, I would guess that he’s the Little Brown Myotis, but it’s not clear that they live in this area. I guess we’ll look a bit more. ...

Well, it’s official now. I’m leaving the university to go work for a private company – my last day will be August 10th which gives me all of a 4 day weekend before starting full time for the new place. FWIW, I’m definitely looking forward to the change. I’ve been in my current job for about 6.5 years and in the tradition of my family, that means that I’ve been doing the same thing a year and a half too long. ...