There’s some DNS funny business going on with this blog the past several days. I’m still trying to figure out exactly where the problem is. DNS has always been one of my least favorite things to deal with.
Category: General
Null
This and other sites of mine will experience a few outages this weekend as the servers move to a new temporary data center.
Update: Server is snug in it’s new home. Will be moving again to a permanent new data center.
It’s now 2007 for an hour already. So here’s to a great 2007!
On the plus side, it’s nice to see at least this blog updated the copyright on it’s own (though an hour off since the server is GMT -6 rather than GMT -5 like I am. I’ve got to make the rounds and do the rest now, and make it automatic for the future. Every year I forget until the last minute.
Happy Festivus!
Just in case anyone was wondering, I made the Festivus Pole in this post using Inkscape, which did a pretty good job at making it easy enough for even me to do silly little work, and I’m far from an artist. It even lets me output svg, though I uploaded a png since not all browsers support svg at this point. Thankfully I didn’t have to draw any tinsel, but as we all know, that’s not allowed, since it’s distracting.
For those who are interested in the real thing, there is a video about a company who makes Festivus Poles.
As usual the web has quite a few things out there about this amazing holiday. Just search Google News this time of year, or check Wikipedia’s Festivus article.
There is even a new book on the holiday: Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us.
Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.
Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?
Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!
Cosmo Kramer: That must’ve been some kind of doll.
Frank Costanza: She was.
I’m back from vacation. Like two years ago, I spent some time in Holland visiting family, and then some vacation time in Spain (Mallorca to be exact), then back to Holland for a day and a half. Just starting to catch up on things, so be patient if your expecting a reply from me. I’m tired after an a long day with a flight at 9:30 (GMT +1) that landed 12:00 (GMT -5). So here are some random thoughts in bullet form:
- Security wasn’t to bad considering all that has been happening. The only thing encountered was no liquids or gels in hand luggage… Interestingly every hour, or less a flight attendant came around with cups of water. I guess they are afraid someone could become dehydrated and sue. An obvious change from procedures prior (on the way over that happened no more than 2x as I recall).
- Constantly check that that your flight isn’t delayed, so you don’t spend 11hrs in
SchipholShithole (after 11hrs that’s an appropriate name for any airport). Definitely not a great way to spend a day. Teletext, Phone, Internet, Smoke signals. Whatever it takes. Check and check again. - Just because a hotel advertises that it has air conditioning doesn’t mean that it works, works well, or works constantly. Hotels that only let it run when your in the room (usually activated by room key) only can work if it’s very powerful and can cool off a room quickly. Yet another thing to be aware of
- When traveling trans-Atlantic, wide body aircraft, such as a Boeing 767, 777, 747 are preferable to a Boeing 757. Because it’s seated 3 and 3 with 1 isle, and bathrooms in front and back of coach, that’s a lot of traffic in 1 isle. Wide body aircraft such as the 767 seem much more capable of handling a long haul without feeling so tiny. Just a personal preference.
- I had this notion that most old stone structures remained semi-cool in hot weather, but the Cathedral in Palma completely ruinied that.
- There should be First Class, Business Class, Kid-Free Class, and Family Class. For those who want to sleep on the plane, you options.
- I ate way to much… and enjoyed it all.
- Beautiful beaches
- Did I mention the food?
I’ve made some changes to how RSS feeds around here. First and foremost we use the Firefox Feed Icon in hopes of pushing it as a standard. Secondly all links in RSS feeds should now be absolute links thanks to a few new lines of code. That should remove any issues bothering some people whose feed readers couldn’t figure out how to handle them.
Like every good master, did a little site maintenance. Well, quite a bit actually. Most shouldn’t be visible (just yet). If you notice any problems let me know. I did correct a few pesky things, but you never know what may come up.
Had a problem with trackbacks not working, though that should be resolved now.
I’m expecting a fixed laptop this week, I think every possible delay has run it’s course, so I can’t imagine how anything else can delay it now. So once again, I’ll be somewhat offline and slow on pretty much everything. Next weekend a bit limited as I test the laptop out a bit, and hopefully I’ll be kicking some butt again next Monday. I’ll give a more detailed account of my experience when it’s all done, explaining the good and the bad (it’s a long story, trust me).
Yet another week with no laptop (though hope to have it back fixed shortly… perhaps more details on that later). So it’s lab only until Thursday. I’ll be checking in, but don’t count on speedy email replies until then.
Today is International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day (Andy Carvin’s Idea). I think it’s rather appropriate.
For those wanting up to date information on what’s going on, check fark.com which has a few slow loading, but information filled threads from people gathering news from all sources.
I think I’ll just leave it with a link to the Red Cross as it’s rather fitting.
Warning: anyone who gets political here may be spanked in a way that would likely be deemed “to far” by most, so I’d recommend avoiding it (I haven’t decided exactly how, but I have been known to be downright rotten when people cross that line). This is not the place for debating what politicians have said/done (or not said/done) in regards to this event.