Life, Technology, and Meteorology
Gumby and Pokey have grown so much since we got them last year that they were kind of uncomfortable in their old 20 gallon tank. A few weeks ago we ordered them a new tank, and the final pieces arrived this past Wednesday. The new one is a 90 gallon tank, so that should give them plenty of space. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the bigger tank won’t be too much more maintenance. 🙂
For some reason, I’ve found 0 time to blog recently, so it’s time to play catch-up.
Gus moved to the West Coast and is settling into his new place. Congrats to Gus and Kirstin on the move.
Brent has been posting his thoughts on Apple’s interface design in Tiger. I’m sure you’ve probably seen links to this on other blogs, but I thought I would post it anyway since all of the articles have been quite enjoyable to read.
WWDC is coming up! I’m flying out to the Bay Area tomorrow evening. Early, I know, but the airlines really aren’t convenient when you want to redeem frequent flyer miles. I’m spending the extra couple of days visiting with Katrina’s parents, so it should be a good time. This year I’m going to bring the digital camera to take some shots at the conference. Apple won’t allow photos to be taken in the sessions, so last year I figured a camera wouldn’t be of much use and I left it at home. I ended up missing out on some good photo opportunities though, so this year I’m bringing it along.
The conditions here in Mt. Pleasant last night at 1am:
Freezing Fog and 14 degrees F at Mount Pleasant Municipal Airport, MI
We had a pretty good frost last night, and everything was covered with the stuff this morning. Here’s a shot of the tree in our front yard.
Speaking of ice…file this picture of a gutter on our house under W for weird.
Looks like something I saw at Kartchner Caverns back in Arizona.
If you live in or around Michigan, you’ve probably noticed the most recent string of snow storms. On Sunday we got about 10 inches of snow, and yesterday added about 2 more inches to that, along with a forecast for snow off and on for the rest of the week. As you can probably imagine, everything is covered with the stuff and the scenery looks particularly nice right now.
Last night was even more remarkable though. We were in between storms, and it was perfectly clear out with close to a full moon. Coming from an area that never got snow, it’s amazing how bright it is at night when the sky is clear, the moon is full, and there’s white colored stuff all over the place. It was so bright, that there were distinct shadows on the ground…err snow.
I was wanting to get a photo of it, but my digital camera here has been kind of acting up lately and I doubt the grainy shots it takes in low-light situations would have done the evening justice.
Woke up this morning to find that the Internet connection here had gone down. I looked on the router, and it didn’t have a WAN connection to the wireless modem, which I thought was kind of strange. The modem is in an unfinished part of our basement (in a cabinet) right next to our sump pump, because it needs to be pretty close to the antenna outside and my office was too far away. I tried cycling the power on the modem, but that didn’t seem to work. Then all of a sudden the connection started flickering a little. It’d go on and then off a few seconds later.
I thought I might know what the deal was, but wanted to be sure, so I ran the cables out of the cabinet into the home theatre room and put the modem there. Sure enough a few minutes later the modem came back to life and the connection was fine. Figures that the best place to have the modem is a place that gets too cold for the thing to run. I checked the environmental specs and it will run down to 32°. It got down to 15° last night here, so that must have done it. Opening up the cabinet door probably warmed up that space just enough for it to start working again, thus the flickering connection.
Just another thing we didn’t have to worry about out west.
Over on the Cult of Mac blog, check out what happens when you have a desk with a glass top and the glass breaks! I couldn’t imagine walking into my office to find that heap of a mess with all my hardware on the floor.
Speaking of hardware… 😉 Most of the pieces of my new G5 have arrived. The Cinema Display, 1Gb RAM upgrade, the All-In-One, and the iSight adapter for the new monitor all came within a couple of days after ordering. The G5 itself is still on hold. They expect it to ship by 11/17, but who knows when it will get here.
Of course with my luck, Apple has since added an nVidia 6800 GT to the configuration options and it’s only $40 more than the ATI 9800 XT that I ordered. I asked about changing my order, but they claimed it would delay delivery by 2-3 weeks. I figured the 9800 should be plenty fast and it probably isn’t worth the wait.
In case you haven’t heard, Linksys recently released a “network storage link” called the NSLU2. Basically it’s a box that you can plug in up to two external USB 2.0 drives and it serves them out NAS style. The box is running a stripped down version of Linux, which gives hackers interesting opportunities to customize the NAS to do other things such as acting as a CVS server, a print server, or an iTunes music server for Airport Express devices.
I already have a file server here at the home office, but if I didn’t, this product looks pretty cool. $80 for an embedded Linux box is pretty cheap, and it has a reasonable 32Mb of RAM to work with. If you’re interested in reading more about hacking it, check out the 4 part series of Hacking the Linksys NSLU2 over on Toms Hardware. Also, check out the page Jim Buzbee (the author of the articles) dedicated to his hacking attempts here. He has some interesting dmesg and /proc listings displayed.
This past weekend, Katrina had a conference up in Traverse City and I decided to tag along since I have been wanting to see more of Michigan. We had a great time up there. It’s a very beautiful part of the state, especially now that it is autumn. They have a few wineries up there, but the area is famous for its cherries. They even combine the two with many wineries selling cherry wine. We bought a bottle but haven’t had a chance to try it yet. We also couldn’t leave without buying some cherry jam and of course some chocolate covered cherries. 🙂
On Sunday, we went to the Sleepy Bear Dunes. We went on a pretty good hike, and it was nice to feel some real sand beneath our feet again. It was almost like being back in Santa Barbara. There are about 4 square miles of dunes, which is nowhere near the size of the dunes in Oceano, CA, but they were still fairly large. The contrast of Michigan forest next to the dunes was pretty amazing, and the National Forest Service set up a nice scenic drive through the forest area bordering the dunes.
Anyway, if you are ever in the area, check out both the dunes and Traverse City. Later this fall, we are hoping to drive up to the Upper Peninsula as everyone has been telling us that the colors are amazing.
Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here. Moving has turned out to be more intensive than I was expecting it to be. Things out here in Michigan are going pretty well for us. Our house still has random boxes scattered about, but at least we are at the point where we can be comfortable in some of the rooms. 🙂
I’ve starting the process of getting Gaucho Software off the ground. A lot of the work thus far has been more focused on system administration…setting up the web, database, DNS, and mail servers here and making sure everything is redundant and secure. I’ve found that RRDTool and Cacti together make a great tool to monitor all of the servers.
Since my office is in a finished bedroom of our basement, there are extra precautions that I have been taking in case the basement floods at some point. The sump pump is on a battery backup itself, so flooding should never be an issue, but I’m from the west, and just the possibility of this happening freaks me out. 🙂 The servers are all wired so there are no wires below the table they are on (except for one plug going from the UPS down to the electrical outlet). The UPS is new…our power has gone off a few times since we moved in so I thought it would be a good thing to have. I ended up getting a Belkin Enterprise Series 1100VA UPS and that has been working great so far. I’ve plugged three servers and all the network equipment into it, and it’s still running at only 25-30% load. This will give me about 45 minutes of backup battery for everything, which should be plenty.
One thing I was going to miss when moving away from Tucson are the monsoons we would get there in the summer time. Monsoons are very intense storms, and they were incredible to watch. Little did I know that Michigan has some pretty good storms as well. Early this morning there was an incredible show. I awoke to see our bedroom glowing and lighting up like there was a TV turned on in a corner. Lightning was flashing more frequent than once a second, and there was so much thunder that I couldn’t distinguish it separately…it was just a constant combined rumble. Anyway, I think the storms here will do for some good entertainment. The only drawback is that most of the lightning here stays up in the clouds, where the monsoons in Tucson would generate a ton of cloud to ground lightning. Below is a picture I took from our back yard an evening last August during a monsoon.
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