MikeBrum.com

My site was offline for a few hours. The hosting company had some problems that took them a while to fix. Not sure of the details. I just know that when I woke up I didn’t have access to email or any of my domains. Not fun. Only about two months ago there was an issue with a disk that kept the host down for a bunch of hours as well.

Everything’s back up now, but I don’t know if any email was lost. External mail servers should try again a few hours later, so maybe some stuff will trickle in. It’s not that I get a ton of mail — I just don’t want to miss anything that might be important due to a stupid server outage.

All of this has me considering dropping the whole VPS setup and finding a place to host my own physical host. I’d need to find a DNS hosting service (DynDNS used to be super cheap per domain, but that price has sky rocketed), but I’m more than capable of actually administering the box myself.

We’ll see if I actually go through with this or if I’m just pissy due to the outage this morning. It’d be a lot of work up front, but not a bad deal in the long run. It’s not like the VPS is the cheapest thing ever.

I just got through updating WP and all of my plugins to the latest versions. It takes some time because I’ve made modifications to about half of the plugins and it’s a PITA to upgrade my test system, test it, make sure I’ve made all necessary changes and then upgrade the production box and make the changes that are needed.

It’s worth it to stage all of the upgrades so that I don’t totally FUBAR the production box, but it definitely makes the task run a bit longer.

Luckily, most of the plugins don’t tend to have crazy updates, so I just need to get a diff of my changes and basically apply it to the new version of code instead of having to re-engineer the functionality against a new code base.

If anyone finds anything odd about the site, feel free to holler at me via the contact form. Though everything’s looking good right now.

Oh, and I’m back from a very productive trip to LA that was 100% related to BME. As a totally unrelated, but exceptionally cool, aside, I’m still overjoyed that I got to hear the space shuttle’s sonic boom on its way to land on Saturday.

I’m flying out to LA in a couple of hours and returning Sunday.

That’s pretty much it.

I’m just glad that I’m escaping the dropping temps and rain for a few days.

Went diving today. Such a great activity to add to a summer long weekend.

The weather was awesome, the water was “warm” and we got to see a lot of critters. Tons of skates and flounder all over the place, along with the usual assortment of lobster and crabs. More than a few lobster were down claws and a few had none left. I think that was due to male sparring due to mating competition.

One of the coolest thing that we came across was a little gang of hermit crabs battling. There was a spare shell that they were all fighting over and nobody wanted to let anyone get a shot at it. The biggest of the bunch was able to get a shot and do a real quick switch into the new shell. He stayed it in only a few seconds and then hopped back into his original shell. All the while, the rest of the gang was still trying to fight for a chance.

I’ve never seen hermit crabs change shells and it was really neat and a lot faster than I expected.

After the switch, the big guy looked like he was going to keep the shell “just in case”, but backed away and let everyone else battle for it. We took off after the other smaller crabs were battling to a stalemate.

Naturally, I decided not to take my camera today because we didn’t get to sorting out the gear until about 11 last night. Not having the camera probably added to the nice relaxed pace of the dive, but it would have been nice to be able to shoot some of the subjects we saw.

Either way, it was a super cool and a fun “crazy random nature” moment.

We went out on a seal dive off the Isle of Shoals this past Sunday and had an absolute blast.

We booked the same trip last year but couldn’t get out there due to bad ocean conditions. Our trip out there was nice and easy but the ride back was rather choppy and we paid for it. That said, it was totally worth it.

Here’s a few images from the dive.

This is probably the best dive we’ve been on in New England and I definitely hope to go on it again next year.

The seals were very friendly, curious and absolutely tolerated our intrusion into their temporary summer home. They seem to love nibbling on people’s fins for some odd reason, but it’s quite endearing to see them slowly swimming after an unsuspecting diver trying to catch a fin in their mouth almost delicately.

Highly recommended for any divers in the New England area!

I was kinda bored tonight so I got a Centos box up and running.

This is going to perform a few important tasks that I didn’t previously have:

• computer redundancy – since my last host died, I only have my laptop (macbook pro). Given how much of a PITA it is to repair hardware issues on a laptop, I need some redundancy should the worse happen.
• SSH endpoint – again, since my last host died, I don’t have a box to SSH into when I’m remote and want to pull files off of my NAS. This hasn’t been a huge issue most of the time, but there’s certainly a level of convenience that’s lost.
• tertiary backups – my NAS is RAID 1 and it has an external HD attached to backup important data to it weekly, but I like spreading my data around as much as I can to make sure that I survive the always painful hard drive crash (it’s not “if”, but “when”!!).
• python/django test environment – I’m considering learning python/django and I don’t want to muck around with apache on my mac. I already have a LAMP setup on the box, but it’s less than ideal. I figure I can set up a real environment that more closely mirrors my server than I can on my mac (which is close, but not perfect).

When my PC died on me a while back, I basically just unplugged everything and left it sitting in my office collecting dust. Given that was its only job, it did so with great effort. I gutted everything except the mobo and PSU and gave it a respectable cleaning. I ran into some problems reseating the CPU at one point and due to some butterfingers, managed to bend like 30 pins. Whoops! Some patience, a steady hand, tweezers, a straight edge and 15 minutes later and I had a working chip again. Gotta remember not to do that again.

The only hardware-related things left to do will be to throw a few spare HDs in it to run backups, but that’s it. From here on out, I just have to set up the HTTP environment and get that squared away. I’m just happy that I’ll be able to immediately SSH into my home network again from remote locations.

It’s amazing how such a little thing can be so amazingly convenient.

I start a week of nighttime upgrades tonight. My schedule looks like this:

Sun: 2100-0200
Mon: 2359-0700
Tue: 1900-0700
Wed: 1900-0200
Thu: 1900-0200

Every night until Friday is overnight work.

It’s just the luck of the draw, and this one is gonna suck.

Corinne and I randomly decided to head to NY this weekend. We just finished getting a place to stay and tickets.

If you’re in the area and might want to see us for a drink or meal, give me a ring.

My NAS arrived today and after some poor documentation and frustration, it’s set up and running fine. I’m currently copying over about 400G to it — which is taking quite a while. I’m sure it’ll be running well past the time I head to bed.

That aside, I’m definitely seeing a lot of junk that I probably can/should delete since I’m never going to use it anymore. As a rule, I don’t delete images that I shoot unless they’re just really bad shots. I also save all of my email and random documents — anything that’s volatile. But I also tend to save lots of apps and installers for various tools.

While I’m definitely a pack rat at heart, I know that I don’t need a copy of PowerDVD 4 for Windows. Nor do I need a copy of 1stPage v2 that has been sitting there for years unused. There’s more than a few examples of stuff like that. SQL Server 2000? Yeah, definitely don’t need that anymore.

Most of it dates back to my more Windows-centric days. My workstation is now OS X and I use various linuxes at work exclusively. I just don’t need this software anymore.

I’ll do a big purge sometime this weekend after I’ve gotten everything sorted and copied over.

I shot this last night while on a harbor cruise in Boston harbor. It’s shot at ISO 6400, which explains the noise. I did a few things to try to remove some noise, but even at 6400, the 5D2 does a great job.

Click for larger.