musings from the sleep deprived

Uh … don’t try to change a domain you don’t own. Heh. Sometimes its the simple things.

So a friend asked if I could host his domain for him. Sure, no problem. Do it all the time, whatever. But there’s a wrinkle… his ip address isn’t static. So generally that would lead down the road of engaging some service like dyndns to take care of you. However, these services generally cost money, and if you have several domains, that can get expensive fast. Read more

Ok, so I broke down and bought one. I got ‘Lumines‘ and ‘Mercury‘ for games, both puzzle style games. They’re both great, and promise hours and hours of time wasting goodness. I’ve heard complaints of dead pixels. I have none to speak of, unless I’m just not noticing them. The picture is crystal clear, and the sound is crisp and the scores for these two games is just great. I will continue my report as more data presents itself.

I think I’m starting to get into the groove. I’ve been working tickets on my own now (with backup from the primary, obviously), and I’m starting to understand better what my role is, really. It hasn’t changed my accepting the fact that I still have a shitload to learn, but it does give me a better grasp of how things will generally flow day to day.
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Reliable, fast Internet service seems to avoid me. When first I’m too far from the local CO to get the proper kind of service, then I’ve got an old router that doesn’t do routing properly. Then when trying to analyze the routing, and get a console cable working, it decides to release some of its magic smoke. Then my replacement router isn’t a new enough release to be supportable, and lo, $300 later, we’re back in business with a new router, and it appears all is well again.
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Alright, I figured I should probably post a quick note here about how my time at my new job is going. eBay is, in short, one of the most massive technology installations I’ve ever been a part of. Actually, no… it is the largest, by far. I though Sun had large data centers? Nope. Hunter Douglas’ data center for the main SAP servers? Small time. Miniscule. The sheer number of servers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, database servers …. the list goes on. While I can’t get into specifics, all I can say is … holy shit.
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We had a bit of an outage there, sorry about that. We ended up doing a bit of an upgrade, and it ended up taking longer to get everything reinstalled again than I was hoping, and it ended up overlapping with my trip to my new job orientation out here in San Jose.

Things are going well now. Web services are restored, mysql back in bidnis. If you notice a particular service that still seems to be missing, please email me, and I’ll do what I can.

So I decided that instead of spending the money to buy myself the laptop (see previous posts), I’d dump it into a computer upgrade for myself. Its been a long time in the waiting, and I figured I’d do it right. Read more

I got a call from the new boss today, and they just ordered me a laptop. Cancelled the order at apple, and I won’t be putting in any other order. Now I just need to figure out if I still want to spend that money on something else nice for myself or not. We’ll see.

Ok, Apple now has 24 hours to make good, or I cancel and go with another laptop. Especially since Alienware now has an offer for the next 72 hours with $500 off their laptops. I don’t need any more incenting than that.

So Apple, if you’re listening … Get that shit in the mail, eh?

I was poking around at stuff, and found a page that gives “Clear Sky Predictions” for something like 2700 areas around the country. This is the one for where I’m at:

That looks like it gets cut off since its so wide. There is a smaller one that I’m going to try to include in the footer on pages now that looks like this:

Dig it.

So after a brief hiatus, I’ve reinstalled my Sony Clié back up to what I had before. Got my games back on there. All the software I had purchased or otherwise downloaded, etc. I had sincerely forgotten how much fun the damn thing was. So I’m going to do some more cleanup on, get ZLauncher back to being configured the way I like it again, etc.

For those of you who’ve played around the inner workings of Apache, or even just done some of the fairly standard stuff with it, you may have at some point stumbled across mod_rewrite. Its actually an incredibly flexible tool when it comes to web servers, allowing all kinds of back end functionality to ease administration, all completely invisible to the users and clients viewing the pages. Great stuff.
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With the idea of another machine incoming and a certain desire to remain firmly rooted in sanity, I decided to redo the wiring underneath my desk. In the past, say, 4 years, it achieved a certain Zen-like state of rat’s nest-edness. To unravel it would require the patience of a monk. Or, at least the flavor of one.
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So the laptop has registered ‘Order Received’ status on the order status page since I ordered it. That just isn’t going to cut it. Ideally, a webcam hovered over the workbench tracking the minutia of the Singaporean factory worker would be good. Otherwise, I’d like updates like “Processor fitted into slot” or “Assembler currently on coffee break”, updated every 10 minutes or so. Don’t they understand that I refresh that page every 30 seconds? Sheesh.
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Sent apple an email. Seems to me I should have seen some progress on the order in the time since I submitted it.
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