Still Not Perfect

It has been a long long time since I’ve written anything here. I think I’m going to finally get back to it. Plenty has happened since I last wrote. Work has been consistently crazy - who would expect anything less from a company as fast paced as it is ridden with standard giant corporate silliness. Ian has grown into a full blown toddler - running, jumping, astounding all of us with his grasp of language, and generally being a lot of fun. We’ve had some big ups and downs in our family life in the meantime - the biggest up being the birth of Chava Leigh, a beautiful daughter, on March 31, 2007.

I’m still very much into all things high-tech, especially open-source. But, those things are no longer as high on my list of priorities to write about. I hardly have any time anymore to devote to producing any neat tools. Instead I think you’ll see posts from now on on family, AP, politics, and my particular hot-button issues. In fact, the things that have finally pushed me over the edge to post again are in no particular order:

• Iraq war - Why it is failing, was that failure inevitable, and what parallels I see with another famous military engagement.
• Al Qaeda - Are their motivations and intentions really as the Bush administration spins them (they hate our freedom and our women’s rights, the terrorists will follow us home, etc.)?
• Our rights are being destroyed right under our noses at home - How did it get this far without anyone who objected noticing? And what hope do we have to get them back?
• Our kids aren’t turning into spoiled brats because of AP - in fact, we’re continually surprised at how much respect we earn from them by wholly respecting them, and relating to and guiding them accordingly. And other parents are noticing too, at least they keep telling us so.
• Immigration - I think the approach this country is most likely to end up with is all wrong, but not for the reasons you think. This one might be my most radical opinion, so watch out.

So, I’m back, with no guarantee of regularity. But with some things to say, and some strong opinions. Now I just have to figure out which one to mention first.

We had a couple of days of downtime (really just 1) because of the move. Like an idiot I didn’t take enough care when shutting Ridcully down and some MySQL tables got corrupted. Hex didn’t wake up right away after the move either. It wouldn’t even power on, and normally it is the DNS server, so it was kind of hard to research how to fix the MySQL problems I was having on Ridcully. Finally after just letting it sit for a little while Hex woke up, and then a quick ‘repair table wp_comments’ later on Ridcully we’re back up and running error free. Just looks like we lost a few comments (probably the last 25 or so).

Sorry about our recent outage. One of the Memorial Day weekend lightning storms zapped our firewall’s motherboard. It took me a little while to figure out that the problem was the motherboard instead of the power supply. However, once I figured it out the part was suprisingly cheap ($9.99 for a motherboard with onboard UltraSCSI and onboard server class NIC, who would have guessed?). I guess the hardware is so old that the few vendors who still have parts left are trying to liquidate them. My UPS should have protected the whole system from the lightning strike, but for some reason it didn’t work as well as it should have. It kept the other two servers plugged into it up and running just fine, but the firewall got zapped. Maybe it is time to look for a better UPS, or maybe the surge came in through the cable modem (???). Or maybe I should count it as an acceptable risk for hosting at home instead of in a real data center.

Anyway, we’re back on line now thanks to cheap parts.

I’m a perfectionist so writing here is going to challenge me. The fact is I don’t like to do anything until I can do it perfectly. That’s why it has taken me 2 weeks to put my first post up. I guess I just couldn’t do it until I had everything laid out like I liked it (and I still have improvements in mind, but I decided I need some traffic first).

This perfectionist tendency means that until my ideas are completely formed I don’t usually express them. This is good most of the time because it keeps my foot out of my mouth. But, sometimes it’s bad because others can’t help me develop my ideas. So, I’m going to try to step out of my box and post sometimes when I don’t have everything already thought out and perfected (not that I ever get anything perfected anyway).

That said, I’ve decided that I need to contribute something to the information treasure-trove that is the internet. I’ve been an internet user for about 10 years now, but have mostly been an information consumer. I’ve rarely posted on forums, never written articles, and basically just lurked. I’m an information free loader. Not that the internet cares, that’s what it’s for after all - free sharing of information. I guess I just felt like it was time to start producing content rather than just consuming it. Read the rest of this entry »

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