mattlary's weblog

I can’t sleep.

I started three or four blog posts tonight, but decided to ditch them all.  In summary:

1. Charlie Wilson’s War was a good movie and I have forgotten everything I knew about cold war politics.
2. Calin and I went on a two week journey across the state, saw Wicked, got lost in Manhattan the next day, ended up in Brooklyn, and found a cool aquarium in CT. The rest of the last two weeks were at various Christmas celebrations, and on Friday I went back to work and found out that everything I was working on is broken.
3. Tumblr seems cool, but I don’t want to change blog systems (again).
4. Yahoo disabled my account for no apparent reason so I can’t login to flickr to upload pictures.

I guess that’s it for now.  Back to work tomorrow- nobody will be there so maybe I can get some work done.

I’ve migrated my server to a different machine; the new server is named Brahms. I’m really just posting to make sure everything is setup and working

Calin has a blog now and she’s really excited about it- check it out at http://www.ladylawrence.com

Randy scolded me for not sharing google reader items, so I added a port for it on the right and I’ll try to share more stuff- unfortunately I decided to start this after I went through all of my entries, so there’s not a lot there yet- stay tuned though, I’m sure there’ll be lots of stuff there soon. If you use RSS, then you can subscribe directly to my shared items. Go here to see the entries themselves and to find the corresponding feed.

Randy also said I need to post more photos; well here you go- yes it’s me from way back in High School; I had a friend who worked at the Mohawk PD who took my mugshot and gave it to me; fun times.

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So it appears that my site was down for a couple weeks because my IP address was incorrect- I found out today that my server was trying to tell my dynamic DNS service that my IP was 192.168.1.8; so of course everything worked fine from home and I just assumed work was blocking my site.  Everything should be better now.  I’ll post something with substance soon.

I just read that Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) passed away this week; I remember watching his show when I was growing up, and I’m sure it had something to do with me pursuing the sciences.

I gave blood tonight; but I tried the “Double Red” donation option.  Basically what that means is that they hook you up to an apheresis machine that takes only red blood cells, but by doing so they can take twice as much as would be contained in a whole blood donation.  So I reluctantly agreed to do it and they hooked me up to the machine.  It was actually a lot more comfortable than the whole blood donation; the needle didn’t hurt when it went in, and I got to sit in a recliner type thing.  It started by taking blood as a normal donation would do, then the machine pumped the plasma back in- I’ve never had an IV, but the experience was similar to what I’ve heard an IV feels like.  It did that twice and then was done- the cool part was that I left just as hydrated as when I had arrived, because it replaced most of what was taken.  So anyway, it was an interesting experience and I would recommend it to anyone who’s eligible.

I’ll probably be posting about some Net Neutrality/Online rights stuff soon; check out The EFF in the meantime.

After many years of faithful service, I’m retiring my server beethoven.  I got Beethoven back in 1998 and used it as my desktop system until 2001.  In 2001, I turned beethoven into a server and used it to host my website and some other sites/services.  It also served well as a router/dhcp server until recently.  Now, after almost ten years of service, I’m getting ready to lay it to rest.  For the time being I’m going to keep the system running, but only until everything is verified to be working on the new system.  After that, I’ll probably shut it down and keep it around as a backup server.

Keeping with the composer theme, my new server is named handel, and is a lot newer and faster (System Specs here).  I got the machine for a real bargain at a United Way garage sale at work and set it up with Ubuntu linux.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited- I’m hoping to be able to do a lot more with this system.

I’ve been having some issues with spam comments, but I’ve had some mechanisms in place to shield everyone from them. I started by just moderating every comment that came through, and then I added the image verification to help filter out more. The image verification wasn’t working at all for some reason, so I’ve replaced it with a system that will try to guess if a comment is spam or not. So far it’s been working well, but we’ll see what happens. If it proves to work exceptionally well, then I’ll turn off the moderation for most cases.

On a related note, the counter climbed to around 80 hits today; all but maybe 4 of them were from the spammers or other bots, so I just removed it altogether. Oh well.

That’s about it for today; nothing terribly exciting; still doesn’t feel like Christmas.

I spent more time tweaking the blog software; I got the counter working, and I was able to tweak the date displays and some other things. This stuff probably doesn’t matter to anyone, but I wanted to mention it because I felt accomplished For those who read who care about blogging software, Wordpress rocks- check it out if you haven’t already- it’s very flexible, and is written in PHP and uses a MySQL backend.

Today was a good day btw; it still doesn’t feel like Christmas yet though.

I’ve missed the connections theme, so it’s back.  Let me know if you like it (or dislike it).