Tag: Personal

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Toll Roads are your friends

Yesterday I had to drive up to Santa Monica, a drive that could range anywhere from about 2 hours 15 minutes to 3 hours 10 minutes according to Google Maps. Google Maps said to take state route 73 which is a toll road for part of the way. I usually avoid toll roads because of the cost, but decided that if I could stay out of some traffic and shave some time off my drive, it was worth it. It cost me $4.25 each way (I went at off peak hours; peak is $5 each way) and it is definitely something I’ll use in the future if I have to go up that way again. While it may sound like a lot of money, the drive is extremely pleasant (it is very under utilized) and scenic (if you can call driving through Orange County scenic). I always thought toll roads were a bad thing because I’m used to east coast toll roads where you pay a fortune and they carry a fair amount of traffic; toll roads around here seem to be avoided even though time really is money!

The only thing I’d do different if I drive up there more often is I’ll get a FasTrak transponder to save $0.75 each way and save time by not having to slow down. I’d basically have to drive the toll road once a month to make FasTrak viable as they charge $1 per month to have the transponder.

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Virtual Server – Day 2

I managed to move over most of my domains to the virtual server and am pleased so far. However, I had to jump up to their next plan because I was running out of memory. So due to the limited amount of memory (512 MB with no disk swap), I’ve decided to leave mail on my server as SMTP has built in retries so if my server goes down, my store and website don’t do down with it.

So going back to my post about servers, I now get the best of both worlds, but pay a higher price. My virtual server has 3 IP addresses (I’m not sure what to do with the other 2) and has 500 GB of monthly bandwidth which is more than plenty for me. The bandwidth is also significantly faster than my current connection, so people should see better performance. I still have to keep my server running for mail, music server, and source control, but I now feel better knowing that I have a backup in case my cable modem goes down or my server decides to die again.

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Trying a virtual server

After the 2 hour downtime for my cable modem, I’ve decided to try out a virtual server. I decided to try VPSLink and managed to get up and running in nothing flat; there automated system worked well. So far I’ve migrated over a few sites including this blog. I still have to figure out backups and move some of the bigger pieces over including email, but I’ll start with the websites and see how things go. Hopefully this will keep me from pulling my hair out when my net connection dies again.

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Getting Mail.app to work the way I want

I use multiple email addresses for various reasons, but have all the mail come into one account. Mail.app handles this fine, but there is no way to link the signatures to the accounts. I seem to recall that there was a plugin to handle this awhile ago, but with Tiger mail, it wasn’t needed. My switch to IMAP seems to have confused Mail and now I have to manually switch the signatures to match the account.

Not being one to do manual things over and over again, I hacked up a Mail.app plugin that sets the signature based on the from name (the signatures are named the same as the from addresses). It didn’t take long and I’m not sure what I should do with this besides use it myself. Who knows what will happen in Leopard as this plugin uses undocumented APIs.

Am I such the exception that I have many email addresses and want 1 signature per address? I don’t need multiple actual email accounts (Mail.app handles the signatures with those), just multiple addresses for my multiple personalities.

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Bee: 1, Scott: 0

Yesterday, my wife and I were walking to lunch (I was carry the car seat with our son in it) when I felt something on my neck. I swatted it off my neck only to discover that it was a bee and it stung me on my hand. As an EMT, I’m taught to scrape off the stinger with a card so that no more venom gets injected. While this is great in theory, it sucks in practice when you’re in pain and panicked. I didn’t even think and just pulled the stinger out and then picked out the last little piece from my hand. Luckily I’m not allergic (we were actually in an ideal spot if I was as we were 3 minutes from the hospital), but my hand still hurts. I would have been happier if I had managed to kill the bee, but it flew away. At least it can’t have another victim.

Cam.jpg

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Boy, I sure feel old

A few weeks ago in my EMT refresher class, the instructor mentioned something about the movie Airplane! to one of the students. The student, who was about 21 or 22, didn’t have a clue what the instructor was talking about. While I can’t remember if I saw the movie in theatre (probably not because I was 7 when it came out), I did see it and the sequel sometime during the 80’s. I really felt like I was getting old because it didn’t seem all that long ago that the movie came out.

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Goldilocks and the 3 keyboards

I somehow managed to spill stuff on my keyboard (not the internal one in my MacBook Pro) and have been looking for a replacement for awhile. I dried it out enough so that it has mostly worked, but I kept missing keys. So I bought an Apple keyboard from CompUSA a few months back (when they still had a San Diego store) and had 2 problems with it; first off the unit was defective as not all the keys worked and second, it was too small for the keyboard tray that I have (it has spring loaded holders on the side). I returned it and ignored the problem for awhile. On Friday I went to my most hated store, Fry’s, and got another keyboard. It looked OK, but when I got it home, I discovered that the command key was too small. My choice of wired keyboards is quite small for the Mac; I want wired so that I don’t need drivers and it works with my KVM switch. I also want a Mac keyboard as the Windows keyboards that are Mac compatible have the command and option keys switched unless you install the drivers.

Back to Fry’s today and I picked up a macally keyboard. It seems to work well, doesn’t require drivers (they have drivers, but I have no idea what they’re for) and fits my keyboard tray. The only problem is that I paid $10 over retail. It’s not worth my time to return it to Fry’s and then order it online (or maybe it is as it is $45 from Amazon with Free shipping).

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Running my own server vs hosting elsewhere

With all my problems with my server, you’d think I’d give up and just host my server somewhere else and make it someone else’s problem. After a little thinking, I’ve come up with the pros and cons of running my own server.Pros————–Physical security of serverMusic server – I need a server to run my SqueezeboxesUnlimited bandwidth (at 1 MBps upstream, but unlimited)Full backups – I backup the server to an external drive and take it offsiteLots of storage (currently at 300 GB, but only about 15% used)It’s a learning experience5 static IP addressesFull control over serverAbility to run my own PBX and have good voice qualityCons————Electricity usageI have to keep it runningLimited upstream bandwidthPotentially more costly (it costs about $50 per month for me to host my own server); however for the hardware I have, a hosting service might charge more for RAID 1 and backupsWhile there are more items I’m missing here, it’s pretty clear to me that running my own server is the right way to go. My issues last week appeared to stem from drives that were failing; it just happened that when I was putting in the new drives, the drive I left running was failing causing some issues. I’m now up and running on my 2 new drives and have been for about 5 days now. Lesson for the future…replace drives about once a year if they need it or not as the drives are relatively cheap ($150 for both drives) and run 24/7 which puts a lot of wear and tear on the drives. Now the question is, what do I do with the old drives? Would a reformat on the drives do the trick and keep them running? What less mission critical role can I put them in?

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An adventure in shopping

Yesterday, my wife and I went shopping for some outdoor umbrellas. Not just any umbrellas, but ones that would extend over our pool (I went swimming on Saturday and my wife and son sat under one of our regular umbrellas on the side of the pool and we thought it would be a good idea to get some shade actually over the pool). We went to Home Expo and found nothing; next stop was Home Depot where we found 2 umbrellas, but no bases for them. Then came Costco, Lowes, and another Home Depot. Nothing. (We always tend to miss the right time in the season to buy.) We looked online and I found several, some with free shipping. Problem was if we didn’t like them, returning them would be problematic due to the weight. I found the same umbrella we saw at Home Depot on their online site for the same price and free shipping. However, online purchases can’t be returned at the stores. Hmmm. The listing has an in store SKU, so I started calling stores. The store we went to said they had 5 available and would visually check the stock. After being transferred around for a bit, I finally spoke to someone who was yelling to someone that had a clue. Turns out they had 2 without bases (I could have told them that). They didn’t know where the other 3 or the bases were.) I’m not sure how you lose bases (there were 2 boxes per umbrella) that weight 114 pounds! I found another store (35 minutes away) that said they actually had 6 and set one aside for me (I asked for two). We drive up there (this was the first adventure with the little on in my car as his seat is on one side in my car and in the center in my wife’s car, so we could fold down one seat) and managed to get 2 umbrellas in my car. Wow, those are heavy. After getting home and having a neighbor help me pull them out of the car, I put them together and am quite pleased.So, it’s a good thing we got them at the “end of the season” otherwise I would have overlooked this model (it was 25% off). Too bad it was such a pain to get what I wanted. Such is life in the big city.