If you want to take a warm shower south of the border, you’ll probably run into what a lot of gringos call a “suicide shower.” You walk into the shower area and look up at the showerhead. It has electrical wires running into and out of it. Yikes. This is because they don’t waste a lot of gas and/or electricity down here doing things like keeping a huge tank of water hot. Instead, they only heat the water right when and where you need it. ...
I was updating some ID3 tags on a few songs today when I got an error saving the new tag. The mounted file system to my music share had become read-only. I checked the exports file on my server. It was read-write. I checked my fstab. Everything looked good. I checked the file system itself on the server. Trouble. One of my drives had failed moments earlier. Luckily, the array was configured for RAID-5, so no data was lost, but it’s still going to take a long time to rebuild it. ...
I moved from the Seattle area to Utah County about four years ago. One of the hardest parts of that move was the extreme lack of good food in Utah. I grew up in Utah and always figured we had good food here, but just in the expensive restaurants. I was wrong. There is no substitute for seafood only a few hours old, and it will never be possible to have that kind of freshness in Utah. One coping method I’ve found is to go on vacations, with the goal of eating great food being high on the list of reasons for choosing a location. ...
I finally upgraded my Linux firewall at home. I had a hard drive warn me that it was going to die soon (S.M.A.R.T. saved my bacon), so I decided the time had come to overhaul the system. I recently switched from Windows XP to Kubuntu at work, so I thought I’d use Ubuntu at home as well. In the process of figuring out what packages I wanted on my server, I played with various ubuntu derivatives. I wanted to keep it light weight, so I decided to go without any GUI or with the Xfce included with Xubuntu over VNC. In the end I went with Ubuntu server with no GUI at all. ...
Your personal information is not yours at all. Companies collect it, buy it, sell it, archive it, mine it, crunch it, and even lose track of it. Many companies have recently disclosed that they have lost track of the information they collected on their employees and customers. Citigroup has begun the process of notifying 3.9 million of its current and former customers that information about their accounts (names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, account numbers, account balances, transaction histories, etc.) has been lost. Apparently, this data was contained on backup media that was being shipped to an alternate location. Citibank shipped the backup tapes on May 2nd, but didn’t realize they were missing until May 24th. ...
I like movies. I buy the movies I enjoy on DVD, so that I can watch them with my friends. Sometimes I expose my friends to movies that they really enjoy, but probably would not have seen if it wasn’t for my recommendation (The Spanish Prisoner). Other times they introduce movies to me that I wouldn’t have seen if it wasn’t for their recommendation. We give our honest assessment of each movie when asked. ...