Brian's World

Riding Late to the Cherry Tree

Two nights ago I had the pleasure of attending a KT Tunstall concert in Northampton. The show started at 8 with an opening act. Some girl by the name of Khaki Katie (maybe it was Kaki King) started off, ya know to warm us all up. She played the guitar and was decent at it, given she had 0 expression the entire time. I’ll give her points for being on time and playing decent music, not much beyond that… but what do you expect from the opening act right? Well she finished her half hour segment at 8:32pm. I figured that KT Tunstall would be on in a few minutes… maybe 15… 30 max. Well it wasn’t until like 9:25 that KT took the stage… 50 minutes of sitting there and doing nothing. She took the stage and promised us 1.5 hours of music to earn our trust back. I set my watch accordingly.

Apparently she had released a new album that Katie (not the Kaki Katie, the Katie Katie) had failed to mention to me. I didn’t recognize most of the songs, but they were pleasant. Her band seemed to be made up of 4 seemingly nice gentlemen. The man closest to me was playing the bass guitar, Arnulf Linder. He’s essentially a thinner version of Ron Burgundy from Anchorman. While I didn’t identify any particular part of the performace that was his, he seemed to be doing a cool job. And his clothes looked like they were washed, unlike the other performers. Overall their music was pleasant and the concert was going well. KT and the band took a break at one point, so everyone else in the audience felt the desire to clap in unison to get her to come back. It worked after a few minutes, and everyone stood up to applaud. No one sat down for the remainer of the concert (likely from sitting on the edge of their seats from the 50 minute waiting game we all played. People felt obligated to maneuver closer to the stage to.. idk what. Get a better view? Well everyone was standing so no one had a good view. Maybe they just wanted to be closer to the action or something. I don’t know. It was moderately humorous to watch people in their 40s and 50s to “dance” to the music. My favorite move is the spaz-out-like-you’re-a-malfunctioning-robot move. That is clearly what all the cool kids are doing these days.

Of course she failed to deliver 1.5 hours of performing, unless the ringing in my ears as I walked to my car was part of the package deal. Overall I would estimate she performed for 1.1-1.2 hours maximum. Not enough to my trust back. I demand at least 87% of your target hours of performing. Just another 10 minutes would have gotten me back on the large black horse. Alas I digress. I had a good time, and I hope Katie did too! Kudos to her for getting the tickets a forever ago.

Off the fun for me topics and onto the fun for you topics. Maybe its fun for me and not you.. I’m not really sure. Lately I’ve found myself sailing a boat I’m not completely familiar with. When you’re sailing a boat, you recognize there are only so many things you can control. You can steer to a certain point. You can bail at a certain speed. You can carry so many life jackets, etc… the rest of the time you are at the mercy of the sea and forces around you. If Poseidon, god of the sea, wants to make a massive whirl pool in front of you.. good luck. Maybe he wants to make the water vanish. Imagine a chunk of water just goes missing, exposing the bottom of the ocean.. wouldn’t that be neat. Completely irrelavent, right? I’ve done my best for quite some time to steer my boat in the direction I want to go, and on that course I’ve done my best to help others on their boats to where they want to be. Sometimes this has put me off course, sometimes its been align with my journey.. but I’m always willing to give it a try. What can you loose? Maybe a little of your progress, but if someone else can get a boost isn’t that for the better.

While flying my airplane I think to myself, whats the timeline for one of those flying gas station planes to come and refuel me. How long will I be required to operate on the current amount of fuel. I mean yes, I have enough to make it to an airport… but is that really the airport I want to go to. I dunno. If its ORD then yes, because I’ve always liked ORD. Somewhere like HKG.. maybe not right now.

I guess cruising is always an option.

Seeking Server Space

I am in the market for a new web host. My current host is getting outdated and I like to keep it fresh. Some of you may go out there and buy a new car every few years, I on the other hand go out there and acquire a new host for my stuff. I’m not looking for the server equivalent of a car with sun roof, navigation system, rear entertainment system or whatnot, just one that works. My goal is simple, spend under $120 a year on a decent web hosting provider.

I think I’m going to start approaching my hosting model into 2 groups, statics and everything else. Things like images, javascript source, pdfs, flash video files are all really big compared to the few kilobytes of text I might generate dynamically on a server via php or rails and I think I can save substantial dollars by hosting those elsewhere. I can cut down on disk space and bandwidth at my primary host, and just throw everything that doesn’t change into a big bucket elsewhere. Yes, I said bucket… implying Amazon’s S3 is top on my list. They have decent pricing and a moderate reliability. I think I could probably use < $1 a month after my initial import of stuff.

The dynamic stuff is what keeps me searching. If the internet was great I would click a button and get my own dedicated server for $5 a month and just do my own thing. Maybe I could drop a spare machine off at my local colo center for a few bucks a month or something. Unfortunately both of those options tend to throw the monthly cost closer to my yearly cost, and for what I do thats unnecessary. My next step is middle ground, a virtual private server. For those of you unfamiliar its like a virtual computer, setup as a slice of a more powerful machine.. lots of people share the same physically hardware to run their own little machines. I’ve been looking around and I’ve found some in the $4 – $10 range, but I can’t say I have found myself particularly compelled to choose one over the other. They all have somewhat poor websites with little technical information thats of use to me. I’d really like to know what these companies default image looks like. I’m not the leading authority on VPSes, but I’ve seen some range from clean installs to full blown LAMP installations. Personally I’d like the clean install, and with no control panel too. The 128-256 MB of RAM you’ll be “dedicating” to me needs to be busy processing useful things, not scanning for virii or checking for updates.

So I am making an offer, which probably won’t work but here it goes. Let me know how cheap you can get me a VPS with the following specs… lowest price that doesn’t seem like a scam wins me as a customer.

Minimum Specs:

• 1 Dedicated IP
• 5 GB Hard Drive Space
• 5 GB Monthly Bandwidth (fast backbone connection preferred)
• 128 MB dedicated RAM + Burstable or 256 MB RAM [doesn’t have to burst if its 256]
• CentOS 5 or Debian 4
• Full root accessfor me to do whatever I want [the idea behind a VPS]. No, I will not host adult content, illegal content, or anything related to IRC
• Ability for me to control my own firewall [either unmanaged, or managed by someone friendly]
• Max monthly cost: $10, I am willing to pay for a few months in advanced… like 3 or 6, not a year.

If you have questions please comment or email me at bmichalski@gmail.com

I am looking forward to some exciting offers here on the table. By offers I mean 2, so that I feel like I have a choice.. even if its not a very hard one.

Also, if anyone knows of a good host that they’d reccommend, I’ll take that too.

Genuine Ink

Its raining pretty hard outside, which has motivated me to follow up with some companies that I’ve been interacting with lately. Comcast, AT&T, and HP.. well not really HP yet, but I’ll get there. Let me start with Comcast, my favorite cable provider.

We got digital voice at my house not to long ago and its been working great. Of course it has extra features, like this fancy remote voicemail service. My parents are trained to use the home answering machine and really wouldn’t take well to having to dial a number or something. I also don’t like the idea of having another company record and store things for me of voice nature. I was able to get the voicemail deactived no problem so it acts like normal going to our home answering machine, but there are still 10 annoying flashes when you pickup the phone to dial. My mom and dad are conviced that you can’t dial during these clicking noises, so they wait it out and get frustrated. I’ve called and chatted with a few representatives over the past 2 weeks and everyone assures me this will get fixed. Last week I was assured it would be 48-72 hours, and today I was assured 24-48 hours [he said he would”upgrade” my priority ticket even more]. Somehow a voicemail must have gotten stuck in the voicemail count and terminating the voicemail service didn’t reset that count. I will call Comcast back in exactly 48 hours.

AT&T is being pretty darn slow at shipping stuff as well. I ordered stuff there 7 days ago and was told 3-5 days for shipping and it has been over 3-5 days. I called the store today (because the customer service rep told me she couldn’t access that information) and the store told me that its always been 7-10 businesss days, and that I should call back in half an hour when he’s less busy. I am not going to call them back. I have a strong feeling my order has not shipped, but I have hope it will ship in the next 2-3 days. If it doesn’t ship before then I won’t be able to pick it up, and it will get sold to another customer as my parents will be unavailable all of next week [They cancel your order if you don’t show up in 7 days]. That would be my luck.

Now for my HP story. Maybe its a Walmart story.. idk. I was at WalMart yesterday buying ink for my HP printer. I needed #95 & #99. WalMart is close, and they sell sprinkles which I also need, so I head there. No problem finding the ink so I get in line. The line is massive but I don’t mind. The #99 cartridge wouldn’t scan in the system so the cashier scanned the #95 again. I think they were the same price anyways. That gets me thinking about HP genuine ink, and how I guess you could make money by refilling and returning cartridges to the store, or using illegal ones. Katie opens the box, which appears intact and I notice a substancial amount of hot glue holding that side closed. We tear the other side open and find a small amount of glue, about the same as the #95 box. Hrm, now this is starting to look suspicious. The #99 cartidge isn’t in a sealed bag like the #95, but otherwise it appears fine. Today when I was installing it I noted the date on it which was 2007/05/21, where the new #95 was 2010/03/15. I’m not sure if that means anything, but my printer thinks its a genuine cartidge and it looks normal when it prints. Who knows. Somewhere the illegal ink cartel is making money, I am sure of it.

If anyone has any suggestions how to forward one port to a different IP on a SonicWall (running SonicOS 2. something) thats configured for one-to-one NAT, please let me know soon.