Rambling into the Ether

Dani and I went to the Flower Show for her birthday. I thought I’d be able to get some great pictures of all the pretty flowers and displays. Silly human.

I took over 200 shots. Out of those I have about 50 that don’t look like pure shit and even those are either blown out or grainy as hell. I simply don’t have the skill to shoot steadily in anything less than great light without either a tripod (no room with the crowds) or by dialing the ISO up to where the shots are more grain than subject. I’d like to blame the camera for having a noisy sensor at high ISO but I know most of the blame lays on my lack of skill.

Now that I’ve moved muad-dib.us over to Go Daddy I’ve been thinking of what to do with my home server (which used to host my domain). I’ve decided to turn it into a NAS as well as a development/play box for things that I’d eventually like to add to this site. I had been planning to upgrade the hardware sometime soonish anyway so I just need to change the required specs.

• CPU/Motherboard: Before I wanted a fast CPU to handle a ton of SQL queries without breaking a sweat but is not super important any more. Now the important thing will be a lot of SATA connectors and possibly 1000baseT networking (could be added via PCIe card)
• RAM: 2GB. It’s so cheap that it just makes sense. I could add more but I’m not sure it would be needed.
• Hard Drives: I’m going to want at very least 1TB of space (if not much more) in a RAID5 set up. Hardware RAID would be preferable but good RAID cards that work with Linux (or *BSD, I’m not married into using Linux) are very expensive so I’ll probably go with softraid (lvm2 or whatever *BSD uses).
• Case: Prettiness is not important but cooling and space are.
• Backup: Here’s the hard part. How the hell do you back up that much data without going broke? An extra set of drives that are rsynced over nightly? I know I’ll have RAID5 but that is not a back up. It’s times like this that I miss when you could back up a whole system onto CD.
• Switches: Right now my network is 100baseT. Because the wiring itself is CAT5e it should handle gigabit speeds. I just need to swap the switches out.

I have a bunch of ideas for posts and pages to write but they’re racing around my head too much for me to concentrate on any one.

I have had a fascination with photography for years. I’ve never been any good at it but I still love it. I started shooting with a little P.O.S. pocket camera, then graduated to a hand-me-down Pentax k1000 from my brother. Eventually I found digital cameras and loved the freedom from film. Today I shoot using a Canon Powershot S5 IS. It’s rather nice for a “point-and-shoot”, having a hotshoe and a 12x optical zoom, and I don’t feel like I need a DSLR, at least not for a while. That being said I do want to upgrade my kit a bit.

What I have:

• 58mm adapter
• Lens hood
• Adjustable flash
• Cheap tripod
• 2X 2 G.B. SD cards
• Lenspen
• 2 sets of batteries

What I want:

• Polarizing and neutral grad filters – I hate post processing (I’m allergic to Photoshop) so those two filters would help me get the shots I want in the first place.
• New flash – The flash I have is quite old and is ever so slightly laggy, even with new batteries.
• A better tripod – The one I have is about what you’d expect for a $35 tripod. That is, it holds the camera and is steadier than shooting by hand, but just. I’d like one that is truly steady
• A bigger bag – While I already lament the fact that my camera is too big to just throw into my backpack and go I need more room in my camera bag. As it is the camera, hood, flash, and such barely fit
• Bigger faster SD cards – What digital photographer doesn’t
• More batteries – Ditto

Jonathan Coulton, the musician responsible for such songs as Code Monkey and Skullcrusher Mountain is coming to World Cafe Live on April 2nd. I’m only telling the world now because I already secured a couple of tickets for myself .

Hello all.

Yea, I know I just did a blog reset a couple of months ago so why the hell am I doing another right now? Well, I just moved from self hosting to a third party host and instead of trying to get everything, including the database dumps working on the new host I decided to start over (again). And, seeing as I only made a couple of posts on the previous incarnation of this blog I’m not loosing much.

About blog accounts: I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that you’ll have to recreate your accounts yet again. The good news is that because I’ve got a real host this time I don’t have to manually activate each account. You folks can do that yourself. I just need to approve your first post (to stop spam).

Todo: I still need to set up my sidebar, fix my about page, and actually start using this. I’d also like to figure out a secure way to post via my BlackBerry