The New York Times has a new reader on the web—she’s 116 years old, lives in American Samoa, and if I glanced at it correctly, is an executive in the high-tech industry.
I hate hate hate web registration for newspapers.
The best time to buy real estate is five years ago.
The best time to buy any Apple product is next month.
I went to glance at the site today, and was greeted with (ACCOUNT SUSPENDED, CONTACT US IMMEDIATELY) rather than, you know, the site. I was wondering why, and started to send an email to my hosting company when I realized that I lost my card that the account was auto-billed to a few weeks ago (hilariously, I left it in the ATM while pulling out money for Amanda, who had lost her wallet several days previously), so the payment was declined and they shut down the site with no warning.
Which was a drag. Fortunately, I’ve been planning to move the site to new (free) hosting anyway, and managed the torturously complex process of backing up the blog’s SQL database a few weeks ago. Torturously complex because nothing that could restore the database could read the backup that I could make, and nothing that could back up the database in an easily restorable format could connect to the old server. I somehow managed it, and considering that my test to see it was working or not was 15 minutes ago, when I rolled over the DNS to the new server and tried to hit the blog admin.
The net effect is that I lost my last post or two, and I’m not going to bother contacting the hosting company to go through the database backup/restore process all over again. It works, that’s good enough.
It’s probably for the best. I’ve been dragging my feet on switching over the hosting, and that I didn’t get billed for this last cycle is just a bonus.
Up next: See if my email’s working again. Whee.
I’m reading this story about a toll road, which coincidentally will, at some point when the shouting’s done, run along the backside of town and be, almost certainly, two things:
It sucks, because the road really is necessary, and there’s no way to put it further north (suburbs) or south (marine base); or east (TRW has a big facility where they…do something) or west (the aforementioned suburbs). So it will eventually be placed right about where they’ve been planning to since about 1982, which will destroy a creek that is a habitat for endangered animals, run about 100 yards from a heretofore-remote campground, and for bonus points, runs the risk of destroying one of the 10 best surf spots in the world.
And of course, in Southern California as anywhere else (though particularly here—the developers run the show to a degree that must be seen to be believed), more roads mean development along those roads. So more suburbs, more strip malls, more soulless dead-eyed bovine suburb-dwellers, breeding the next generation of strip-mall workers are a certainty.
So I’m conflicted. Getting traffic off the road = a moderate good. The attendant costs of that traffic alleviation are a shame. And all this is to say nothing of my feelings (echoed by many long-time residents), which are that more soullessly perfect suburbs (and the strip malls and megachurches to support them) at the back of the city detract from the town’s quiet ambience of a goofy little beach town.
But while reading the article, mulling over the implications of the above, while lamenting the shameful stifle-the-dissent attitude practiced by The Powers That Be, all I could really concentrate on is that Clint Eastwood is seventy-seven years old.
We set out on Our Big Move. We arrived, 1500 yowling-cat miles later (three times as long as regular miles, due to fatigue), in the wee hours after St. Patrick’s Day, ate some cold corned beef and cabbage at 3:00 AM, and slept like the cat-yowl-fatigued travelers we were.
Five years. Ridiculous. A lot’s changed, a lot’s stayed the same, but the cat still yowls. Not as much, but enough so you’d notice.
Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: Meh. It’s Futurama, but not as powerful mojo as I’ve come to expect. First comedy DVD I’ve ever bought that had a math lecture as part of the bonus features.
This is where I'd tell you a little about myself if I was so inclined. But I'm not right now. » This doesn't work yet either.
