Archived News starting from 08-14-2003 and earlier
Blog08/14/2003: 04:10 pm -
UPS Reports Power Failure
After discovering the outage would forever be known as "The Great Outage of 2003" I left work for home. As you can see from the
Gnome Cam the server was still running when I arrived at 6:10pm, a full two hours after the outage. Unfortunately the cable company isn't as prepared so most likely the server was down from the beginning. I decided to turn off the server and use the remaining power to charge my phone. While it was charging, I
took some pictures while the power was out including a
movie of the 5 and Beech intersection. Walking back, I saw Lindsay, who was
obviously hysterical over the whole thing. As is tradition, I
ran my roomba during the outage just because I could. I also gave my cat a
brain protection device to keep aliens and the government out. My
girlfriend did bills, and my
computer sat lifeless so we decided to head for
Duane's house. Upon arriving, we found
Gina also doing bills, and also hysterical. Duane got
looter protection and we
headed outside. ATV's were
running rampant as is typical in Redford. My response was
pure panic. A few drinks and a bonfire later, we braved the looters and rioters and headed back home. <WalterCronkite>"And that's how it was during the Outage of 2003"</WalterCronkite>
It just turned 12:01am and I'm not sleeping like tired programmers should be. Instead, I just finished making my server monitors more accurate. On the
homepage, the SYSTEM and STATUS sections (on the left) now have real-time updated information. If you refresh, you'll notice the used/free memory changes, and if you wait long enough the used/free storage will also change (from GnomeCam captures). In addition, if you click on the
SYSTEM heading, it will take you to an even more detailed real-time system info page. Is any of this useful? Probably not to everyone, but it will help me if there is a runaway process or memory leak somewhere, or if my diskspace starts to become a premium. I can also see who's connected at any given time, so at least it's useful to me. Now it's
bedtime for bonzo!
Today and yesterday everyone was yapping about the
new worm taking advantage of a well known flaw in Microsoft software. It's not being discussed quite as chicken little as the
slammer worm of January was, but still elevated to "run around in a panic" status. The Internet itself is rarely affected by these worms. The idiots who don't know how to patch their servers or use firewalls are the real victims and fortunately the media has been making an effort to inform rather than sensationalize. Since I'm striving to better inform rather than rant, I've included a few useful links you can use to determine if you really should run around in a panic. As a note: all of these sites only registered a small increase in backbone traffic.
This weekend I did more than I usually do in three. Friday I went biking with Keith, then went to see
Terminator 3, which I thought was pretty good. Most of my friends said it sucked, which is usually a good thing since I go in expecting nothing and am usually pleasantly surprised. Saturday afternoon I went to
Cougar Extravaganza, an event organized by
Excelcier that involved driving a loop through downtown windsor and having a cookout at a local park. It turned out to be pretty fun. Saturday night Melissa and I went to
Duane and Gina's wedding shower. Sunday morning I had my SCCA Race in the GM Hamtramck assembly plant parking lot. Sunday evening we went to a
WNBA Shock game with my dad. A jam packed weekend and I survived it!
Staovs sent me a link that scolded my site for not being HTML 4.0 Certified. I admit, I have become lazy and missed a few ALT tags here and there, with the occasional extra closed tag from time to time. However, 5 minutes later and I'm once again
HTML 4.0 Certified according to the
World Wide Web Consortium. I was so proud of myself I even put their icon in the bottom right of the homepage. Take that!
Duane found a project called
GeoURL that uses old meta tags in HTML to generate a database relating locations of web servers (or their advertised location). The tag called geo.position is also known as the ICBM tag (as in inter-continental ballistic missle). Purely for this reason I've added it to this server (with the correct lat/long) and you can now click the
button to find other servers advertising their location near me. If you also want to have an ICBM tag (and thus be /<-r@d)
visit their add page for instructions.
My friend
Joseph works at a TV studio transmitting feed for various stations. I'm not exactly sure what he does, but it involves working at night and sleeping in the day. This unnatural cycle has finally caught up with him and now he can't sleep. Since he once
murdered my snowman, I fear he may become a zombie, or worse, a zombie that has "the gay" and again attack me out of rage. To prevent this horrible future from occuring, I've assigned Officer Gil Stebbins of the Winter Park police department (pictured here with my friend) to the case. Gil will assist Joseph in getting to sleep, and alert me if he spots Joseph heading my way (so I can protect myself). Good luck Joseph, and be careful.
My
girlfriend and I went to the
Great Lakes Bat Festival at Cranbrook. They had bat roosts, bat shows, and of course, bat merchandise. In addition to all the bats we walked around the museum and saw "Mars and the Worlds Beyond" in the planetarium, which only served to ignite my need for a powerful telescope. Fortunately
Stavos already has one so now I just need to steal it and I'm all set. The visit was topped off by an
animated T-rex display that was pretty well done.
Even though the weather did not approve, our
bonfire went ahead as planned. After the better part of an hour lighting newspaper and cardboard, we finally got enough wood going to sustain it. Eventually the rain also let up and there was much rejoicing. Many burned hot dogs and under-done burgers completed the event.
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