Archive for 2008

Our deck and spa replacement project has sort of been in “standby” mode since my initial post. Since then, the concrete spa pad and deck supports were added, but not much else could be done until the spa itself arrived. That day was today.

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I was reading a news item the other day indicating that the Las Vegas Hilton is closing the Star Trek Experience in Vegas. This was one of the few things in Vegas, along with the fountains at Bellagios and the Siegfried and Roy Secret Gardens animal exhibit, that my wife and I actually enjoyed while we were there. But it was apparent when we were at the Hilton that they were barely putting any effort into the Star Trek Experience any more.

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Everyone is talking about SSDs replacing hard drives, if not today than Real Soon Now. On the surface, solid state drives have a lot going for them: no moving parts, potentially very dense storage, and the possibility for low power consumption. The main things stopping me, at least, from seriously considering an SSD in my machines until recently were price and capacity. The cheapest SSDs cost something like $600 for 64 gigabytes: a normal hard drive might costs $200 for 500 gigabytes of storage, making SSDs easily ten times the price of mechanical hard drives on a per gigabyte basis.

But solid state drives obviously have an advantage in terms of reliability and power consumption, right? So all I have to do is wait for the inevitable drop in price/increase in capacity that Moore’s law suggests and I’ll be set. Maybe… or maybe not.

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Irene and I spent the last five days over on Vancouver Island in Victoria for the Tall Ships Festival. I had a good time, and would particularly recommend seeing the Tall Ships to someone who has a moderate to strong interest in the age of sail. So what did we see? Well, a lot of ships, of course

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Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…

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My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.

But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…

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My vacation started on Friday. Well, technically, the days off work start on Monday, but on Friday I realized I’d already worked 50 hours for the week by about noon, and I was feeling beat… so I set up my out-of-office email auto-responder agent, changed my answering machine message, and shut down my work laptop at around 2:00 PM. I’ve had some stress at work the past couple of weeks, mostly good stress, but tiring nonetheless.

So, what am I doing with my vacation time? The biggest “event” during my vacation will be a getaway to Vancouver Island with my wife to see the Tall Ships Festival. We are joining my friend Chris and his family there: he’s the one most interested in the sailing ships, for me it is a good opportunity to visit, an excuse to get away for a few days, and maybe a chance to learn some thing about the ships.

Other than that, I’ll be hopefully relaxing, playing some computer games, drinking some beer, and if the Gods of Construction smile, watching some progress on our deck construction take place. Supposedly they will begin pouring the footing next week- and there is a (slim) chance that the spa itself might be delivered the week after. We might even have a way to eliminate the need to use a crane to place the spa in our back yard… I’m somewhat torn on that one. On the one hand, saving a thousand bucks for the crane and operator fees would be very nice. On the other hand, being able to watch a crane lift a 600 kg spa over the roof of my house is definitely something I’ll miss

I received my second Macintosh a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d share some photos and thoughts regarding the new arrival.

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I turned in my beer bottles and decided to put the windfall towards a new deck. Step #1 is: destroy the old deck.

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My niece, Marnie, her husband Murray, and their six month old baby Grace came out to visit folks on the left coast a few weeks ago. I took a few photos…

Click the photo to see some more pictures. We had an enjoyable chat with Marnie and Murray, and Gracie was constantly smiling and waving her arms at us. I’m not really a baby person, but she’s pretty cute. And now I can feel *really* old, by adding the term “grand” in front of my other title, “uncle”.