#WritingFromIsolationWard
Author: NiteMayr
Before:
Kevin was born on the mossy hills of Scotland and lived for a while in West Lothian before the mores of pre-Thatcher and REALLY pre-Oasis Great Britain sent his family across the ocean to North America. They moved here and there and Kevin did the same when he was old enough. Now he lives in London with his family and a Dog.
Kevin Wardrop is an amateur writer, amateur photographer and professional pain in the ass. He has worked in the PC support business for most of his adult life and has been accustomed to simply answering technical questions as a matter of fiat, it was his career choice after all. Now he herds cats and puppies for a living as well as babysitting the web enterprises at the heart of western industry.
Two weeks in on the iPhone I’m very very very Impressed. I was able to link it to my Outlook account and synch it over the air via a flawlessly easy to configure WiFi account, I was able to use SSH from the device to manage my home servers without an issue and I can play music through the speaker when I just want noise where I am. It’s flawless save for the massive touchscreen and Camera.
The Camera sucks, it’s almost pointless. either improve it or remove it. It’s almost like they included a camera just so that competition could say “it has no camera” it’s no good in low light it is sensitive to shaky hands and requires the user to press the touchscreen to work, causing shake. Oh well. Maybe someone will release an app that will delay the shutter until the camera is still (I know, someone has already, but I don’t want to pay for it)
Installing apps is easy and painless, I prefer synching via iTunes, but have used the App store on the phone without issue.
The interface really shines when you get to use all of it’s features, like RJDJ which allows you to organically interface with sound, touch and motion to create sound scapes. It’s amazing.
I strongly recommend purchasing a nice cover for your phone like the one I have on mine, if only to protect the very vulnerable screen.
All in all, an excellet phone that is leaps and bounds over the Windows Mobile devices I have used in the past.
Growing up, it was my little sister who bled all the time. Her nose was like a Blood Pez Dispenser, dropping it’s wares all over the acres of the world at a moments notice with no warning or rhyme to why it was doing so. She wasn’t a nose picker (That was Me). I never got nose bleeds growing up, so whenever my nose would bleed it was an “event” for me. If only for the copious amounts of blood that would come from a relativley minor injury and in some cases from a mystery source (up my nose).
The first nosebleed I can clearly recall was given to me by one Raplph Grass, who punched me in the face during a shoving match at the beach. Dude was bigger than me, no joke and for the life of me he didn’t chase me off. I stood up to him and took my bloody nose like a small boy with a bloody nose who then went on to get serious sunstroke from being out in the summer sun for about 12 hours that day. So, Ralph Grass, thank-you for my first memorable nosebleed.
The next nosebleed I remember “for sure” was from Monique Duguay, who smacked me in the face with a snowball. It didn’t bleed much, but I remember to never again confess to anyone how much I admired her, as she was clearly a bitch. I don’t think that anymore, but for a while there, I was inconsolable on the matter.
After that it was a couple of years before anyone smacked me in the face hard enough to cause bleeding, in fact someone hit me SO HARD that I blacked out. He was twice my weight and goaded me into a fight, where he walloped me in the face and made me lose my mind. Oh well, I changed buses after that. I really forget his name, his surname was “White” he was a teacher’s kid and we all called him Winston. He was a big fat bully, simple as that.
Gillian bromfield punched me in the nose around the same time, when a cancer survivor is smacking you in the nose, you’re being an asshole. Right?
I think I’ve had a couple mystery bleeds along the way since then, but nothing to write home about (or even a blog post about). This last one over the weekend was a strange one because it bled like crazy for ages. I ended up with a tissue up my nose for about 30 minutes catching the dregs of it. It wasn’t volume, you understand, just persistence.
How about you? Any memorable Nosebleeds?
Janice got up from her chair sometime later and wandered back out to the veranda and looked down into the sooty streets. Screams had become moans and the sounds of fighting below had become the thudding of the crowds on random cars. Janice wasn’t paying attention to that anymore, she was looking up at the sky and seeing the stars. She couldn’t see a single constellation she recognized and as she strained to do so she didn’t notice that she wasn’t alone on the the deck.
“It’s not the sky”
New Desk, originally uploaded by Kevin Wardrop.
I finally have my own desk in the office, not that I really needed one. I’ve been sharing desks with people who were not in the office when I worked at night, this was fine for me. However, when I came into the office last night I found a newly constructed cube with a nice L shaped desk. Sweet! Now I have to deck it out and make it “home”
Incidentally, I have the only cube in the office, the rest of the IT area is “Open Concept” so I feel like I’ve gotten something special here.
You can check out more of my photographs at: Flickr
I’m no rock historian, I know about as much about the Stooges as the next guy, fronted by Wild Jim (Iggy Pop) and infamously awesome, The Stooges backed up one of (if not the most) explosive personalities to come out of Michigan (Fuck the Nuge) . I was not a fan of the Stooges in my youth, preferring the Mall-Ternative sounds of the Housemartins or The Sex Pistols to the “real shit” from American Artists. However, I was turned on to them by my (noticeably un-hip) room mate who made a joke about how I was hopelessly involved with a girl (You wanna be her Dog). He giggled himself stupid over how clever he was and when I didn’t get it he explained the whole Stooges connection. I liked Iggy Pop, but not as much as I did after that; because I really did want to be her Dog.
So, yeah. Dead at 60. Mr. Asheton leaves behind a catalogue of music to inspire generations of musicians and make kids want to bash themselves bloody in the name of Rock and Roll.
Friday:
Some Facebook groups that you may find helpful:
- journalspace
- js refugees (invitation only)
Friday:
From Andrew’s Blog: How to recover most or all of your journalspace posts/images using Google cache
Friday:
Hi there, Slashdotters. My blog has some more information which you may find interesting.
Tuesday:
Journalspace is no more.
DriveSavers called today to inform me that the data was unrecoverable.
Here is what happened: the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it’s automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism.
The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive has a copy of the data on the other drive, the data is intact. The administrator simply replaces the drive that’s gone bad, and the server is back to operating with two redundant drives.
But that’s not what happened here. There was no hardware failure. Both drives are operating fine; DriveSavers had no problem in making images of the drives. The data was simply gone. Overwritten.
The data server had only one purpose: maintaining the journalspace database. There were no other web sites or processes running on the server, and it would be impossible for a software bug in journalspace to overwrite the drives, sector by sector.
The list of potential causes for this disaster is a short one. It includes a catastrophic failure by the operating system (OS X Server, in case you’re interested), or a deliberate effort. A disgruntled member of the Lagomorphics team sabotaged some key servers several months ago after he was caught stealing from the company; as awful as the thought is, we can’t rule out the possibility of additional sabotage.
But, clearly, we failed to take the steps to prevent this from happening. And for that we are very sorry.
So, after nearly six years, journalspace is no more.
If you haven’t yet, visit Dorrie’s Fun Forum; it’s operated by a long-time journalspace member. If you’re continuing your blog elsewhere, you can post the URL there so people can keep up with you.
We’re considering releasing the journalspace source code to the open source community. We may also sell the journalspace domain and trademarks. Follow us on twitter at twitter.com/jsupgrades for news.
As a somewhat newly-minted overnight admin for a firm that deals almost exclusivley in important information, this story is a reminder about how important it is to keep up to date backups (something that I don’t do on my personal machines as much as I should)
I don’t imagine for a second that my customers would be happy to find out that I was not keeping a non-volatile backup of my important data like these people were, but I don’t know if their customers were even paying for the service, so this may be a non-issue in terms of cash. I didn’t look any deeper to find out.
As for my personal sites, I keep backups off site and on other mediums, but not as often as one might want or expect. In Fact, I’m doing one now just in case.
Taking a Quick Swipe at an Easy Target
Published by NiteMayr on January 5, 2009I lived in the States for a while, Oregon to be precise. State control of the Education Budget would be a disaster there; as the people would underfund the school system to death, then blame the schools for failing to educate their kids. I overheard dozens of Walmart Butter Trolls talking about vetoing school budget increases (needed to offset cuts imposed by NCLB) because the schools were doing a poor job of educating their kids. Of course! The answer is obvious, force the schools to cut budgets for education, that’ll make them teach HARDER to survive!
I wonder if the education System in Oregon has been producing these dunderheads forever or only since the electorate got to vote on budgets?
People will vote down any tax “increase” simple as that.
Good Old Ron Paul was like Tax Panecea for some folks, stupid folks.