General

And…metamusing is back

It was a bit painful due to a bad decision on my part and a flaky dist-upgrade from Ubuntu, but if you’re reading this you’ve noticed Metamusing is back. The bad decision led to the extended downtime. We got Charter out to install cable on Friday last week while Susan and I were off from work and unpacking. I tried to bring the server back online that night, and when I brought it up it alerted me that there was a new version of Ubuntu out and asked if I wanted to upgrade. Without really thinking I said sure, and let it start its thing (a dist-upgrade can take quite a while), then moved on to other chores in the house. Some hours later I checked back in with the machine and the dist-ugrade had hard locked the machine, or possibly just killed the usb bus, but either way I could no longer interact with the machine, which was sitting there with an alert that had popped up part way through the upgrade warning me that some packages I was running were no longer supported. Tired already and frustrated, I cycled the power.

Bad choice, which I basically knew when I was making it. This rendered the machine unbootable. With so much else on my plate I turned my attention to other tasks and only returned to it last night. Thanks to a pointer from someone at work the repair was relatively painless. Recovery mode ftw ;-)

Site going down while I move

Sometime in the next day or three this site is going to go offline, and it will remain offline for as much as a week as Susan and I move into our new house, get unpacked, and most importantly, get internet service. I’ll post again when it comes back, and also note it on twitter/facebook etc.

Awesome birthday gift

Susan got me my first piece for my birthday

Close call in the parking lot

I always set my parking brake, something I am occasionally teased about. This weekend I got an almost painful reminder of why I do. It was snowing hard when I left work on Friday. I stopped at Atkins Farms for a few things on the way home, and forgot to set the parking brake. By the time I got back to the car it was completely shrouded in a light coating of snow. I could not see once I got in. I had Soolin with me and had picked up a small treat for her while in the store, and I started unwrapping it as I started the car. I turned to give it to her and while she was enjoying it I got a funny sensation and suddenly realized I was moving. I slammed on the brake, sending Soolin tumbling, and flicked on the rear windshield wiper. I was maybe half a car length from a small embankment that sits above Atkins, and the car had scooted most of the way through the parking lot, only 5-6 car lengths in total but my path crossed over 3 lanes of parking spaces and an area where there’s normally a lot of foot traffic. I was super lucky no one was walking through the lot when this happened, and that instincts kicked in and I slammed on the brakes before I went over the embankment. It’s only a couple of feet high but nothing good could have come of it. Three cheers for a little Friday luck!

Back after a week away

Susan and I spent most of last week in Washington, DC. For me this was mostly work – this year’s North American Drupalcon was in DC so I spent Wednesday-Friday in conference sessions from 9AM to 6:30 every night, then entertaining in the evenings. The conference was pretty good overall – I learned a lot and added a bunch of stuff to my todo list. Friday night I got together with a couple of old friends from college and had a blast catching up, hanging in a funky bar/restaurant that was Marvin Gaye themed and had a southern/belgian fusion menu (no typos there!). Saturday was my 42nd birthday and despite nursing a miserable cold Susan and I tromped all over the mall, visiting an exhibition of 15th century Dutch painting in the national gallery (cityscapes, really great stuff), an outdoor sculpture garden and skating rink, the National Botanical Garden, the Jefferson Memorial (which I had never been to), Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial Park, the Lincoln Memorial, and finally the Korean War Memorial. Sadly we ran out of gas at this point and never made it to the WWII Memorial which I had also hoped to see. We finished off with a poor choice for dinner by me. Susan doesn’t like chinese food so we never get to eat it, so for my birthday dinner I chose chinese. Sadly Washington DC has no good chinese food and the place we went to pretty much stunk. Despite this I had a great day. It was the first time I had been to DC since roughly ’93 and outside of the mall area it was all new to me. We walked pretty much everywhere and by and large I really liked the city.

I’ll also mention that we took Amtrak both ways. It was pricier than flying, we got stuck for 2 hours in a broken down train, and the bathrooms were disgusting, but I’d still choose to travel that way again in a heartbeat, it is so much more comfortable than flying.

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Susan out on the town in Northampton

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