Mokka mit Schlag

I’ve decided the time has come to move several sites out of my spare bedroom and off this box and onto a shared host somewhere. I probably should have done this years ago, but there’s something nice about having a server you can personally reboot or stick a CD into when necessary. I need to be able to serve three sites:

• xom.nu (static HTML)
• The Cafes (WordPress)
• www.elharo.com (static+WordPress+custom PHP)

These sites are not mission critical, but I would like them to stay up. Reliable backups that I can download periodically are a must. I would like them to respond much faster than they do currently. (Xom.nu is pretty fast, but the two blogs can be dog slow at times.)

Traffic is not too heavy, though I don’t track hard numbers. I would like to be able to quickly ramp up to withstand a Digg effect if necessary.

These sites can all live on the same IP address. (They do now.)

I’d like the flexibility to install my own Apache modules and custom PHP extensions and modify the various config files such as httpd.conf and php.ini. Ideally I’d like to be install other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or eXist if I feel like playing with them. That is, root access to the box would be very helpful, even if it’s virtualized. However I can probably live without that if it raises the price too high. Alternately, I could perhaps live with 24/7 phone support from a reliable sys admin who can make changes like that for me. However the ability to install and manage my own WordPress extensions and modified code is a must.

Any suggestions? So far here’s who I’ve looked at:
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The Golden Compass was sold out at our local movie theater last night, which proved fortuitous since it meant we saw Juno instead. Wonderful movie! By all means, go see it. The dialog was extremely clever, even verging on Whedonesque. The basic story is about 16-year old Juno getting pregnant (after what seemed like her first time, though I don’t think that was definitively established) and then giving the baby up for adoption. I do wonder a little about a girl as intelligent and strong-willed as Juno not figuring out how to use reliable birth control, but I guess that was necessary to get the plot moving.

Of course, the movie had the obligatory, girl-goes-to-abortion-clinic-but-decides-not-to-go-through-with-it-at-the-last-minute scene. Otherwise it mostly avoided clichés. At least it didn’t go with the usual television cop-out of Juno magically discovering she wasn’t pregnant after all.

Still, just once I’d like to see a movie about a teenage girl who gets knocked up, has an abortion, and lives happily ever after, just like thousands of real teenagers do every year. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a spare afternoon to kill in Silicon Valley today so I headed over to one of my favorite birding destinations in the country, Shoreline Park and Lake in Mountain View. As usual I was not disappointed. On a lazy afternoon in December, without even a scope, I managed 49 species including a life bird!

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American Kestrel, Falco sparverius
Brooklyn, NY
2007-12-15

We found this cute little fellow at the Pennsylvania Ave. Landfill on the Kings County Christmas Bird Count today. I hope to post a fuller report soon. Other raptors included Red-tailed Hawk and Short-eared Owl.

After a few years of relative peace, the phone spammers seem to have discovered my home number again. I’ve gotten two calls in the last fifteen minutes, one from Mark Marshall at Ambit Energy (though I’m certain he lied about his name) and one from Daniel of the Police Conference of New York (one of those scummy organizations that tries to sell you stickers to put in your car with the implicit promise that this will keep you from getting tickets). There have been quite a few others in the last few weeks too.

I suspect some of these are jumping the gun on the expiry of the federal Do-Not-Call list. The FTC claims:

Your registration will not expire. The Federal Trade Commission will not drop any telephone numbers from the National Do Not Call Registry based on a five-year expiration period pending final Congressional or agency action on whether to make registration permanent. Read more about it at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2007/10/dnctestimony.shtm.

I think it’s time to start filing some complaints. In fact, I think the next time this happens I’m going to hold the caller on the phone while I fill out the complaint form.

Today on Buy Nothing Day we remind ourselves that:

• It’s far more comfortable to sleep in your own bed than camped out in a big box parking lot.
• Cashiers deserve a holiday too.
• Mall food causes heart disease.
• You may save $100 on a big TV if you buy it today, but you will save $1000 if you don’t buy it at all.
• Wal-mart is not our family.
• Ronald McDonald is not a real person.
• Going to the mall is not a patriotic duty.
• Credit card debt is not a sign of God’s favor.
• The Grinch can’t steal Christmas if you don’t buy it in the first place.