Wow, not even 9:00 and I have already declared this the best day ever.  I better hurry up and post something before it all comes crashing down.  What do I base this glowing review on?  Well, I got to bed early and slept pretty well last night, so that’s always a good start.  Then, I managed to get out the door on time and caught the early bus.  The bus was remarkably uncrowded, and I didn’t get stuck next to talking-person, crazy-person or even stinky-person.  Needless to say, I was already fairly skipping down the sidewalk on my way to the office after that pleasant ride.  Already brimming with optimism for the day, I walked in the break room and BOTH coffee pots were totally full!  I kid you not, I have never, ever seen that before.  Ever.  Generally, the best case is there is enough in one to fill my cup, and more often than not one is all but empty and the other is covered with baked-on smelly crud because nobody can switch off the burner when it’s empty.  And THEN, if THAT wasn’t enough, guess what happened next??!!!  Well, nothing, that was it.  I try not to get too lofty with my expectations these days.  I’ll tell you what though, if stinky-person doesn’t sit next to me on the way back home, it is ON, I’m going out and partying somewhere.

I am not particularly inclined to recap that weekend.  I am tired, cold, hungry, and I probably need another cup of coffee.  Wah.

I will, however, hit the highlights I suppose.  That shouldn’t take long, as there weren’t many of them.  Friday I stopped by the Brooksider to say “hi” to everybody.  I hung out there for a bit, then Donette came down and got me and we went to Cantina Del Ray for some dinner.  We haven’t been there in a while for whatever reason.  Matter of fact, they had totally new menus since the last time we ate there, with a few new plates in the mix.  Need to get up there more often, it’s always good.

Saturday was sort of a “hunker-down” day I guess.  Too dang cold to do anything.  I watched all the basketball games and that was about it.  We made some fish stew for dinner, which came out rather nicely if I do say so myself.  Have to add that one to the regular rotation.  Easy, tasty and even healthy;  A rare combination.

Sunday the cabin fever started kicking in again, so Martin came down and rescued me.  Donette was at the movies with Susan and Kelly, so Martin and I went and hung out at 75th Street.  We stayed there a good part of the day, watching the football games and plotting next season’s BBQ strategies.  The girls came up after a while, and we headed down to the Brooksider for a bit.  Watched some more football, but it was pretty loud and crowded, so we headed back south and rounded out the evening with some dinner at Waldo Pizza.  MAN that is some good pizza.  All that running around effectively cured my cabin fever, at least until about noon today.

Given the fact that I’ve been snowed in at home the last several evenings, I really don’t have anything to post on here.  However, I’m on such a roll that I feel I should put in something, so I will delight everyone with an update on the status of my latest webserver iteration.  As of last night I finally moved it from “work in progress” status to “ready for production.”

As I’m sure everyone remembers, I recently migrated this site from my long-running NSLU2 onto a Synology DS111.  The trusty NSLU2 certainly served me well, especially given the price, but eventually it proved woefully underpowered.  As a matter of fact there was a dark period in my life where I actually ran everything on my Windows desktop, but we don’t talk about that.  Enter the DS111.  After much research I finally decided on that particular unit as a good compromise on hardware, price-point, and energy usage.  (Some small part of me still wishes I would have opted for the dual-bay DS211, but that nearly doubled the price.)  I was also naively convinced I could set up the entire thing to my liking right out of the box, with no customization required, which would save me a lot of time.  I’ve made that same idealistic statement many times before, and it’s never worked out once.  Within hours of unpacking it and turning it on I had already flashed it with Optware, instantly voiding the warranty but giving me many more “opportunities.”  For the first several months I worked with a mix of the stock features and the Optware packages, but by now it’s entirely running the Optware add-ons.  So, without further ado, I shall regale you with a fascinating synopsis of the finished product.

For a while I ran the stock setup;  Apache webserver with Synology’s flavor of PHP + MySQL.  Honestly this worked fine and I probably could have gotten away with it, but I found myself staring at the system utilization constantly and thinking “It could do better.”  So, my first step was to ditch Apache for Lighttpd, which is what I ran forever on the old NSLU2.  I quickly ran into problems getting it to work like I wanted though, so after another bout of research I settled on nginx.  This proved to be the answer to all life’s problems, with the minor issue of setting up a virtual host.  I only need that function occasionally for phpmyadmin,  so after a half-hearted attempt at wading through nginx’s mostly foreign-language support pages, I settled on using lighttpd for that, and just shutting it back down when I’m finished.  The next hurdle was the quirky Synology SQL package.  I got it all tuned up like I wanted performance-wise, only to find that the server would hang every time I shut it down.  (OK, I didn’t REALLY accidentally turn it off when we were on vacation, I made one final SQL change on the way out the door and it locked up.)  I puzzled over this for a few weeks, and finally ended up moving off their stuff onto Optware flavors of the same, which proved more challenging than I anticipated by quite some stretch.

The final step was some means of preserving all these fascinating changes and updates in case of a system failure.  After monkeying around with the built-in backup, and a few other wildly complicated third-party options, I finally enlisted the help of my fellow “tinkerer” Mike, who is much more skilled in the ways of the Linux Jedi than I.  As it turned out he already had a well-written package of scripts which, with some minor modifications, fit my needs just fabulously and with far less head-scratching than anything else I had tried.  I tested it all extensively last night and it worked just peachy.  So now you can all sleep well at night knowing this site is auto-magically backed up regularly, albeit not to an off-site location.  Speaking of which, I wonder if I could…  NO, NO, I AM DONE WITH IT.

See, I told you not to read this update.

The ol’ bus is starting to wear on me a bit, and it’s only mid-January.  Bad sign.  Getting home last night was a real adventure.  I showed up at the bus stop right on time, and noted on their fancy, supposedly GPS-driven sign that the bus was also right on schedule.  Excellent.  The sign changed to “arriving” as always.  And then it stayed that way for about five minutes.  Pretty soon it changed from “arriving” to “delayed,” and then the next bus showed up on the board as ten minutes out.  Huh, that was weird, did I see that right?  A quick conference among the other commuters confirmed that yes, our bus had fallen into some kind of abyss.  So we watched the next one count down, and then promise it was “arriving.”  Some time later it too went to “delayed.”  This pattern continued over and over, and the ever-growing crowd was having quite a laugh about our fair city and their “services.”  Over an hour later, the now very, very large crowd was morphing into more of an angry mob, and much of the humor had left the situation.  I wasn’t really dressed for standing around in a snowstorm, and the cold was getting quite uncomfortable.  (Yes dear, you can say “I told you so” if you like.)  I was considering taking refuge at the Flying Saucer or maybe the Phoenix, but although that might have been a good temporary solution it still wouldn’t get me home.  I noticed the northbound bus passing by regularly, so I finally bailed out and jumped on one of them, just to get warm if nothing else.  We wound through downtown and I got off at 11th & Grand, and queued up for the southbound again.  After standing there for quite a while, finally a Plaza-bound bus showed up.  Not really my route, but I wasn’t in a spot to complain.  My “theory” was that the buses were not making it up the big hill on 11th street, and were bypassing the stop I had been standing at on Wyandotte.  Well, this guy chugged right along with no problems at all, and we picked what remained of the crowd at the stop I was originally at.  So where the heck were all the other buses?  What happened to all the ones that had passed by going north?  (They turn around at the City Market and come back south.)  Who knows, it’s still a mystery.  I emailed them a pleasant inquiry, which I fully expect to be ignored.  Getting on the bus proved to be just the first step though;  Turned out traffic on Main was at a dead stand-still and there was no place to go anyway.  Hey, at least it was warm.  I made it as far as 42cnd Street, then I bailed out and Donette came and got me.  The trusty SUV got along just fine.

This morning started off much smoother, and my “regular” bus showed up right on time.  Unfortunately it only made it as far as the Plaza, where it broke down.  Back out into the cold to wait again.  Maybe it’s time to buy a Scooter Skirt and start driving myself to work.

Wow, we had quite the adventure yesterday.  We got home from work to find the cable TV was out!  (Hence the extended outage of this website yesterday.)  I called them and they had a recording that said it would be back on by 6:00.  When it still wasn’t on at 7:00 I called again and the recording had been updated to say 10:00.  At 10:30 it still wasn’t on, so I went to bed with no idea what was going on in the outside world.  Imagine, no TV, no Internet, no streaming movies…  It was like living in the wilderness.  Luckily I had video games and DVD’s to fall back on, or I might have been forced to go take refuge at the Brooksider, or maybe even the library.