A leatherback turtle swam nearly 13,000 miles in 647 days, from India to Oregon. A tasty jellyfish feast awaited. I can not get turtles out of my head because of a song in a Baby Einstein DVD that Owen likes. …I said, “Hey, Little Turtle, would you like to take a swim with me?” Oof.
Oregon Primary
April 29, 2008 is the last day to register if you wish to vote in the Oregon presidential primary, which is May 20th.
The Atlantic Monthly
Spotted this on kottke.org:
Beginning today, TheAtlantic.com is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors.
Giggity.
Stunning, Beautiful
Mary Robinette Kowal has created one of the most beautiful transformations of a generic Intel/Windows laptop I have ever seen.
Enough Is Enough
So the circuit went down again to a coordinated DOS attack (according to my ISP), and before it had recovered, several city blocks lost their copper due to a train hitting a 300 pair telephone cable, one of those pairs was home to my circuit. After the phone company replaced the cable (which was somewhat interesting to watch for a spell, believe it or not), the DDOS was still going on, so I moved my server to a hosted provider. Unfortunately, some incoming email was definitely lost. More unfortunately, I’ve got seven years of mail archives that I may or may not want to migrate to my new server. Probably not. Anyway, if you sent me an email between Friday and Sunday, it may have been lost for good.
For fun, I wrote a little script to throw random images onto the left sidebar.
YASO
Yet Another Service Outage. QWest had to switch copper to get the circuit back up, but I am now on another (much slower) line temporarily until I migrate the site to a better pipe. The problem is migrating seven years of mail in Cyrus imap format to the target server.
Lots of new pictures coming. I swear.
Long Time No Time
I haven’t had much time to spend working on pictures as of late, let alone post blog entries, and have several hundred images to process and load. I have been working heavily with WordPress for the last few months on a couple of sites I administer and will be switching here too, as soon as I figure out how to integrate my picture pages. Gallery2 is an interesting project but I don’t think it works for me.
Pentax K10D Repair
My Pentax K10D has exceeded my expectations since my original purchase of the body last November. Unfortunately, my unit developed the problem that when the built-in flash is deployed, the unit fails to release the shutter; I do not know if the capacitor is charging or not; it does function with an external flash attached, or when shooting without flash. I sent the unit to Pentax repair, which is located in Colorado from what I understand. In the mean time, I will shoot with my Pentax DL, which is a fine body in its own right.
Brokeback Bike
I broke my bike’s frame riding to work earlier this week. Crossing some rough tracks by the Darigold plant, the center post broke the lug just above the crank. I rode for a few more days, pondering my options and thinking I may have to replace my beloved Nishiki. Instead, I got advice from a bike co-op to visit Acme Welding at SE 7th and Salmon Street.
Ron from Acme told me what parts to strip. I followed his instructions and turned the frame over to him Thursday morning. He clamped the frame back to its original position, set a bead around the broken lug, and welded a triangular gusset to the lower and center bars to reinforce the frame. It was ready to pick up today at noon; quick turn, $70. I bought a new chain, new derailleur cables, and new brake pads (chain and cables were needed; the pads were just since I was in there anyway) from 7 Corners (Corey is awesome) and put everything back together today.
The bike rides better than before I broke it. Happy endings.