argus

The company’s name is Steorn — website here: www.steorn.net. From their site,

Steorn is a word translating as ‘to guide, direct and manage’.

In maybe as little as a few months time, they will become

1. not-very-widely known as hoaxers;
2. not-very-widely known as unfortunate engineers (and equally-unfortunate or just astonishingly poor selectors of peers to review their shizzle);

or

3. known all over the world, on the front page of everything everywhere, as the little company that changed the course of human history.

Nichole and I carved a pumpkin Sunday night. We used a pattern she found online and printed out, and brought to bear an authoritatively-priced ($1.29) “Pumpkin Carving Kit” obtained at our local Publix. Coming off of last year’s first place at Allen U’s “Pimp My Pumpkin” party, we think-felt-knew that no pumpkin would be able to withstand our combined onslaught of steak knives and plastic doohickeys.

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…or, “I’m such a big nerd that I’m writing a tribute to my startup’s website hosting company.” Even though we pay them for services. Sheesh :)

I’m now at Rimu (http://rimuhosting.com) and they are nothing short of outstanding. It’s more expensive ($20/mo, billable 1 month at a time if you prefer) but they give multiple site discounts and their customer support is THE BEST in the business. All that and you get a VPS thats like you’re own *nix box. Only thing you can’t do: recompile the kernel. If you can afford the higher price and the logistics of moving your site, don’t waste one more minute of your life using any hosting service other than Rimu.

Oh — and you get a choice of four available *nix kernels when you purchase a new VPS. I went with the latest Ubuntu, so installation/configuration went something (approximately) like this:

> apt-get update > apt-get install mysql > apt-get install apache2 > apt-get install python > apt-get install mysql-python

I manually checked out the latest Django subversion trunk and configured it, as I wanted to be able to keep up with the bleeding edge Django state (as it’s far superior than their released packages).

And no, I’m not a Rimu employee or something — just someone who has fought with craptacular (or at least “less-than-90%-satisfying”) hosting services for years.

Plugin hybrids + new nuclear power plants = a new economic chapter for America

Am I just naive in thinking that this seems like such an obvious solution to our current state of affairs? I just posted the following comment on a randomly-stumbled-upon article:

Immediate problem(s): - dependence on oil causes dependency on countries that we would -ahem- prefer to not be dependent on - mass rollover to an alternative fuel source involves enough risk and infrastructure expenditures that those entities who could best make it happen (large car companies, oil companies) are still financially better off maintaining the status quo - the “we’re destroying the planet” meme - reference earlier comments about the moonbats sleeping better, etc.

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..no, no pictures this time. I have some on the camera but they haven’t made the migration to their gallery roost just yet. Patience, Daniel-san. I’m afraid that this is just a random post; it’s been a while since I had both the time and the inclination.

Audrey smiled her first real, actual, verifiable smile this week! Of course it happened while I wasn’t here (and not just at work: out-of-town at work), but my awesome Better Half got a picture of one of them. Since then she’s produced several more, and this morning was the first time I got to be the recipient of a few. Having your first child isn’t “a” bridge-crossing — it’s one bridge-crossing after another, as you realize over and over again that there seems to be no limit as to how in-love with this strange, cute little person you can be. (more…)