The Infinite Unknown

One of the more fun things I did in Seattle back in 2014 was to participate in a StartupWeekend event with another guy from Amazon. I’d never heard of these events and he described it as being like a hackathon. So I was in and joined him on at the start of the event that Friday night at the Google campus in Kirkland. We quickly discovered that this wasn’t anything like a hackathon. We were expected to write a business and marketing plan, do a customer analysis etc. so what we brought to work on wasn’t the right choice. So.. with minimal prep I pitched an idea to a room of about 200 people and managed to convince two others to join our team. One was a web developer and the other a business development person from another big tech company.

I like sharing useful gadgets with people and having an inexpensive thermal camera around the house can be very useful at times.

I’ve been in the new house for about six months now and with the cold snap making it in the mid 30s outside I thought this is a good time to break out the Flir One thermal camera and see what I can find around the house.

I lived in Charlotte for a good long while… so here is a small list of my recommendations for businesses I’d come to know and trust. If you think I’ve forgotten to include you please let me know.

• If you need a real estate agent for personal or investment property talk to Brenny Thompson

• For help finding contractors I preferred Hocoa I always had good experiences from their suggestions.

• For lawn care around downtown I liked Kevin at magnolialandscape.com

I don’t often write about stocks or the economy.. it’s just too difficult to know anything with any certainty anymore. We’ve been kicking this can down the road far longer than I thought would be possible at this point but a quick look around the world and you are seeing the wheels start to come off. Here are a few scary charts that when combined with the news coming out of Europe and Japan spell trouble.

I spent 2 nights trying to get mysql replication over ssl to work.. and kept hitting this generic error message: connection error 2026. After much searching and trying different things I finally found the solution that worked for me. If you are hitting this error here’s a short list of things to check.

I learned an important tip that I thought I should share with others who are considering Octopress with publishing to S3/Cloudfront. If the S3 deployment line in your Rakefile includes the s3cmd option for “–cf-invalidate” you should be aware that this will drive up your costs quite a bit. (3 guesses how I know this) I had about a years worth of expected CF costs in my first month because I didn’t understand what that was doing.

I’ve run my own hosted server for many years now. Originally it was just to have my own mail server but later I decided to start the blog using Wordpress. It’s great to have the control and flexibility to do whatever you want with a server.. but there are definitely some downsides as well. Wordpress is great.. but there are constant security issues to worry about and people attacking your server trying to hack it with automated tools. Customizing it has also never exactly been easy.. and it’s a huge code base that I don’t really understand.

So this new version of the blog is far enough along that it was time to turn it lose.

After I’d been riding a motorcycle for a while.. and I’d gotten rid of the truck.. I decided that I needed another way to move the bike around.  I traded the truck for a TDI VW Golf which isn’t a giant in the realm of towing capacity but it is able to pull a 1000lb load which is plenty for what I needed.  So after doing a very thorough survey of what was available in light weight trailers I settled on the aptly named Trailer in a Bag.

Racks for computer or other 19″ gear don’t have to be expensive.. but they usually are. I had a heavy 2U UPS and a few half-depth servers that I wanted to keep together so I built this little rack over a couple nights. It’s made using 3 each 8′ 2x4s and 8′ 1x4s along with some wood glue, wood screws, and some 1/4″ bolts to attach the rack rails to the frame.

I’m living in a part of town that has no good option for broadband internet. That’s very annoying as in some parts of town you can get verizon fios.. and in most of the rest you can get Comcast which isn’t terrible. Where I am your big choice is a company called Broadstripe.. which is so bad even the employees blog about it. So with that I decided to try Clearwire.. the Wimax broadband provider.