Irene and I spent the last five days over on Vancouver Island in Victoria for the Tall Ships Festival. I had a good time, and would particularly recommend seeing the Tall Ships to someone who has a moderate to strong interest in the age of sail. So what did we see? Well, a lot of ships, of course 😉
Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…
My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.
But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…
My vacation started on Friday. Well, technically, the days off work start on Monday, but on Friday I realized I’d already worked 50 hours for the week by about noon, and I was feeling beat… so I set up my out-of-office email auto-responder agent, changed my answering machine message, and shut down my work laptop at around 2:00 PM. I’ve had some stress at work the past couple of weeks, mostly good stress, but tiring nonetheless.
I received my second Macintosh a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d share some photos and thoughts regarding the new arrival.
I turned in my beer bottles and decided to put the windfall towards a new deck. Step #1 is: destroy the old deck.
My niece, Marnie, her husband Murray, and their six month old baby Grace came out to visit folks on the left coast a few weeks ago. I took a few photos…
Okay, it is actually almost summer now, but I took these pictures a month ago or so. Usually there comes a time in spring when the exuberant plant life, the birds singing, and the occasional bit of sun finally make me realize that the winter is over. Sometime around that day each year it is my habit to take a few pictures of the flowers around my house.
Microsoft has been working on something they call “Surface” technology. Basically, it is a touch sensitive user interface, and it is usually demonstrated using a large, flat horizontal LCD panel… a table. I’ve had my doubts about the usefulness of this technology outside of a niche environment- but I’m ready to be proven wrong. That said, I find the following video pretty effectively expresses my doubts…