Slower, cheaper, less useful…
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was an excellent, if long, read. I preferred it to Barchester Towers, though that is also an excellent book. Aside from the a bit of the language the book could be about events of the last few years. We haven’t really changed all that much it would appear.
I’d definitely recommend it, but suggest trying a shorter Trollope first.
I returned from Hilo on Monday evening after a lovely five night stay. No it wasn’t completely a vacation, but I was able to relax a bit and do some riding. Here’s a shot of my bike and Mauna Kea in the background. The camera makes the volcano pretty small but it dominates the landscape if you are actually there…
Of course riding wasn’t the only thing I did. My mom has been using dial-up internet for years. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and decided that for Christmas I’d upgrade her to something better.
She was okay with the idea when I brought it up but she absolutely didn’t want it on a bill she paid which meant that adding DSL to her phone line or adding the service to her basic cable was out.
The Big Island can be a bit spotty when it comes to broadband. Spotty is actually erring on the generous side. I was in Puna doing some volunteer business over the weekend and could barely get my Sprint HTC EVO to pick up a signal, phone or broadband, at all. In fact it works almost every place at my mom’s but the laundry room where it doesn’t work at all.
Still Mobi PCS has their Hele service and their service map shows that it should work. Okay, it was a pretty good price, $30 a month or so, about what you’d expect. I decided to go for it.
I signed up for the two year plan so I could get the equipment subsidized. I chose their MiFi setup as it seemed to be the most flexible.
I took it all home (to mom’s) with some trepidation but felt somewhat comfortable because of the seven day return policy. I kept my fingers crossed.
Against all my expectations it worked quite well from the get go…almost. I should mention that because she hadn’t really updated her software over a dial-up line I spent quite a bit of time updating virus definitions as well as all those XP updates. Then her AOL wouldn’t work…sigh. I’m not an AOL user myself, but it seems to work for her so I wanted to be sure she had access. Updating to the newest version took care of it and….
Voila! At the end up of all the installation and updating I had enough time print my boarding pass and hele to the airport.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving, I’ll find out from mom just how well it works.
Aloha!
I biked out to Hawaii Kai this past Saturday to take in the “Interisland Down & Derby” women’s roller derby match. I’d missed a match earlier this year so I wanted to be sure to catch this one. It sounded like a lot of fun and, as an added bonus I was able to put in a nice thirty mile ride. Here’s a shot of the derby in action…
I had a great time, as did both the participants and the crowd. This event was sponsored in part by GiRL FeST 2010 which aims to stop violence against women through education and art, and in this case violence by and for women.
The derby itself is run by Pacific Roller Derby. You should really check these folks out. I’m hooked and I’ll bet you will be too!
The next event is the “Battle for the North Pole”…
It’s at the Hideaway Club at Barbers Point so you’ll have to RSVP to get in…here’s the blurb (just click the pic above)…
Come and witness jingle hell as the ladies of Pacific Roller Derby meet once again in the famed ‘cage’ at the Hideaway Club! Watch with holiday awe as the grumpy grinches and merry elves fight on the flat-track for their respective right to be naughty or nice.
The scrimmage starts promptly at 4pm and will also feature a BBQ, bake sale, and Pacific merchandise for purchase. You are encouraged to bring an unwrapped toy to donate to Toys for Tots. Live music follows after the festivities. All funds raised will help Pacific’s All-Star Travel Team represent Hawaii’s finest derby at bouts across the mainland for the 2011 season. Remember to text “like PacificRollerDerby” to 32665 to become our fan on facebook!
I’m not sure I can make it but I’m certainly going to try!
Aloha
Here’s a topo map of Honolulu from Punchbowl to Diamond Head using data generated by the USGS National Map Seamless Server (available at http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm). I’m playing with the R language using the book R in a Nutshell which I just purchased as an O’Reilly deal of the day.
Both the language the book are pretty cool.
Back to business….
I spent the weekend visiting Hilo with a side trip to Kona and had a great time. My folks live there and it’s always great to see them. On this visit I had the opportunity to take their photo for their annual holiday greeting cards. I’ve only managed one really creative shot and that was a few years ago, but this year’s isn’t too bad…they look good even if the photo doesn’t do them justice:
I really love my Acorn Medium bag. I purchased it earlier this year for my Quickbeam and it’s been on it ever since holding tools for the most part, but also a variety of other small items as the need arises:
Because it’s made so darn well I’ve been looking for an excuse to get something else from Acorn. Today I got my chance. My new old Raleigh on the Big Island needs more than the small saddlebag I’ve currently got. I’m not planning on shopping with the bike as I do with my QB, so it really only needs to be able to carry a few things as I make my way around Hilo. Since I don’t have a front rack (yet), I can’t really use the Acorn Boxy Rando Bag which I’d love to have. At $170 it’s a bit out of the range of what I’m willing to spend for something I can’t use though. You can see my Raleigh is just crying out for a new bag though…
Hence my purchase of the Acorn Handlebar Bag. It seems like a perfect match for the Raleigh and hopefully it’ll arrive in time to use when I go to Hilo soon. If not I’m headed back that way in November as well so it’ll see some use then.
So now I wait….
Aloha!
While it’s true I do work in tech and am responsible for a several websites besides this one I’m not really as technically savvy as I like to pretend. That’s why when a cool tool comes along, one that makes life easier, I’m generally quite glad.
Recently I came across Turnkey Linux which is more or less a set of distributions, each targeted to a specific use. Based on Ubuntu you can get turnkey setups that are targeted for development, for blogging, for hosting files, you get the idea. Essentially it’s everything you need and a bit more. You can install onto your own hardware, a virtual machine, or…and this is the cool part…into a cloud.
That all sounded fine but that’s not really the cool part. Because I’d signed up I discovered I was asked to be part of the Turnkey HUB beta. This really takes things to the next step.
Basically it’s a way of moving one of these distributions around, backup and migration made simple.
I already use Amazon s3 for backing up the production sites I work on (two non-profit sites). It’s easy to use and quite cheap. I think it’s been costing me about $0.50 a month each for both sites I caretake. I’m using a ruby based cronjob to tar each site and db. It works well but does require a bit of tinkering. This HUB system does away with the tinkering…well that’s not quite true…you can tinker if you like but you can also just let it do it’s thing.
As a test tonight I tried setting up a the Turnkey LAMP distro in a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook. It was quite easy and I discovered that it runs a shell over the browser. Sweet. I can tinker on break from work…or at least I hope I can. I’ll find out tomorrow.
Next I set up a user account on that system and put up a test page. So far so good.
I backed up the system to s3 (the default) and it was smooth.
Now, this is the kicker, I set up another bare system on Amazon EC2 as a first step. Next I restored the system I backed up from my MacBook to the EC2 system and sure enough, there was my modified system running on EC2. Sweet.
Of course EC2 costs a bit of change, $0.08 an hour. That’s not much but it is more than I’d pay for my webhosting system so I don’t plan on running a site off of EC2. But I am going to use it as a movable development system. By having the same turnkey system on a variety of machines and using the s3 backup to maintain the changes I should be able to play around just about anywhere…even when I don’t have my own computer with me. Sweet.
Aloha!
I just received two more images taken by Jeff of The Flat Tire blog. Unlike the one from my last post I’m not cropped off in these. You can see me changing flipping my wheel to change my gear ratio. Sadly it’s not my best side, though it my be my biggest.
As said on The Flat Tire, the hill doesn’t look like a lot in the image until you look at the bricks in the wall and see how fast they rise.
Aloha!
Well I guess it was really MY half century, others did the whole ride…I had to get to a meeting in the afternoon and, because I’m slow, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish the whole hundred. On the plus side I felt sure, after fifty miles, that I could go the full distance. It was just a matter of time.
Having said that, I was ahead of the deadlines set for each station along the way, maybe not much, but enough. To be honest, the fact that I was ahead of the cut-off times was a bit of a surprise. I’d pulled a muscle in my neck or shoulder and I’ve been in quite a bit of pain for the last few days. Oddly there is a position on my bike that doesn’t hurt, but it’s a bit of trouble to hold when I’m in traffic or need to look around.
Still after the first couple of miles the pain disappeared and really never came back till I got on the bus to go home. Sweet.
I didn’t take any pictures, but it seems one found me. Here I am at the bottom of ‘heart-break hill’ flipping my rear wheel to change the gear ratio. You can only tell it’s me if you know how I dress and have seen the front wheel of my Quickbeam.
Thanks to “The Flat Tire” blog, here I am:
That’s me on the right side, in yellow, working on my wheel.
Aloha!
Tis that time of year again, the Honolulu Century Ride will be held this coming Sunday and yes, I’m planning on riding. I’m not sure I’ll be riding the entire hundred miles, I’ve got some issues…
The biggest obstacle, of course, is naysaying. I suspect I could ride the distance, even on my single speed Quickbeam (well…multi-speed but no derailleurs) if I had a mind. So do I have a mind…stay tuned and find out.
Aloha!