Geek Habitat

South Texas is not known for its moist summers, although with the weird weather patterns we’re seeing across the globe these days, I’ve lost track of what “normal” is.

About a week ago, the weather pundits began warning of severe flooding rains. Of course, it took five days longer than they predicted to occur, but sure enough yesterday morning we awoke to the “river” running in the greenbelt behind our house. No danger, and kind of a perk really — for a day or so, our backyard deck overlooks lush riverfront property, rather than an overgrown greenbelt!

However, we’re going on day two of the same cycle, and judging by the current San Antonio weather radar (courtesy of Wunderground.com), it’s going to be a busy day for the local high water rescue First Responders!

After mailing a print order this morning, I’ve been taking the daylight hours OFF in preparation for a marathon overnight photo editing session. It works better that way, sometimes, due to the glare in our computer room and my general predisposition to be more productive in the wee hours of night as opposed to traditional work hours. So, I’ve been using my free time as any good computer geek does — organizing my music collection in iTunes and re-ripping favorite CDs to a higher bit rate.

Miscellaneous Update:
Dad’s back home from Europe, my brother is moving into his first apartment in a couple weeks (WOOT!) and Justin and I are slowly but surely losing weight and eating healthier. Now, if I could just make peace with the rowing machine and get back to doing that regularly, in addition to our 2.5 mile walks a couple times each week!

Yesterday, I took our new 100mm macro lens out to photograph wildflowers on the greenbelt behind my parents’ neighborhood. We used the lens briefly at the San Antonio Zoo a couple weeks ago, but with the diversity of wildlife (including many wild bird species that are perfect photographic subjects), we spent most of the time shooting with our zoom lenses.

I have a lot to learn, but the trip was worthwhile. I had forgotten about the diversity of naturally occurring wildflowers I grew up with literally in my backyard — flowers I still have yet to see while hiking and camping at various Texas State Parks. There were even still some yuccas in full bloom, which seemed a little late for our area.

Anyway, here’s one of the few “keepers” from my macro introduction excursion. Next time, I’ll remember to bring Justin’s tripod, even though I hate lugging the monster around and find it stifles my spontaneity a bit. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered a tripod is basically a must for macro photography.

I cloned out all the perspiration I dripped on to the camera lens while shooting in the oppressive heat and humidity. (I’m kidding… about the cloning out part, anyway. It was damn uncomfortable out and reminded me why I haven’t been camping in months!)

One of our primary web servers has been sputtering and fizzling all morning. It’s not a good day when your website uptime stats report looks like this. Ah, the Life & Times of a Web Geek …

I’m not knocking our web host, here. We’ve been with them since ’97 and they are very rarely down at all, and usually no more than a matter of seconds when they are. In this rare instance, the server lumbers along for an hour or so and then takes a deep dive into oblivion until they restart it. An hour or more later, the process repeats. It doesn’t help that it’s taking email and FTP services out each time, as well. Now we know why Justin & I have two separate server hosting accounts — as bad as having several sites offline is, it’d be horrific to have them ALL offline.

True to form, in the span of time it took me to screencap the status screen and blog this, the server’s back up. So I’m back to developing before the next nosedive potentially hits…

Just received another email from our tech and if they can’t isolate the issue, they’re going to do a complete chassis swap of the server this evening. We’ll see what happens…

Google’s Why you should work here page is fun reading, even if it does feel like a throwback to the dotcom (pre-bubble burst) era. However, I think I can live without an on-site dentist… yikes!

“Paging Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore, after your root canal, please report to Meeting Room Alpha for a briefing.”

I also want to know if you can get your free massage during your free lunch? I’m all about maximizing productivity, you know? Also, they don’t mention free Starbucks. I imagine footing the Starbucks bill would put any company out of business!

If I worked for Google, I’d “settle” for paying for my lunches if it guaranteed me a front-page ranking for all my websites! Sure, it’s a selfish wish, but oh so much more valuable!

You can forget the Concorde, I want a passenger ticket when civilian trips to space are available. With the successful launch of the world’s first private spacecraft, I’m ready to hop a flight. (I’m in denial about how much such flights will likely cost. A gal’s gotta dream big, you know!) Check out the awesome in-flight video!

More news related to SpaceShipOne is available on Google News.

I do have a hypothetical question, though. The inventors of this civilian spacecraft named it SpaceShipOne. It’s feasible to think that someday the President of the United States might do at least some of his long-distance travel by hopping into space briefly — well out of surface-to-air missle and enemy aircraft range. I wonder how long, then, we have until there’s a U.S. government owned and maintained “SpaceShip One” (identical in name, if not in design) just as we have Air Force One, Marine One and so forth? Something to ponder…

Hats off to Burt Rutan and Paul Allen (Microsoft’s co-founder, a billionaire) and their company, Scaled Composites for their journey into the history books. With the Space Shuttle grounded by February’s catastrophic re-entry breakup, it’s wonderful to see CNN and the public at least looking skyward with excitement and anticipation again!

Yesterday evening, we welcomed the return of my dad from a four-month-long stint in the United Kingdom (U.K.) It’s wonderful to have Dad back home, and doubly nice to have him back in time to celebrate Father’s Day! (Perhaps that makes up a bit for his having to spend most of Valentine’s Day ’04 on airliners to began this adventure?)

It’s an awesome and opportunity-filled world we live in, but there’s one thing that will never change — Home is always the best place to be! And home isn’t quite the same when someone who’s supposed to be there, isn’t, for whatever reason — travel, military service, illness, etc. So, again, WELCOME HOME, DAD — Happy Father’s Day!

Also, Mom deserves kudos for keeping up her spirits, the household chores, AND a full-time job while Dad was away for four months. That’s challenging for anyone who’s grown accustomed to sharing life and the household chore workload with a partner, but it’s even more challenging when, like my mom, you’ve been living and working with advanced Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) since your early-to-mid thirties. I love you, Mom!