Shooter, Scientist
Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category.
After using a generic blog theme for some time, I’m looking at using a custom theme (nearly all canned themes don’t seem to work).
Unfortunately, my graphical skills are slim-to-none.
Anyone out there have any graphical skills? I’m a bit tight on money and so can’t pay with cash, but eternal glory could be yours1!
Sorry for the recent downtime.
My host says the explanation for “Saturday morning’s downtime was caused by the hardware failure of a not-as-redundant-as-claimed power supply. Monday morning’s downtime was caused by a software error triggered by the rebuild process that occurred after the system came back online. On Saturday morning, we fixed the hardware problem, and now we are addressing the software problem.”
Things are stable now, and they’ll be moving the disk cluster from the existing hardware onto new hardware in the near future, hopefully increasing reliability.
Whee.
This blog is on track to hit 10,000 spam comments stopped since it’s inception in July 2008.
The total number of spams that have passed the battery of filters? Zero. When will they learn to stop trying?
Total number of CAPTCHA’s and other things that annoy legitimate commenters? About three, over a year ago, but were quickly retracted due to being poorly received.
I’d also like to apologize for some technical difficulties that resulted in the website being unreadable (though the feeds evidently kept working) for at least a few days. It’s been corrected.
Many thanks to Carl for his donation to the New Shooter Ammo Fund. With his generous donation, 1,500 rounds of CCI Blazer .22LR ammo was purchased.
And yes, I still need to do the write-up from the New Zealander new shooter event, but things have been hectic. Hold your horses…
Still here. Still alive. Really busy with the end of the semester and grad school apps.
The USS Constitution is the nation’s oldest commissioned warship that’s still afloat.
While admittedly a bit of a tourist magnet, the ship is soaked in history (and whatever else happens to be floating around).
One of those bits of history is that the ship fires a cannon at 8am and at sunset.
Now, some of the nearby neighbors are complaining, and want to either have the firing stopped or the charges reduced. While I can see their point1, the ship has been there for longer than they have, and while they can ask that the ship accommodate their wishes (free speech and all), they have no real standing; the ship was there first.
As a commenter on Fark said, “Perhaps they should stop firing blanks.”
Sorry folks, writing’s been light recently. Swamped with homework, graduate school applications, and tests.
Stay tuned.
Update: Did pretty well on the general. Next up, the physics exam.
Sorry for being so quiet as of late.
Class has started back up and, in addition to having a rather busy workload, money’s short so I haven’t been shooting that much.
When it comes to the blogosphere, I’m more in “receive” mode than “send” as of late. My apologies.
My webhost has informed me of a security issue with their systems. Evidently a member was able to gain sufficient privileges to change their account balance1, which is obviously bad. Fortunately, they have logs that detail the intrusion, understand how it occurred, and are working on a fix.
They report that the security problem appears to be limited to their administrative systems, not customer sites, but that they may need to do rolling reboots over the next day or so to push out the fix. Any downtime for the next day or two is likely related to that.
This reminds me (and should serve as a reminder to you) that one should keep regular, off-site backups that can be restored to a different host if the need arises. In addition to this blog, I also maintain several other sites with this one host, so extended downtime (which I’ve fortunately never experienced — the host is routinely excellent) would be problematic.
Whee.
