Eric M.’s Blog

So this past weekend, Sara and I went up to her parents cottage. They have a small place a little ways from Houghton Lake in northern Lower Michigan. Her parents had been there all week for a vacation. They also have a boat that they take out on Higgins Lake. Saturday they took the boat out and launched it, and Sara and I met them at the lake, but I looked at a radar map on my phone, and there was a very large storm system coming, so we decided to pull the boat – good thing too, it ended up raining for 3 or 4 hours.

Next day was beautiful, so we all headed out and just tooled around the lake and lounged around for a few hours.

I took my camera (sealed in giant zip lock bags for the wade out to the boat), and here are some of the pictures.

I’ve embedded the jQuery Lightbox in my blog, so now when you click a image it will popup, and you can navigate between them with your mouse or arrow keys. That shouldn’t work if you are in an RSS reader, so you need to actually view the post (Chris…).

This would probably be failed under ‘Woops’ from NASA.

This was a test of the new parachute system for the upcoming shuttle replacement, Orion. The chute that was supposed to slow and orient the craft for the test failed, so the actual test chutes could not deploy correctly. So basically this was not a failure of the thing being tested, but the devices used to setup the test. But still, either way:

SPLAT!

Full article here.

Here is a time lapse of some demo work we did today.

Sigh. So the hard drive in my laptop died last night.

I’ve tried my normal diagnostic work, but it seems to be really hosed. If I hook it to a computer (SATA), it doesn’t even report a device, it just says ‘There was an error reading the SATA bus’, so I think it’s a goner…

I don’t think I had anything too important on there that I lost, but I had that feeling of not knowing. I know i know, backup backup backup. Honestly I haven’t had the space to keep adequate backups of that machine. I make sure all my photo stuff is fully backed up, so I’m quite confident I didn’t lose any of that stuff, but who knows what miscellaneous stuff I lost.

Luckily most of my important stuff lives in the clouds nowadays, or is on my work computer (which is backed up with Time Machine).

I just need to convince Sara to get a Time Capsule or a Airport Extreme + hard drive so we can backup our laptops over the network, automagically.

So I run my own server to host my sites as well as a few others. I haven’t had a lot of time to maintain it, and it’s running a horribly out of date OS and services. Last week a friend of mine who is a client needed PHP 5 installed, so I decided to just hand compile a version (which I had been doing for work anyways). Went pretty much without problem, except it broke SquirrelMail, so I had to update that too (it came built in with the OS, so needed to configure a stand alone version). Now I’ve also compiled Apache 2, I just have to make the config files for all the vhosts and switch over.

But anyways, back to Google. The email system on the server is the one area that I don’t have a ton of knowledge on. The spam filter worked for a while, then stopped. I fixed it once, but it only worked til the next reboot… I would prefer to get email off the server and just concentrate on the webserver side. To that end I decided to look at Google. My work (Oakland University) is in the middle of a switch to Google for email services. Right now all students are on the system, and the employees move in a few days.

The school has arranged full support and no ads, something they usually charge $50/user/year for, for free – the school is paying absolutely nothing… And we are talking tens of thousands of email accounts. I swear, Google is just doing it’s best to take over the world, one email account at a time, it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

Well, for people on a slightly smaller scale and not in the EDU market, they still offer free domain email hosting. You see the normal text ads that are in gmail, and you don’t get support or transition tools, and look to be limited to 100 accounts per domain, but otherwise it’s the whole shebang. So now all my deadendsw.com, ericmblog.com, and ericmphotography.com email is hosted on Google servers. If it works out well, I might press the people using my server for email to move also.

[from Today's BIG Thing]

July 2008 weight chart

As you can see, I suck.  My weight loss has really tapered off, and I need to get my punk ass back on track. The last few weeks have been really hectic, and Sara and I have been going out to eat a lot lately (we haven’t gone grocery shopping for real in a few weeks) which has really not helped. I’m going to try to get my loss back down to >=2lbs/wk (the last week was ~1lbs). Still got 10-20lbs til I reach my goals, and I would like to not take another 3 months to get there.

On a related note, I found a picture of me in Photo Booth from December (normally I do a pretty good job of staying out of pictures). Man I was… pudgy… I didn’t realize how much thinner I looked until I saw this:

Fatter Me