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There will be thunder and lightning, possibly stolen as a tag line from the completely free soundtrack for a documentary available here. But today there was lightning and thunder, it was in fact only missing one ingredient, about 10 more degrees of warmth Had a “party” at work, Dave, Yuek-fen, Mike and Julian somehow all ended up in our office. I think anyone coming to our desk at the time was strangely confused, but it sure helped to pass the time. Then we went on a roadtrip!

Ok, so maybe the roadtrip’s purpose of getting Dave his new hard drive, which we insist is purely for more porn, isn’t as exciting as it may be. But by now it should be fairly obvious that we make any trip exciting. Julian insisted on getting a cart, I insisted we don’t need one, we went with his plan, then were forced to abandon it after filling it with one too many items we weren’t actually going to buy XD They had some nice demonstration seats, we used all 3, while sitting in them we decided Costco should actually pay us for that “job”. A clothing isle later we found some PS3’s — actually a lot of PS3’s, if only Sony was serious about this, I’d be instantly $15,000 richer. They were interestingly stacked on top of each other, and it looked like the top $800 box has seen the 1 meter drop to the concrete floor at least a few times XD

I bought the James Bond DVD (why is the cover so bad?), while in line, I was politely told by Julian and Dave that it wasn’t the widescreen edition, we had to wait in line again Julian’s membership expired, he had to pay $106 to buy beef jerky It was amusing when Dave tried to pay for everything and the cashier said “Oh, you can’t do that… it has to be the member’s debit card.”, undeterred we only had one answer “Well, we could just you know give him (Julian) the PIN and the card”, *silence*, cashier “Right then, go ahead, but only this time, next time bring cash.”, Julian “If you get in trouble just tell them I yelled at you.”

A wrong parking lot later, almost deciding to try and drive over a curve, and sitting behind a salesperson counter for a while we also added a FutureShop visit to our list, in fact, we all ended up buying DVD’s. Take that stupid MPAA, I’m like the main cause of file-sharing at my university and I buy DVD’s, stupid company >.<

Which brings us to thunder and lightning… the clouds were ominous and black, it was coming, and I was totally like yey! Standing around in the rain for a while by the car wasn’t enough, so I took matters in my own hands and after getting home went to finish the job by getting totally soaked, could have been warmer Then I got some books, could have been more exciting, then I thought I lost one of my huge towels, then my bed could have been longer. Anyway, that’s really it, it’s Easter this weekend, I should visit home, and with Sharon going home it seems like a good plan.

It comes from the Samurai Champloo OST soundtrack, well worth getting your hands on if you like mood music. I’m still trying to make my way through some of my albums and this just randomed to today when I was just lying around, a repeat button later and I love this track. If you want it in context of an episode:

Without having too much to add, check it out!

I got accepted for the don position I applied in my university residences for Fall 2007 and Winter 2008. I didn’t get the residence I wanted, but that’s fine, I got one with really, really nice don rooms instead. I don’t really have much else to add right now other then Adam and me realised that just having really fast squash rallies is almost more fun then actually playing a point game and that I need to get a first aid certificate before the end of August this year. I close with more, Eeeeeeee!!!

One thing that certainly makes using NginX a fun experience is that since the version I installed when I first got the slice, it has already gone through 2 revisions. Thankfully the upgrade process could not be any simpler. There is a pretty on the run replacement method, which is outlined on their wiki, or for my case, there’s just take it offline for the whole 5-10 seconds that it takes to do the upgrade.

On the to fix list there are really two items, maybe 3.

1. Rewrite rules for WordPress, seem to continue to elude me. What seems to be working for several other people is still not giving me the desired result. This is for now fairly low priority as I don’t care about SEO on my personal blog.

2. FastCGI, seems to sometimes go on vacation. I’ve had to restart it once now, and I guess we’ll see if it was a fluke or if this is something that needs to be looked into and fixed. I haven’t seen this on any of our in-house servers, but granted none of them run this exact setup, yet.

3. I should probably look into using SFTP as per the suggestion to another user on the SliceHost forum, I mean it’s sort of amusing to watch the attempted brute-force attacks against your FTP server login, but I don’t like them. Even though they’re not going to get the right login and I take FTP offline when I don’t use it, still, it’s just a small to fix thing.

Tonight, I think I need to write something not technical

If you don’t like geeky technical explanations you really should stop reading now, because this will make absolutely no sense.

I moved my main website over to a VPS provided by SliceHost from the GridServer that MediaTemple offers. In case you’re actually wondering what prompted the change, well a few factors, mostly the completely unreliable MySQL performance on the GridServer setup that can on good minutes be extremely fast and on average makes me hate visiting my own website. The final straw pretty much came when I got a reply to an FTP question that said that the PHP mode would have to be changed to a slower one to accomodate larger FTP transfers not working, I said wtf and moved on

I’ll be writing a few more bits later, but they’ll mostly be how-to and once again geeky articles that shall go on my alternate blog. But for now, as a summary, I’m running the following setup.

- NginX is my front-end webserver that serves any static content on the webpage.
- PHP is v5 and is proxied off to a FastCGI PHP server.
- When I get around to moving the 2nd blog, which is based on Ruby on Rails, it will likewise be passed off to FastCGI. I decided not to go with Mongrels since they offer scalability, but not the performance of FCGI, and since this is a single server setup
- FTP is being catered to by vsftpd, which has the most paranoid upload permissions *ever*.
- And to make things easier and save on system memory, email is being done through Google Apps.

As for what will change for you? Absolutely nothing, except hopefully faster page load times and that’s about it!

I didn’t screw up A/NS entries for domains : )

I used to download 95%+ of my music from wherever on the internet without paying anything at all. I can’t afford to spend the $20 on a CD, and frankly, I don’t really have any use for CDs. I basically have to then take that CD, take all of the music off of it, and then find a spot on a shelf for it because chances are good it’ll never get used again. Which brings me to when I finally decided to check out AllOfMp3.com during their holiday promotion, when you got a bonus for adding credit to your account.

This was pretty much the best way of getting music ever. You could choose what quality you wanted, anything from average to CD quality. You had a choice of different formats for most tracks, from the popular MP3 to lossles formats like OGG and FLAC. The best part is that you could choose entire albums, or individual songs, and you paid per bandwidth used. None of this per song pricing shite. I don’t want to pay $2 for a song just because it’s popular. It was easy to get music there, easy to find, some of the revenue went to the artists, and it was just convenient.

Then the US courts ruled that MasterCard and VISA could no longer provide services to the site. So I switched to having to buy gift cards and add money to my account that way. Then that method got eliminated. And guess what? Oh yeah, that’s right I went right back to downloading music for free, except it’s more inconvenient. Did I mention that RIAA recently got voted as the worst company in America, beating out a large list of others. So now I’m considering buying gift certificates for AllOfMp3.com from eBay. Should the music industry be concerned that’d I’d rather go through all these hoops to pay and get music then use what they offer me now? For their sake, I hope so.

Went to see The Fountain on Saturday. It was originally supposed to be Dave and Adam going to see it, I tagged along, Dave actually didn’t show up and blamed it on lack of sleep and hallucinations. We waited until pretty much last minute to leave, and I woke up Yuek-fen when trying to find Dave by calling her at 2pm Actually took a cab to the theatre, which I don’t really like spending money on, but it was just over $5 and the cab driver for some reason handed me $15 change on my bill. I was like “Do you maybe want to give me some change so I can tip you?” and his answer was “Don’t worry about it!”, me “…uh…”, him “Don’t worry about it!”. Some change out of Adam’s change bag made out of duct-tape later and we headed in.

You know, in most aspects, the older Princess Cinema is pretty ghetto. But it has the most comfortable cinema seats I’ve ever sat in. I don’t know what it is, but they’re sooo good. Since the excitement couldn’t possibly be over we ended up watching the movie in about 4 episodes. You’re probably wondering why, right then, so onto the story. Somewhere about half an hour into the movie the scene started to get darker and darker, and to be honest at first it looked a whole lot like it was just a movie effect. Until it was pitch black, and then we started to hear ominous scratching and cracking sounds from the direction of the projector room o.O A minute or so later we got confirmation from one of the cinema employees “Uh… yeah so there’re some minor technical difficulties… we’ll be fixing that within a momemnt.” That happened about 3 more times with varying degrees of damage and time to fix estimates. It was amusing on the last one, because a whole bunch of people stood up and started to put their coats on to leave and then as soon as they started moving it fixed itself and they sat back down. The movie was pretty good, I think I am still not entirely sure what the point of it was so I can’t even spoil it for you. I hada theory that got absolutely destroyed in the last 30 minutes of the movie and after that I was just lost.

On the walk home I discovered there’s apparently a zoo in a park really close to campus. I had some pictures of the random animals, ok so I had one picture, and it was mostly of the Bambie looking thing’s ass — stupid camera and it moving I also think I left my USB cord for it at work so I can’t even upload it.

I actually slept in a bit on Saturday too, and it helped out since I had some friends and a couple of total strangers over to play some poker later in the evening. Fun was had, nachos were made, and eaten, the Leafs actually won a game after being up 4-1, too bad every other team in their conference also won their games. I ended up winning and it was pretty sweet, I actually felt comfortable playing through the whole game, and it ended with me being $20 richer. Then I play wrestled with Rhesa in my living room, I don’t know why we did it again, but the record was maintained 10-0 for me, despite the fact that Adam was definitely hanging off of my neck for all of last round and it made taking Rhesa down a whole lot more interesting o.O Then we played pool, apparently I’m a pool shark, Rhesa is a professional, and thanks to Adam’s clutch play moments I didn’t lose all 3 games (thanks for not sinking my balls!). I ended up getting home past 3, stalking outside the Bomber and watching couples coming back from a Charity Ball trying to catch a taxi and pull the fire alarm, and some walks home later. That’s about it, slept in on Sunday, played some more squash, had entirely too much juice and that’s about it.

There’s probably going to be some random explosions, states of general disorder, broken pictures, and so on, while I play around on a project to see just how well I can get this running on a different webserver. Thank you for tuning in for this PSA and I hope you enjoy the mass chaos that I’m sure will insue starting tomorrow

Ouch! I just tried to sit cross-legged and the plan failed utterly since I definitely pulled something again, but this time in my left leg

In case the triple S title wasn’t obvious enough I’ve started playing squash again with Adam from work. The first time out I was so utterly dead after the first game set that it’s probably not even worth mentioning. I did manage to somewhat keep up with the score, but it didn’t feel like I was totally in the game. Either way though it was a huge amount of fun and reminded me why I hate gyms and love sports like soccer, tennis, volleyball and squash!

Anyway, we played again today and it was even better, I was actually starting to get some of the feel for where I want to go with the ball and actually making some progress towards accomplishing what I wanted. I totally need to work on the short drops since I am sucking hugely with those. And that huge kryptonite, the out of the left corner back hand, is making an appearance often. Actual technique aside today was awesome, after 3 games I totally felt like another one. I didn’t quit today because I was too tired, I quit because stuff started to hurt as I managed to get a blister (ewwww) because of stepping weird on my left foot to avoid the whatever else I managed to hurt there pain. But weeeeee, fun! We signed up for another game on Saturday and hopefully these small annoyances go away by then.

Other then that, I can’t wait for a summer semester filled with some more of the above and more. Totally going to try and get a team for soccer intramurals and just play around there. In closing I submitted my last graded paper before the exams just yesterday, it’s worth 40% so I’m looking for a good mark on it, but I mostly liked the final product after a complete topic change and a huge rewrite of the draft.