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Ever have one of those days…

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Where you want to work on something but at the same time you want to go work on a bunch of other stuff.

Yeah today is one of those days.  On the upshot I did discover a new theme I prefer for the site while working on the pet project.  I’m doing some other stuff around the house in preparation for some stuff going on later this month.

I’ve also been working finishing up my stage designs for August.  I’ve got two more stages to go.  I did however make one stage that was an adventure into minimalism, making due with less.  It’s a short stage, but should be fun never the less.  I have discovered though it takes practice to think about Revolver, L-10, Limited, and Open and coming up with different solutions for each.  Even more so trying to avoid the wide open hole to let someone just completely wreck the stage.

I need to shoot more stages though to help the creativity.  I would go work nationals as staff. I think I’ll plan on trying to do that next year.

Welcome to the Darkside…

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So last week A Girl made a comment about something going wrong with blogger.  I made a comment which resulted in an email.

The email basically said, I would love help.  Not that she really wanted to completely blow this popsicle stand, but well there have been some issues with Google as of late.  I promptly said, I’ll just get it all set up and surprise her.  Well about an hour of my time and I had it relatively ready.  Then all we needed to do was port everything over from Blogger and redirect the traffic headed to blogger.

This morning she finished the last step which was a redirect.  She has herself a new shiny blog that even still has the new blog smell.  That’s not to say that any of the content is gone it’s all there.

She thought she may have messed something up when blogger all the sudden started sending everyone to blogspot, but nope, it’s working just as intended.  She now has freedom and power at her disposal.

So go give her a nice house-warming.  We’re still unpacking, but she’s enjoying the new place.

Welcome to the Dark Side A Girl, we have cookies, they’re on the counter!

*If you would like to ditch blogger, I am more than happy to help.  At this point though I do not want to be buying everyone and their mother a domain name.  If you have a domain and want to move, contact me, we can hash something out.  I’m not going to do everyone’s for free, hours of time do add up.  That said, this weekend I’m going to kick off a site for gun bloggers that will behave much like blogger.  You get a sub-domain and I will help your migration if necessary.  That keeps my costs to purely time, and a minimal amount at that.

If you want full hosting though, please do contact me, we can probably work something out.

 

CloudFlare Review

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So a friend of mine ended up having his site offline last night after a DoS attack took his web hosting offline.

About 3 months ago I decided to give CloudFlare a shot.  After 3 months I thought I would give a quick overview of how it went and what differences I have actually seen.

Page load speeds, there was a noticeable difference when I migrated the site.  I left a archived version of the site available for tracking down broken links and the like.  So this was equivalent of me flipping the off switch.  Using the archived site is unbelievably slower than what it was prior to migration to Word Press.

Bandwidth usage proves this.

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I did the change over in the beginning of April.  Sitemeter and Google Analytics both have shown at least a steady and slightly increasing traffic over those months, with January being the largest.  So I could say that effectively CloudFlare has cut my bandwidth down by 1/3.  CloudFlare’s analytics are accurate as well and provide some extra differentiation.

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One downside though is as you can see above, AWstats is no longer accurate.  You can see the number of Unique visitors is no longer accurate, however you can see that the number of visits does reflect that number.

When I first did the change over I did have some weirdness and problems.  Mainly that my hosting provider was reacting to CloudFlare like it was a DoS attack.  The majority of the requests are forwarded through their network for speed reasons.  So the number of high hits from their services made them look suspect.  I got the issues straightened out and things have been much more stable since.

When my hosting provider did have a hiccup, the site content remained available.  While I couldn’t post new content, I wasn’t loosing viewership which was a huge plus.

There are also numerous apps that can be installed with CloudFlare to aid in thinks like link tracking and malware detection.  There is also a service to help monitor for people scraping content, including people hot linking images.

Overall I have found the service worth the setup time which actually was amazingly simple.  I’m not quite big enough to find their pro services worth it, however I do see how they might be beneficial if I had considerably more traffic.

The only setup required is to point your root DNS entry to CloudFlare and enter your DNS info that your hosting provider has into CloudFlare.  If you have a full website and you’ve had downtime from service issues, CloudFlare can help mitigate that.

Quote of the Day – Tam (06/28/2012)

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“I mean, as bad as it was for the Jews in eastern Europe, what about the poor Einsatzgruppen? They probably had blisters on their trigger fingers by the end of the day.” *

Seriously, you’re failing to engage my sympathy by telling me what a humiliating drudgery it is to violate the hell out of my rights.

Tam – Oddly I am not overcome with sympathy.

June 28, 2012

[Yeah, and neither am I.  Guess what, if you don’t want to be sticking your hands in the stank of someone else’s crotch the solution is unbelievably simple.  Don’t do it.

If you do stick your hands in there, don’t come whining to me about how horrible and nasty your job is and that all you’re trying to do is make a living.  I don’t care.  Not only do I not care, but I find your actions worth of public scorn.  Seriously, I want to create a flash mob at a security check point of people chanting “Two by Two Hands of Blue”.

Why do I want you publicly insulted and humiliated for your choices?  Because they are exactly that, your choices.  “I was ordered to do it,” didn’t work at Nuremberg and it’s not gong to work with me.  I understand that people are more willing to do questionable acts when ordered to do so.  I don’t care. You have the ability to think about it and say no.  And it’s that willingness of people to blindly follow orders is a serious reason to stand up and just say no.  Just because there’s other people working for the TSA doesn’t make the actions justified either.

You have made this bed and it’s yours to sleep in.  Don’t come crying to me because people continually give you a hard time.  Don’t look to me for sympathy that your hands reek of ass.  Don’t look to me for sympathy because you decided to take a job where you are told to violate your neighbors rights.  You made that choice, you decided that violating your neighbors rights was acceptable.  You decided that taking a job with child molesters and thieves was acceptable.

I don’t care if times are tough for you and you’ve had a hard time finding a job.  My wife spent a large time unemployed.  She never once ran to the TSA and said, “Please masta, let me molest people, I really need a paycheck.”  Consider my sympathy meter at -10.

As I said already, if you work for the TSA and don’t like the fact that people hate you, mock you, and generally want nothing to do with you, that’s a clue.  You are in fact doing something wrong, even if the government says it’s a good idea. -B]

*Joe’s right, Godwin be damned, that quote’s just too good.

Buwahahaha!!! Awesome!

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I just discovered this in Jetpack while waiting for my code to compile.

[latex size=”4″]e^{\j \theta}=\cos{\theta}+\j \sin{\theta}[/latex]

But wait, there’s more!

[latex size=”4″][\vec{\nabla} \cdot \vec{\mathbf{E}} = \frac{1}{\epsilon_0}\,\rho ][/latex]

Man, that is freaking awesome.  I can write formulas on the fly now and not have to resort to weird things to get the images to post.  Now I just need to get back to doing those posts on the power system.

Well, that’s neat

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During my lunch I did some browsing around and I found a really nice proof reader that has a plugin for WordPress tied into Jetpack.  Not only does it exist for WordPress though but someone created a plugin for Live Writer.

I know more often than not my writing leaves something to be desired.  This I attribute to the fact that my brain will mentally fill in words that are missing when I wrote it.  It usually takes at least 24 hours before my brain will actually catch missing material.  That’s a bit of a problem with how fast some information flows within the blogosphere.  I don’t exactly have an editor to proof my work before I hit the submit button.  Hopefully this will help with some of those deficiencies.

My brain is actually really good at filling in other people’s mistakes.  I have to seriously slow down my reading to catch mistakes.

In other news a couple of weeks ago I finally ditched the big beard since summer was finally showing up.  Normally I go bald specifically because I’m already bald on the top of the head anyway so I might as well just embrace it.

This limits my ability to have the big fat beard, which I do enjoy though it does make soup a serious pain. It just looks weird being bald and having a big bushy beard.  Also it’s really hot during summers out here and it’s just not necessary.

Now normally I go with what some would call the JayG look, bald and goatee, but that’s relatively common and frankly I just like being different.  So instead I’ve gone with the below.

With the hat on:

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With the hat off.

imageYou can’t see it, but I’m flipping someone off in this picture.  He said something about a blinding light coming off my head.  I told him to just stop staring into the sun.

I still have the beard, doesn’t look scroungy, and still allows me to be intimidating if necessary.

So what say you?  Should I just go back to the goatee, or keep the trimmed line running back?

Busy Day, pardon the light posting

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In a long business meeting today and tomorrow.  Currently I feel the urge to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

Fun thing is to see the main players involved in the discussion, count all the extra engineers in the room, figure in hourly engineering wages, this is one expensive meeting.

So enjoy this picture and read some of the folks in the blog roll on the right.

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I had been meaning to post this before.  That shirt is just awesome!