Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 32mm, 12mm TeleVue Nagler New objects observed: Messier 78, Messier 48, Messier 93 Previously viewed objects observed: Messier 81, Messier 82 This last winter ended up being remarkably brutal. There ended up not being a single night I was able to go out. There were a few nights were it looked like it might be clear, but it ended up that it wasn’t really because while there weren’t any clouds, it was very hazy.
I’ve been whipped around a lot lately. Those of you who have seen me in person over the last year or so, or have paid attention on Twitter, may have noticed that not all seemed to be right with me. I’ve had a glut of strange symptoms ranging from numbness, tingling, or “strange” or downright uncomfortable or painful sensations in my arms and legs to having my left leg buckle under me so much I started using a cane (both to catch myself and so I wouldn’t look like I was drunk at noon because I was stumbling around) to nerves in my neck or lower back freaking out to weird muscle stiffness and trouble at times using my hands.
A lot of people spend a lot of time customizing their text editor. They bring in all sorts extensions, plugins, and shortcuts with the notion that it’ll make them more productive. In my experience, though, it doesn’t really do anything to help and can actually hurt. If you’re happy with your tricked out config, that’s your business, but it’s OK to not want it. I do confess that I have a vimconfig that I keep in github.
I’ve been pleased with Octopress so far, but I’ve been thinking about making some layout changes here so this blog doesn’t look quite so much like every other Octopress site out there. When I first set it up I changed the fonts and colors at least so it wasn’t quite as generic, but I feel like it’d be nice to get it looking at least a bit better.
I’ve not been smoking lately. This is generally considered a good thing, but even while using one of those electronic dealies you hear about I miss getting up and walking outside. I needed a way to be able to blow off some steam that didn’t involve going outside and smoking. On a lark I fired up Doom again (PrBoom is the one I’ve been using, but there are many ports these days), and I found that it works really well for a quick diversion.
I’ve been given permission to release Daily Kos’ Chef cookbook for installing the Zeus Traffic Manager. It’s located at https://github.com/dailykos/zeus-zxtm on github, and I’ll be adding it to the community repository at Opscode soon. What it does: Installs Zeus Traffic Manager and does the basic configuration. There are some attributes to set in the cookbook for it to run properly, like the version, location of the Zeus installation tarball, etc.
I’ve been battling with a mysterious problem for about a month or so where running xtrabackup from a cron job to do a full database backup would mysteriously fail when running on Sunday night, but would run fine when run by hand or when run in the cron at some other time. It would always fail at the same place in the database backup, but only leave the mysterious error [11592490.
Recently, I got a bit annoyed because I was starting to pick out Russian words lately when I listened to Russian operas. I found myself trying to remember what the word как meant, so I googled it. One thing led to another, and I started reading some introductory Russian lessons on the Internet. I’ve always had a talent for languages, having taken three of them in high school (three years of French, two years of Japanese, and one of Spanish), and I started picking up some German and Italian from listening to a lot of operas in those languages as well.
Zeus Traffic Manager (now, Stingray Traffic Manager) is an excellent product that I’ve found to be very useful, but the default “Service Unavailable” page is kind of ugly. Unfortunately, the documentation on how to put a more attractive error page up on your Zeus load balancer isn’t very clear, and I banged my head against it for a long time before I finally figured it out. It’s totally one of those “hiding in plain sight” things.
A little while ago, on a lark, I ordered a 113mm eyepiece from Surplus Shed, because I was ordering some refractor objectives and bearings to make a Crayford focuser at the same time, and I was curious about an eyepiece with such a long focal length.