Yannblog

The personal website of Ian Littman

Archive for March, 2009

School closed a half-day…We’re Helluva Engineers, what can I say?

Mar 26

Posted by Ian Littman in General | No Comments

A compatriot at The Oredigger, Andrew Ferguson, summed up the situation on his blog, so I won’t reiterate. Though I will post my comment on that post here, as well as a proposed addition to the school fight song, The Mining Engineer. I’ll also note that I didn’t really have any classes after noon anyway…

I had class until about 12:07, when the prof decided we really weren’t supposed to be in Meyer a full fifteen minutes after quittin’ time; the class normally extends to 12:15, perhaps a little later.

The way back to my apartment, across from the CTLM (yep, that close), was rather arduous; blowing snow and closed buildings, yuck. Had a friend over because his house is a few miles away and no RTD buses came for an hour or so when he was there.

Later a roommate and I delivered him home…the driving experience could be summed up as “The Fast and the Furious: Golden Drift”. Thence to King Sooper’s. Sonic was for all intents and purposes closed (I really wanted some ice cream in that snowstorm, go figure). Then another interesting ride back home.

I seriously thought about breaking into a chorus of the school fight song, upon hearing that EVERY other institution had been closed down due to the snow…except Mines, which deigned to wait until lunch. It just goe to show how hardcore this place is. I’d say it’s the Chuck Norris of schools but then I’d get roundhouse kicked in the face.

And now for the addition to the fight song Mines attendees know and love so well:

They closed the schools, the city and they closed Colorado State,
The students of the School of Mines wondered “what’s next”, but wait!
The classes didn’t close down until noon of that day.
’cause the School of Mines’s reputation would have it no other way.

So, whaddya think? I’m no metallurgist but steel is tried, stressed and strengthened when force-cooled, right? Guess Mines students are supposed to be men (and the token women) of steel? That’s what it feels like, and the only thing we can do about it is be insanely proud. 🙂

WordPress Plugins I Use

Mar 25

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Hey, why not let people know what I’m using?

creative commons license widget
Google Analyticator
Shockingly Simple Favicon
WP Captcha Free

Also, for the record, I’m using a rather modified version of the old WordPress Classic theme (yes, the one that comes with all WordPress installs). The difference? A bit of quality time with CSSEdit. A really cool app, I must say. Got it a few MacHeists ago.

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Google Voice Draws Nigh…for me…

Mar 24

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Just received this e-mail from Google about my account conversion from GrandCentral to Google Voice. I’ve had GrandCentral for awhile but have never really used it. Google Voice looks to be amazing, from the five minutes I played around with it on someone else’s account. Now it’s finally my turn, albeit with a reservation or two, as outlined in the e-mail below…guess this is why my account took so long to convert:

Hello

We’re happy to announce that your GrandCentral account can now be upgraded to Google Voice. In addition to the great GrandCentral features you already know, Google Voice gives you free transcription of all your voicemail, conference calling, and more. You can also use your Google Voice account to make low cost international calls and free calls to anywhere in the United States.

Unfortunately, there is a group of about 891 phone numbers for which we are not able to enable the new SMS feature. Your phone numbers is one of these that won’t support SMS, so we would like to offer you two upgrade options:

  1. You can upgrade your current GrandCentral number to Google Voice. You will get all new Google Voice features, except SMS.
  2. You can select a brand new Google Voice number that will support SMS. You can also keep your existing GrandCentral number working for the next 3 months while you tell people your new number, and you can still check voicemails to that number in your GrandCentral account.

Let us know which option you prefer here (link removed) and we will upgrade your account accordingly.

Thanks,

The Google Voice Team

Once the account converts, rest assured I’ll at least be blogging about it, if not writing a full-blown newspaper article about the service. Looking forward to getting some free calling in…

In case you’re wondering, I’m switching my number. Nobody knows my old number so it’s no great loss, and I really want the texting feature 🙂

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Speaking of servers…

Mar 23

Posted by Ian Littman in General | 1 Comment

…I actually have a few spread around the world, for various purposes. Most are going dead as soon as the money runs out, but a few will stick around. This includes web hosts…here are the names, packages and reasons, in order of when I got them:

  1. 1&1 ($5 Microsoft and Linux packages, for personal site, I’ll let them expire but will keep them as a domain registrar…their stuff is just plain slow)
  2. LiquidWeb (low-end VPS with all the upgrades, paid $4100 in advance so I now have to pay just $40 per month for what I’m getting, which is a decent deal, used for a push e-mail project that isn’t working right currently)
  3. SuperSeedbox (seedbox, on an OVH server, gets decent speeds and costs $20 per month)
  4. Seedbox.fr (seedbox which was cheap but is lousy speed-wise, also at OVH)
  5. Seedplace.eu (dedicated server with low-end specs and network storage, 17 Euros per month, will let this one expire…based in OVH, used as a seedbox)
  6. PruHosting (99 cents per year, 50 MB of storage, 1GB of bandwidth and a server that works)

So I’ll be down to three different servers at the end of the month: LiquidWeb, SuperSeedbox and MDDHosting. May cut out SuperSeedbox as well. Whew, I’m spending a bit of dough on servers…but most were experiments anyhow.

What’s funny is how each seedbox has a different BitTorrent client on it. The SuperSeedbox has µtorrent, the seedplace.eu system has rtorrent/wtorrent, and the Seedbox.fr unit uses Transmission. All are decent clients when configured correctly on decent servers, but I’d recommend µtorrent on SuperSeedbox at this point.

As to my choice of VPS and shared servers, I stand behind what I bought; LiquidWeb and MDDHosting are both good companies, and they do what I pay them for quite well.

Oh, and PruHosting…it’s 99 cents per year, what can I say? It works quite well, so if someone wants to set up a basic WordPress blog, that’s where to host it; just grab a domain from Domain.com and forward it over there (why Domain.com? They’re cheap…$7.50 per year after the promo code TEK1, as in TekZilla).

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New Server!

Mar 23

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No, really. No sooner did I move to my new host, then they decided to switch all their shared hosting accounts to a new server. This is a good thing…though server load went up for a few hours, there was zero downtime, I didn’t have to do anything, and the new server is configured a bit beefier than the old one, so my site will run even faster. Woohoo!

On a more negative note, due to DNS propagation delays, I had to post this twice, once on the old server, once on the new one.

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New Web Host!

Mar 22

Posted by Ian Littman in General | 1 Comment

I got an amzing deal from MDDHosting, which rocks anyway, so I’ve converted my personal site to them, though I still host my domains with 1&1. I must say, it’s lovely to be on a server that responds quickly to what you want it to do, and which is prety much in the center of the internet, rather than being over in Kansas City…

NOTE: The above link to MDDHosting was an affiliate link. Still, they’re awesome. I used them for my college newspaper before I used them myself, and the service is rock-solid.

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