March, 17, 2007 archives

it’s been almost a month, but i finally found time to get through my pictures from the 108th annual golden dragon parade. taking pictures at a parade is a lot of fun — interesting subjects just keep coming to you. i have a bunch of pictures from yesterday’s st. patrick’s day parade in downtown los angeles to go through.

one reason it’s taking longer is that i’m trying to write a bit more with each picture than i have in the past, and i’m also taking more time to really pare down the photo selections to just those i’m happy with or have a good story.

when the los angeles marathon happened a few weeks ago, they ran right outside our front door, which meant we had a good view of the action from our patio. but since we were at mile 25, it was a day-long flow of people, so it wasn’t that exciting to just sit and watch it go by.

we were able to keep an eye on the progress of the leaders by watching the progress of the helicopters covering the race, so i went out and snapped some pictures of the leaders when they passed by. as it turns out, that was when the eventual male winners were passing by the eventual female winner.

the wheelchair racers were actually more fun to watch cruise by, but none of my pictures of them really turned out. they were moving fast.

along with re-thinking how i back things up, i have also been thinking about how to handle hosting my stuff. currently i have a server in a colocation facility that is costing me $75/month. it is a p4/2.4GHz with 768MB of RAM and 55GB of disk space, of which i’m only using about 20GB. the machine is over four years old now, so i am starting to get the creepy feeling that it is running on borrowed time.

for $30/month, paid annually, i could get a virtual server from linode with 384MB of RAM and 18GB of disk. it is half as much memory and even less disk space, but it doesn’t look like the memory will be an issue based on my current usage. i can use less disk-space by archiving things off to other places like amazon’s s3, such as the access logs for this site that go back to 1997.

there are other virtual server providers, of course, but jeff waugh’s praise of linode is what got me started on looking into this again. they look like they have their act together, based on the activity in their forums and how they present themselves in general. so many of the other providers seem so dodgy.

of course, if i do move to a virtual server, i’ll have to figure out what to do with the physical server that i pull out of the colo facility.

the st. patrick’s day parade in downtown los angeles is a little odd, since it is on a weekday. naturally (stereotypically?), it is sponsored by the los angeles police and fire departments.

the parade route took a turn at 5th and main this year, so that’s where celia and i headed to watch. while she cheered and got the vintage police cars to almost run into each other, i took pictures. have i mentioned how i like to shoot parades?

this time i decided to have some fun by setting my camera to its largest aperture setting (f/4 with my basic zoom lens), which helped to isolate the subjects a bit from the background, like in this shot.

300 is gory (but not as ridiculous as sin city was), stylish, and fun. and almost as homoerotic as professional wrestling.