March, 18, 2007 archives

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.