The house behind us has a large “shade” tree. It has an enormous quantity of fern like foliage that does a good job cutting the sun that beats down on our back yard.
All good right?
Except that when it loses its foliage, it dumps an incredible amount into our pool. How much? I have to skim and scoop two or three times a day, and still the filter gets jammed.
In December, we had a cold stretch. Lots of my plants died (never to come back to life). Another neighbor had a large tree completely die. I crossed my fingers hoping that this messy tree would be dead as a dodo. Alas, it was not to be. Today I see the first signs of spring on it and it is beginning to grow. Crap.
I get that some people view their cars as transportation. My dad is that way. You wash it once a year, mainly to get the birdshit off of it. Heck, he had a 56 Porsche Speedster that had totally oxidized paint before he sold it to a kid down the street (one in pristine original condition is worth about $250K today).
If you have a camry, or an accord, or a Taurus, or any of those generic interchangeable cars, I can understand not having any pride in your ride. If I see the clear coat peeling, or the paint totally delaminating from the zinc undercoat, no big deal. In a few years you will be sending it to the crusher and replacing it with another interchangeable car.
But, it you buy a premium car, you have a duty to keep it in decent shape. Wash it frequently (preferably hand washed), waxed 2 or 3x a year, and if you have a soft top, clean/treat it. But all too often, I see premium cars that look beat to hell. In my neighborhood there is an Infinity G35 that looks as ratty as a 20 year old Ford Escort. Or the newish Lexus RX350 that has minor collision damage. Don’t fucking tell me you do not have insurance to get that shit fixed.
I could go on and on. I know I live in the desert, and the sun can be hard on a finish, but with a modicum of care you can keep it looking decent for 8, 10, 12 years or longer.
The first actress to play opposite of Patrick McNee in “The Avengers”
Pre-Diana Riggs, the actress opposite of Patrick McNee (Steed) was Honor Blackman. This was very rough TV, but it has its charms. I am working my way through the 1963 season, and making a kick ass green chili.
Perhaps I will break out the DVD’s with Emma Peel who made black leather unbelievably sexy in the 1960′ next.
I have a lot of work to do, and I am dutifully avoiding it.
There are many valid reasons to hate GoDaddy web hosting, from their soft-porn advertisements, to their owner’s proclivity to go big game hunting in Africa, to the barrage of pushy marketing of their goods and services (no, I don’t want to add domains today). Today though, I will be complaining about their support and their absolutely shitty hosting platform.
Until Friday, March 22, 2013, the few times I needed support, I received quick, accurate, and insightful help. Leading up to the Friday a website that I run for a local non-profit, Southern Arizona Greyhound Adoption, had been sluggish in loading for a week or so. I noticed it taking a minute to respond to the original URL request. and similarly on the back end (we had a fundraising event on Wednesday, so I was doing daily tweaks to keep the excitement up) it was a pig, taking minutes to load.
But starting Friday morning, it was pretty much unreachable. It would time out, or present the default Apache 500 series error. I could ping the server, I could FTP to it, I could SSH to it, but the Apache/MySql system seemed completely broken. I head on over to the support area, and log a ticket. They estimated that it would take 11 hours to get a response (in the past it had always been less than 2 hours), and the status noted that Friday Evening they would be doing maintenance on their 4GH platform (where my linux hosting is) to fix some resource allocation issues. But no real details.
I also went to their customer forums, and noted that there was a long stream of other people with similar comments/complaints. I posted there as well, and got a prompt response from one of their support droids, telling me that the upgrade/maintenance to the 4GH platform will resolve the issue. But also 4 other people commented on my post that they were experiencing the exact same thing.
Groan.
Saturday morning, and things are back up, but still sluggish. Feels like there is some delays in their system. 20 hours after opening the ticket, I get an email response. Instead of mentioning anything at all about their problems, I get a list of unhelpful suggestions:
Support Staff Response
Dear Geoffrey,Thank you for contacting Online Support. You can make modifications to your site that improve performance. Some of these changes are easy to manage while others might take some time to figure out.
Here are four things you can do to speed up your site:
GZIP Compression
Smaller pages load faster, regardless of your Internet connection speed. You can make your pages smaller by compressing them with GZIP. (GZIP is only available on our Linux Hosting plans.) For more information about GZIP and our hosting, see Compressing Web Pages for Faster Load Times.
Image Sizes
If you use HTML to make large images small, a site visitor still needs to download the larger version. If you need a small image, don’t use HTML to do it—shrink it in an image-editing program instead.
Scripting
You can edit to say more with less. A good programmer does the same thing with code. If the code on your site is inefficient, it impacts your site’s performance. There isn’t a quick fix for bloated code, but if you’re using GZIP and you’ve reduced your image sizes, analyze your code to make your site even faster. One way to make a database-driven site faster is to use a database index to improve the speed of data retrieval.
CSS
Cascading style sheets are great for formatting the look and feel of your website. If your style sheet contains a lot of styles that aren’t being used, you are forcing browsers to download things they don’t need. If you’re trying to maximize performance, trim your CSS files and remove anything that’s unnecessary.
Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.
For the record, GZIP compression was enabled, I run the site on Joomla, I make sure that all the images are 640 pixels wide or less (and set thumbnails to 200×200 pixel png’s for speed), and really? want me to rewrite the Joomla core to use less PHP scripting? I already have a pretty clean CSS.
So basically, they flipped me the bird, told me that the problem was mine, not theirs, and closed the case. Oh, and in the header of the email they were trying to sell me more domains.
Fucktards. I am now preparing to move the site and domains to my personal hosting provider, the awesome folks over at Media Temple. I will abandon a year of prepaid Go Daddy hosting to get away from those scumbags.
I finally took the plunge and got my reloading press setup again. It had been sitting idle on my workbench, partially disassembled from the move, and generally looking sad. But now it is back together, and when I get about a 2′ x 2′ piece of plywood to reinforce my workbench, I will bolt it down and then get back to reloading.
I also cleaned all my firearms. A couple had been put away dirty from the last trip to the range, so it was time.
I also need to find a good range here in the Chandler/Gilbert area so that I can see if I still can shoot.
There is nothing like getting a nastygram (or two) from your HOA. In general, I don’t mind being in a community with an HOA. Lots of people whinge about the CC&R’s, and having to comply (no, you can’t have a 40′ “murican flag in your font yard, thankyouverymuch).
I have found that they have been very willing to work with you if you ask them. In our house in Tucson we had two primary interactions with the Silverado Hills HOA, both positive. First was to do something about the idiot ATV riders blasting through our property. The second was when we put solar PV panels on our roof (they were cool with it, as long as we tried our best to keep them obscured from view).
However, here in Chandler, where we moved in July of 2012, it has been less positive. I should back up. We bought a house that was foreclosed on, bank owned, and finally bought by an investor who did a great job cleaning it up before selling it to us. We are (mostly) really happy with the house, but we knew that the exterior paint was a bit rough when we bought it.
Last week, we came back from a short trip to San Diego to a nastygram. The one I expected was for the out of control weeds. It is astounding how fast they sprout up and take over the yard. But no, it was about our paint “not meeting standards” and gave us 10 days to rectify it.
The thing is, from the front it isn’t too bad. A hose to wash off some of the dust would spruce it up. The real rough parts are in the back, and that is clearly not in their purview.
So we got some quotes, and have filed an appeal. It has also caused us to look at the houses in the neighborhood. There are LOTS that are in worse condition than us. I hope they all got the nastygrams.
But I suspect that they didn’t. I get the feeling that the HOA had been watching our house, and when owners came in, who live here they pounced on the painting.
A recent post I mentioned that I would follow up with my irritation with Arizona cyclists. In that post I mentioned the insane practice that is widespread of cycling on the sidewalks, that greatly increases the hazards to people walking.
Today, I am going to grumble about cyclists who are unfamiliar with the rules of the road.
First, I grew up in California, at a time when the schools were well funded (that is, before Proposition 13), and we all learned to use hand signals properly. Just like in a car, you use your left arm to signal intent. Up for right turn,straight out for left turn, and down for stop. Easy peasy, except here in Arizona, people seem to use their right arms to signal right turns, their left arm to signal left turns, and some other hand-wavy things that make no sense.
Second, I continue to see cyclists completely ignore stop signs. As a cyclist, I sometimes slow to an “almost” stop, then move on, and I feel bad about that. But here, I see cyclists not even making an effort to stop. They look to whether there is cross traffic, make the decision to just blow through it, and do it. Crazy.
And you wonder why many car drivers get pissed off at cyclists.
I am fortunate to live 7.2 miles from the office. A straight shot down a main artery, I can make it into the office in 12 minutes, as long as I time it properly around the kid dropoff at the two major elementary schools on the way. The lights are timed, and if it keep it to 1 – 2 mph below the posted speed limit, I can often stop only once.
Seems pretty ideal, living in a place where 10 months of the year I can drive top down on my S2000, and really enjoy it.
However, being that I live in a state with some of the worst drivers imaginable, Arizona (where your driver’s license doesn’t need to be renewed until you turn 65), I get to see some really dumb crap done around me during the drive in.
First, those who turn left to enter the drop off area at the school. They LOVE to run red lights and block the intersection. I dare say that your kids are safer walking to school (like I did until I could afford a car in High School) than you trying to not wait one more light change.
Next up are the idiots who feel the need to cut across three lanes of traffic, to pas one more car, and only to be 2 cars closer at the next red light.
Then there are those cars that apparently don’t have blinkers. They just move into your lane, without warning. Fortunately, my years of motorcycling has taught me to assume I was invisible, and to always have an escape path in the event of an incursion.
Lastly, those who are too busy texting to drive, or to even go at a red light. They are easy to spot, and unfortunately, it seems to be an exponential increase in practice.
Still, a 7.2 mile drive into the office is pretty awesome.
Way back (1992 ish) I worked as a chemical technician. Part of my responsibilities was to move large amounts of chemicals in boxes (4 gallons per box), and drums (55 gallon drums). Needless to say, I probably was in the best physical condition of my life during that 9 months or so.
But there was an upside. Since I worked off shift, I would need to drive the forklift to get my job done. So I went through the training (possibly the only person in history with a physics degree to be certified to drive a forklift), got certified, and moved a lot of product with that forklift.
I will admit, it was fun. One thing that if you are a normal person seems confusing, but for a physicist, it seemed logical was the fact that a forklift is least stable when it is not carrying anything. They tip over quite easily, and can be very hazardous to the operator and the folks nearby. However, as you approach the maximum load limit, the dynamics change, and it become the most stable it can be.
That meant when I was carrying a pallet of Freon dissolved in methanol (about 750# per 55 gallon drum), the machine was at its best performance.
Having worked for a company that was uber proud of their content management system, and wondered why that productivity sapping POS was popular at all, and now at a company that has a huge Sharepoint infrastructure, I am coming to the conclusion that all content management systems blow.
I understand the need in highly regulated industries to use such things. Government, financial services, medical are all where these systems are essential. Lots of rules about access, retention, and positive destruction of records are where content management (or document management solutions) thrive.
I also understand in large enterprises the need to have central repositories and version control of documents and artifacts for programs and projects. Having a huge server pool letting users to create and store their own hierarchy and taxonomy just leads to chaos, and lost documents (and huge surprises when you are doing eDicsovery for a legal action).
But, for the love of god, they are painful to work with.
