Blog Posts

the never song

best. kid’s song. evar.

resource management on Hippie Hosting

The Hippie Hosting Co-op server has been humming along for several months now. We’ve had our share of growing pains, and recently we’d been seeing memory usage on the server spiking pretty severely.

For the non-Hippies: the Co-op is run on a Mediatemple (dv) dedicated virtual server, and we have 197 domains for 84 members running on the box. Most are pretty low demand, simple blogs with low traffic. Some are higher demand. But, on average, we should be well within the limits of what the server can do.

jack white at the iTunes Festival

I just spent 2 hours watching Jack White play at the iTunes Festival (recorded earlier this month in London). What a show. If you have a copy of iTunes, fire it up. Better yet, if you have a fancy AppleTV thingamabox, check out the dedicated app/channel for the Festival and watch it on the big screen.

I tried playing along for a couple of songs. But, there’s just no fracking way. The dude is absolutely insane. Wow. He reminds me of someone, though…

wherever the road takes us

Fantastic short film by David Aldrich. Four friends go for a bike ride. It’s just like this, except, you know, with jobs, and families, and about 20 years of old-man-ness on these kids. But, yeah…

Wherever The Road Takes Us from David Aldrich on Vimeo.

UofC Kickoff 2012

Today was the home opener for the UCalgary Dinos men’s football team. They slaughtered the UofA Golden Bears¹. But, lots of campus pride on display. We got to the stadium too late - all of the Kickoff 2012 t-shirts were gone already. The Boyâ„¢ was disappointed, but he got over it quickly enough…

september highwood pass ride

easily the hardest bike ride I’ve ever done. Not the longest, but over 1000m of climbing, with constant headwinds. Awesome. So much fun. And ouch. We started 25km further out (from Boundary Ranch) than our usual Highwood Pass route (starting at the North Gate), so the ride was about 50km longer than usual. I wound up snapping a spoke and getting a flat less than 3km from the cars. And Anthony got 2 flats within 1km of each other, near the summit. Still, what a fun ride.

ebooks update

So, last year I wrote a post declaring my boycott of ebooks, because of the fracked up pricing of the books I’m interested in, where the ebook version is significantly more expensive than the dead-trees version¹.

In the comments on that post², and indie author, Nathan Lowell, suggested I give the indies a shot. They typically have a saner pricing model, and they also don’t get as much exposure as the mainstream / high volume authors.

quick ride to cochrane

For my morning ride, I headed west on 1A to Cochrane, to take on the epic hill. Beautiful morning for a ride…

That dip in the middle is the Cochrane hill. About 200m of elevation over just 3km. It’s a fun climb :-)

Ramping up the Co-op in Hippie Hosting Co-op

The Hippie Hosting Co-op was started by the idea of friends and colleagues pitching in to share resources to run a server together. It kind of took off from there. In the months since the launch, it’s grown to over 80 members¹, most of whom were attracted by the idea². And it’s continued to grow.

But, we’re reaching a point where we need to make some decisions as a co-op. For this to work, it has to be more than just a discount web hosting provider³. We need to be in this together. For the server to handle the number of users it has now, the costs to the co-op are $186/month⁴⁵ . We’ve been lucky enough to have a bucket of cash to kick things off, but we’re going to burn through what’s left of that in a couple of months.

The Dead Moocmen - #2BIG2FAIL

debut release by The Dead Moocmen, including a painfully noisy track from yours truly. Thankfully, the other contributors have actual talent etc…

University of Calgary opts out of Access Copyright

The Provost announced today:

The University of Calgary has announced that they will not enter into an Access Copyright model licence but instead will manage copyright compliance and payments in-house.

The Copyright Office in Libraries and Cultural Resources has been expanded and new tracking software, Ares, has been purchased. Information Technologies is working closely with LCR to implement the software, integrate it with Blackboard and link it to other campus systems as required.. Library staff has begun working with the software which will later be rolled out to all members of the University community.

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2012 Banff Gran Fondo

What an awesome ride. 1500 riders, with highways through the Rockies reserved for bikes. Epic.

a few more photos and the Strava page for the ride.