The Blizzard of 2007
This has been one helluva a weather year. In Fall City, we got about 14 inches and as of 11:04 pm, it's still coming down. Other parts of Seattle got less than an inch but we were hammered here in the foothills.
Poor Amy left Kirkland (about 16 miles from home) just after 4:20 and is still 10 miles away here at 11:05. She's ok but behind a bunch of dumbasses who can't drive in snow. For some reason, people up here think it's perfectly acceptable to abandon there car in the middle of the road and just leave.
The dogs loved it. Sally absolutely loves the snow and plays Tazmanian Devil until she exhausts herself. Poor Kirby jumped off the deck and was completely submerged. He let out a huge yelp and jumped back. Poor widdle guy.
Check out the pics in my Flickr Gallery.
[EDIT]: Amy got home at 12:11 AM last night, nearly an 8 hour commute. FROM KIRKLAND.
Take a look at this normally very busy section of I-90 near Issaquah. Tons of abandoned cars right on the highway. A total cluster...
Wi-Fi On The Water!
Right now, I'm about 300 yards out into Puget Sound on the Edmonds-Kingston Ferry but have high speed internet access for free. How cool! I think I remember reading something about internet access on the ferries but have only used a ferry once in the six years I've been here. I opened up my MacBook Pro and saw an available wireless network. How Cool!!
Off To The Olympic Peninsula
Even before I moved to Seattle in the fall of 2000, I had set my sights on a long hike up the beach on the northwest coast of Washington but 6 years later and I haven't been north of Long Beach.
It occured to me yesterday while watching the Seahawks squeak by the Cowboys that I have a unique opportunity to do some exploring and shouldn't pass it up. So starting in a few hours, I'm taking the first Edmonds to Kingstong Ferry and am hitting the Peninsula. The plan is to not have a plan. I have no idea where (or even if) I'll be sleeping, or where I'll go. For safety reasons and to keep my family from freaking out and calling the coast guard at noon today, here is my rough draft:
1) Monday: Rialto Beach to Hole in the Wall (low tide is at 9:54 am), will likely stay somewhere in Forks
2) Tuesday: Point of the Arches & Shi Shi beach
3) Wednesday: Ozette Loop?
4) Thursday: Crescent Lake?
The weather? I'm not looking for a sunny day here. Meteorologists are expecting a pretty good storm to roll in off this part of the coast tomorrow afternoon and I'm hoping to see some pretty impressive surf. Other than mist, most of the rain forms between the beach and the Olympic Mountain foothills 20 miles inland, that being said, I'm still expecting to get extremely wet.
Point of the Arches from the air
I'm taking my good cameras and hopefully there will be some decent pics here in a few days.
WordPress 2.06 Released
Yesterday WordPress released a significant update to the world's most popular CMS. Mainly security fixes but also:
1) HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
2) Comments are filtered to prevent long winded ones from hosing up your well crafted blog layout.
3) Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI environments
And while I'm on this subject, you should checkout Nixcraft's guide to upgrading WordPress in three simple steps via the command line. I used it to upgrade the three WordPress installations I manage on this server and was able to do all three in under 6 minutes (the longest thing was tarring up the directories).
Cloning That Perfect Ubuntu Setup
After recently ending my three year love affair with Gentoo, I moved to Ubuntu when I found Mint, an Ubuntu based distribution that comes preloaded with all the codecs necesary to enjoy multimedia as well as some other tweaks. Debian's dpkg/apt package manager is by far the best in the biz (yes, even better than portage), but I had stayed away from Ubuntu because 1) it's so popular 2) I hate that damn brown theme and 3) it took me a half day of "apt-get install" -ing just to play a damn mp3 file. I understand why but please don't drag me down into your ideology war RMS.
With Mint, it's just install and play! That being said, you'll still need to install some stuff like smbfs (to mount your NAS smb shares), nmap, sshfs, etc, but once you've got it absolutely perfect, you can clone it easily.
While doing some research for this post, I found some crazy ass 50 line awk scrtipts and choked on my Mountain Dew more than once. I've got a better method and no, this doesn't involve the use of dd (which I'm thinking of writing a lengthly post on since I have some time). The idea here is just to export all of the packages I currently have into a text file and then use dpkg to install those on any other debian based machine.
Run this to ask dpkg to export all of your installed packages into a text list:
sudo dpkg --get-selections > installed_packages.txt
On the new machine, copy installed packages.txt to / and use dpkg to import and have apt-get install these packages (after you've run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade of course):
sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed_packages.txt
Then do apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and you're done!
(Source: Knoppix Wiki)
