Rotorglow

Ready for a snooze? Here we go.

Recently, things have been a little tough on the tech side at RotorHQ:

My car got rear-ended (again) and popped a fuel pump (again). The former was cosmetic, the latter (combined with all the snow we got) kept the car in a snow drift for all of January and most of February. All's well now, and it finally stopped snowing long enough to put the new summer tires on. First race on them is tomorrow.

The old, departed NeoPhi had a little hiccup back in March. The immediate result of that is that after a few hours of email downtime, I'm now (thanks to DanielR) enjoying Google Apps as my email interface, with a stupendous reduction in spam getting through to my inbox. Seriously. To the point of almost non-existence. I've never really liked the actual Gmail interface, and juggling two separate Google accounts is a little cumbersome, but it's ok for now. I even successfully moved more than a gigabyte of email from various personal and work accounts dating back to 1996 up from a desktop machine to Gmail, with the associated impact of being able to gauge the evolution of (to name but two) my personal angst and professional demeanor via Gmail's handy and comprehensive search syntax. Yikes!

Then the new, cloud-hosted NeoPhi had a bit of a hiccup over the last few days, which all three of you who visit this blog might have noticed. A large part of Amazon's cloud computing cluster, on which the new NeoPhi webserver (but not mailserver) lives, was down for the late part of the week. It affected a lot of companies who try to make money, so other folks were probably more upset than I've been.

Even before this week's Amazon outage, I'd been toying with shutting down this ramshackle blog, and switching over to Tumblr fully. Which itself might seem a little strange, because (A) Tumblr had a 36-hour+ outage in December and (B) it uses Amazon for storing data. But now that Flickr has removed Movable Type support, the time has probably come to switch over to the Tumblr platform, either hosted on NeoPhi or Tumblr itself.

As the faint tracks of my Id through the forest, I'll keep this up for historical reasons. And I'll let (both of) you know, via a post here, when I finish the Tumblr redesign and work out the hosting details.

sunset
Originally uploaded by rotorglow at 12 Nov '10, 2.48pm EST.

I'm going camping for the weekend. I'll be trying to avoid finding out who won the final Grand Prix of the year (and with it the 2010 World Championship). So don't tell me anything about that.

But if Jayson Werth signs with the Phillies over the weekend, feel free to drop me a txt.

underpass, South Boston
Originally uploaded by rotorglow at 5 Nov '10, 12.42am EDT PST.

I'm still not writing much, but I'm starting to use Tumblr more. You know, just FYI.

Game 1. I'm wearing my Fightin' Phils shirt.

Giant Cadillac, heavily processed
Originally uploaded by rotorglow at 27 Sep '10, 7.01pm EDT PST.

I'm waiting for the Phillies to clinch. In the meantime, here's a Cadillac.

One of the things I like most about summer is the muggy, quiet nights when it's late and even in the city the crickets are chirping. There's something strangely calming about the hazy, orange moon crescent, and how it hangs low and waxing, rising later and later (or staying lower and lower at a given time each night, sidereal and precession effects being what they are), getting more and more unfamiliar, because, really, who's up at 3am on a summer night when the moon is low?, reminding you always of how things wind down.

hurricane watch, Chatham, MA
Originally uploaded by rotorglow at 6 Sep '08, 7.28pm EDT PST.

Two years ago this weekend, I was on the Cape during another hurricane watch.

Lake House: night
Originally uploaded by rotorglow at 1 Aug '10, 11.46pm EDT PST.

Where I was last weekend. It looks even better in the daylight.

Nearly-full moon, and Jupiter.

New England Demolition and Salvage
Originally uploaded by rotorglow at 21 Jul '10, 12.31am EDT PST.

And that means salvage warehouses in depressed whaling towns.