spring cleaning
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.