So I used to religiously backup my data...well, at least up until the last major hardware failure I had back in '06, at which point I discovered that it didn't really matter because the "important" data that I was backing up wasn't enough to fully recover. So I just switched to buying reliable equipment, which has worked out much better. Unfortunately it means that in 10 years I wont be able to come back and spend a week distracting myself by popping CD's in & out, reminiscing...

ANYWAY, while digging through those backups (& slating them for destruction), I came across a bunch of photos from high school Spring Break (2001), when my family went down to Clearwater, Florida for the week. So here's the album (sorry for the low resolutions!):

• 2001-03 Spring Break (Kennedy Space Center, Florida)

Heh…okay, so I was already a geek back then, and only took pictures of the day we spent at Kennedy Space Center, and didn't take any of the beach...or Busch Gardens...or...well, Florida itself...

Now playing: Julie Fader – Outside In – 08 Goodbye Before Hello

Clearing out a couple months accumulation of things...my excuse for so few is "the holidays"...

• Birthday gift to self? : Bruce Schneier doll
• Kind of reassuring (at the time...not so much now...) : Everyon is just an email away
• Neat visualization : Link (via The rise of nations)
• And so the robot revolution begins! (I mean it this time!) : Roomba saves child from deadly viper
• awww... : Cute overload
• There were 6 cats at home this Christmas. *6*. : Tracking a cat
• (For Emil) : fine, your desktop isn't that bad : unused icons
• Interesting idea? : outsourcing art
• While it's a very lovely peacock...ouch...just ouch on the choice of medium : british ink

Now playing: Brandi Carlile – Give Up The Ghost – 08 I Will

Waaaay back, right after graduating from high school, I went to Europe with my French class from high school. Unfortunately, I didn't have a digital camera yet at that point, so all the pictures had to be scanned. While digging around, I found the scans of those pictures, so after a bit of cleaning up, here they are!

• 2003-06 French Trip

Now playing: The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights – 07 Only Good Days Caught on Camera
(okay, so that's not actually the song I'm listening too...actually, it's 11 I Hurt the Ones That Love Me, but the title of track 7 seemed more appropriate for a picture post)
(i.e., putting in all (2) the links took longer than I was planning...)

I wish there was a way in Windows Live Photos to let me get an RSS feed of the albums, not just the photos within an album...

• Crabbing at Rockaway Beach
• Motorcycle riding at Bend, Oregon (& the return trip)
• Miscellaneous from November
• Emptied Reservoir #3 in Washington Park, Portland, Oregon
• Christmas in Indiana

(they're in order of date taken, not necessarily date posted...yeah, I need to be better about posting things on time...)

Now playing: You Say Party! We Say Die! – XXXX – 10 Heart of Gold

Happy New Year to everyone! Here's to next year!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

(pictures of food to come later...)

Now playing: Pick a Piper - Rooms

Despite what some people might think, I'm not writing journal entries on Facebook. No, these are blog posts from my one, true web presence: www.ntldr.net (www.ntldr.com…ntldr.net…ntldr.com…whatever, they're all just host headers for a single IIS 7.5 site).

See, there's this nice little part of the web called RSS. It lets content be automatically published in a nifty machine-readable way. I even wrote about it years ago… Anyway, its relevance here is that there's a RSS feed published by www.ntldr.net that some other sites (such as Windows Live Profiles, and notably Facebook) are subscribed to. These two other sites are able to pick up a change I make to the site (add/change/delete blog posts) and inform their users. So everyone stays up to date and everything is happy-fun-unicorn-prancing-in-the-sun times.

Note that I called out 2 sites there. Never wrote anything about the Windows Live addition of syndication. Now, some might say that's because I don't have any Windows Live Network members (fine, I'll say what everyone is thinking "he doesn't have any Friends"), to which I'd reply "ha! But who's got the traffic analysis to show otherwise!". (note that this argument applies to Windows Live Friends; I don't have nearly the resources (or wherewithal!) to stalk everyone in real life…and no, I'm not looking for grants from Homeland Security to change that…) In truth, I just don't have a problem with the way Windows Live implemented the feature. But I do have a few issues & comments regarding how Facebook does it.

One issue is feed refresh speed. I made a post midafternoon Sunday. I log into Facebook to catch up on friends*, go to my profile for some reason (or maybe just look at the Facebook Feeds), and notice that it hasn't picked up the post made hours earlier. Now, this isn't really that big of a problem. I mean, how often do I really make posts? How critical is it that people get these & read it that second? It's not like I'm giving out stock tips or something here.

But Facebook has this weird insistence that the timestamps of the "journal" entries be different from the timestamps on the posted content. So in combination with slow refreshes of the feed, it's possible to get into situations where multiple posts are made, Facebook picks them all up at once, and then totally screws up the order of the posts. So much for being able to carefully lead readers through a series of posts! Just think how much fun it would be to read a mystery novel where the final chapter shows up before the mystery is even presented!** Even more annoying is that the order seems to depend on what view is presented. This happened to me later Sunday evening, after everything finally refreshed, with friends viewing the "oh noes! I goofed up!" post before reading the much more recent "praise of Hyper-V" post that reflected a much better personal mood.

Going in a slightly different direction, Facebook proxies every request to the host website from its users through itself. I can't really take issue with this behavior, because I think the original intent is to protect users from malicious content. Facebook pulls the entire feed content down and presents it as a user journal entry. So if I wanted to be malicious and put things like Web bugs, or perhaps a little bit of script to go do evil, nefarious acts, that trash could gain legitimacy and bypass restrictions because it's now on Facebook's site. Proxying also allows for another level of caching to occur (I suspect I may be seeing this behavior in my servers logs), thus improving performance and maybe letting the source site stay up if something becomes really, really popular (obviously good). However, as a site admin, I get kind of nervous about the blatant way this seems to be occurring, and the lack of control I seem to have over it. Plus, it wouldn't really be necessary if the design were tweaked a bit to not trick users into thinking everything was Facebook & originated on Facebook & that Facebook is the Real Internet.***

Tied to the content proxying is content reformatting. RSS feeds are XML; entries can contain XHTML and all its glorious formatting. As part of "journal-ifying", the original site's CSS and formatting are ignored, and the Facebook styles get applied. In most cases, this is fine, and works well to create a more seamless experience. But on a couple of my entries, the formatting has reacted strangely and the resulting Frankenstein looks horrible. Again, I much prefer the Windows Live route where users get just a headline & a brief snippet to catch their interest. Unfortunately, I doubt that model will ever be picked up by Facebook. They're too focused on keeping people on the site and making money off those people, even if they are misrepresenting the origins of the content that those people are coming to see. Now, I don't really have a problem with a company making money. I just don't like seeing ads next to things I've written. I don't run ads on www.ntldr.net, and I don't plan on ever doing so.

Umm…so…"boo! to these Facebook journal entries!" visit www.ntldr.net! ;-D (I'll conveniently ignore how many, many more people (and better targeted! these people might actually care about this stuff!) have probably read these posts now via Facebook than have ever visited my actual site…)

* this part's hypothetical; despite having an account there since the beginning of 2004, I'm still not really sure why people use Facebook

** not that I'm planning on featuring detective stories at any point, but it'd be nice to have the flexibility for me to make that choice

*** some exaggeration added for dramatic effect…please don't "eliminate" me if I've stumbled across the super-secret plans for world domination!

Now playing: Lifehouse – Who We Are – 02 First Time

Hmm... can this get posted from Microsoft Office Word 2010 Beta?

Here, let's try a picture too:

& how about a category too while I'm at it?

Update: okay, so can I update this too?

Okay, Hyper-V is cool. It's fast, easy to use, has a lot more features, & generally works very nicely. Much better than Virtual Server 2005 R2. Moved this website over to a new VM (upgraded to 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 in the process...yeah!) on my new server, and it's working great (I hope...guess I'll know for sure if any comments get posted...:)). Tried moving another VM over just by coping the VHD file, but that didn't work so well. Didn't really expect it to before trying, but then got hopeful when first starting it up and trying to install the integration components, and now have finally accepted that the two solutions (VS2005R2 & Hyper-V) are just too different for things to work.

Not sure I care that much for Hyper-V's licensing model though...yes, the basic product is free, but to get the "good" management tools you have to shell out the big $$$'s for System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Guess I'm just greedy and want everything for free... ;) (no, seriously, would it be too hard to have a management interface that allows you to see, at a glance, how many resources have been allocated to the VM's? kind of like the old VMRCplus view?)

Now playing: Stabbing Westward – Stabbing Westward – 07 Angel