Belize A Go Go
Hot. Lots of fish. Big fish. And coconuts. Finally cracked open a random coconut and feasted wildly on its raw untamed flesh. A bit rangy. So much for childhood dreams.
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Big Country
Just finished driving 3,900 km (2,400 miles) from San Francisco to Sylvania. Left on Wednesday, arrived today. Drove through three time zones. Saw lots of landscape. I now have a visceral feel for how wide North America is in physical terms. If you are around 2 metres tall (6 feet), then given perfect visibility a flat horizon is around 5 km distant (3 miles). So assuming we drove pretty much west to east along I-80 (which is pretty accurate), then our journey consisted of fixing on a spot on the horizon and driving to it, then repeating that process 780 times. I have now seen a lot of desert, an enormous plume of dust and smoke from a giant forest fire burning near us, the weirdly horrible salt marshes and ancient dead lake beds of Utah, the upended vast sandstone fossil beds of Utah and Wyoming, the windsscoured Burren-like alientated Wymoming plains, lots of extraordinary mesas, the improbable vastness of Nebraska, and lots and lots of heavily federal subsidized corn welfare crops growing in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
More later.
Limits to Growth
Well, in preparation for the big move, I bought 4 250GB drives, two of these external firewire dual cases, did the EnableDynamicConversionFor1394 trick, and rigged up a ~1TB hard drive near-line backup.
The sad thing is that I notice that though hard drive capacities have increased tremendously, this has not been tracked by a similar increase in read/write speeds. And of course, the old PCI/Firewire connection limits the throughput.
But anyway, it took just under 4 days to do a complete backup of around 720GB of data, and another 36 hours to do a byte-for-byte verify. That’s just too damn slow!
DNS
Server is visible again from most parts of the Internet – the slowdown was updating DNS. It took “24-48 hours” for the Registrar to update its entry, and now it apparently takes another 24 hours or so for the new meehawl.com name resolution to propagate out from all the root nameservers. This needs to be fixed!
Dumbing Down
So we’re moving in a week or so and will be effectively homeless for a couple of months. I am moving the website to a new server for the interim but it is a freebie that doesn’t support PHP or MySQL so the comments, forum, and associated services have had to be curtailed.
I think it’s important to keep the wedding website up as long as possible…
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