Out of Cheese

Tomorrow afternoon my landlord is coming over to fix the heat. As I rearranged things to give him access to the area under the stairs where the heater is, I had to move a few boxes out of the way. One was the box for my old 22″ Cinema Display, which I’ve known about for years. The other was quite a surprise — a PowerMac G4 box containing an 867 MHz G4. I’d completely forgotten I owned that computer. I remember the one before it very clearly — a 233 MHz beige G3 — and the one after it was a 15″ Titanium PowerBook which was in use until I got a MacBook Pro last March — but I’d entirely forgotten about the PowerMac G4.

Now that I think back on it I remember using it while I was at Microsoft, but that’s entirely because I remember using the Cinema Display then and the display presumably had a computer connected to it. I think I bought it just before I moved to Washington, and I stopped using it as soon as I moved back to California because in the California apartment I ended up using my laptop in the living room instead of using the desktop in my bedroom as I did in Washington.

Now that I know (again) that I have the PowerMac, I wonder what I’ll do with it. I doubt I’ll throw it away because I’ve never thrown away a computer. I still have the PowerBook 5300c I bought at the start of my freshman year of college and every computer I’ve owned since except for a Pismo PowerBook that I gave to someone last year. Maybe I should find someone to give the PowerMac to….

There’s something very cool about seeing an ad on TV for something you’ve worked on. This is actually the first time that’s happened to me. Strangely, there were never TV ads for MRJ or Rotor….

In the run-up to Macworld I think it’s safe to say I was a little bit busy. I think I had one day off between Thanksgiving and January 10th. (December 25th, if you’re curious.) Just in case I needed something to make that time more interesting, the colocation provider where we’d hosted our server for a couple years, CCCP, ran out of money and told everyone to move their servers on fairly short notice.

I’m not surprised that CCCP ran out of money, since their philosophy was to provide colocation services to anyone for free with a “suggested” $50/month donation, ideally to help non-profits run servers. We paid our $50 via automatic bill pay every single month, but quite a few folks simply won’t pay at all when given the option. Somehow CCCP managed to survive for a few years anyway.

After a couple fairly disorganized weeks of trying to figure out where CCCP clients who were actually willing to pay for colo services could go, a bunch of us landed at Cernio. Our server is in a rack there now, merrily doing its thing while we pay even less per month than we did to CCCP. The move wasn’t really something I had time to do, but it seems to have turned out OK in the end.

The heat in my townhouse stopped working Friday night and hasn’t managed to magically fix itself yet. Something like this seems to happen every nine months or so — the air conditioning broke just a few months after I moved in, the heater broke roughly nine months after that, and now it’s broken again. I’d call my landlord and let him know, but I was at work for ten hours today and I’ll be there again tomorrow, so we’ll see when I have time. That, and I always feel like I have to clean things up when he’s coming by, and with the work schedule I’ve kept for the past (insert large number) months things are a bit messy here.

Then again, this is one of the things that’s great about living in California. I’m wearing a couple layers and I’m not cold at all. I don’t have to worry about little things like freezing to death overnight. And on the plus side, I’ll save a few days on the heating bill for this month.

There’s also the fact that I’ve been thinking of moving again. This time it’ll probably be to Mountain View, ideally right by Castro Street. I just have to find the right place. I’ve been scouring Craigslist for months, but the only truly promising places I’ve found showed up as we were in the middle of the push to Macworld and there was no way I could move then. Hopefully another one will show up reasonably soon. It’ll presumably have a working heating system.

(So much writing to catch up on….)

There’s been one big change in my life recently — I’m managing a team now. It’s the same team I’ve been part of since May, so at least I don’t have to get to know a new bunch of people and they don’t have to get to know me. It’s still very different, though. I’ve probably written less code in the past six months than I have at any point since high school, and the things I worry about every day are rather different from what they were before I was managing.

So far I’ve found managing to be quite challenging, but it’s also very rewarding. I have a great team and we’re doing great work. I’ve also learned a lot in the few weeks I’ve been doing this. Perhaps the most surprising is just how long reading email can take — I’ve had days when I’ve come home from work at 8 p.m. and spent six hours catching up on the day’s email. Maybe that’s really a sign that I need to get off some mailing lists….

For months now I’ve been planning to switch from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve been driven over the edge by a flood of comment spam over the past year, for which the only solution I’d found with Movable Type was turning off comments altogether on old posts (and sometimes on newer ones). I’ve heard very good things about the Wordpress Akismet plug-in, so I’ve moved everything over to WordPress with the hope that comment spam will mostly vanish. We’ll see.

When I finally sat down to do the migration tonight, I figured it’d take hours. After all, importing from Radio Userland to Movable Type took a very long time when I did that a few years ago. I was pleasantly surprised this time around. Despite some out of date instructions on the Wordpress site and some odd problems with the software — why is the memory limit on imports so low? — nearly everything went smoothly.

Permalinks are undoubtedly all messed up. Sorry about that. If enough people complain bitterly maybe I’ll do something about it, but for now I’m just happy that I have a site where I can post things and folks can comment back without me having to spend more time deleting comment spam than I spend writing posts.