This recession sucks. Lets face it. Taxes are up. Income is down. Bank fees are up. Interest rates are up. Students are hard to find. Things suck.
But if you have money, some offers are insane. Like Native Instruments Komplete 5 offer. Instead of being like $1000+ for basically everything Native Instruments makes. They are offering it for $399. 60 gigs of sounds. Thousands of instruments. Drool factor 9 engaged.
Had some major problems with my DNS. Seems Worldwidedns.net had a Denial of service attack. Meaning I couldn’t get email or access my sites. So….while trying to do something about it, I discovered that networksolutions offers DNS with their domains. Well, problem solved then!
Posted by ericdano on Apr 28, 2009 in News, Thoughts
This economy sucks. Let’s not mince words about it. So, I’m throwing my hat into the ring to supplement my income. Got a theatre show you need a reed player for, need an arrangement of something? Email me. I have nearly a 100 theatre shows under my belt, and have played countless gigs. And some of my arrangements are here.
In fact, I’ll even offer up my immense computer skillz for hire as well. I was an MIS (Manager of Information Systems) for a startup for 2 years after all. Back in the day. Yeah. I am a Mac and Linux expert (heck, you are reading this on an Atom server that I setup and run, which used to be a FreeBSD server). And probably Windows as well (I do have a XP PC). I know networking. I know NAS (Networked Attached Storage). I know the internet. I just…..know. Ask anyone.
Posted by ericdano on Apr 12, 2009 in News, Thoughts
Ok, pretty much everything went ok on moving from a 1997’s era Dual Pentium III 450 server with an Adaptec RAID card running FreeBSD 4 to an 2008 era Intel Atom processor mini computer/server running Ubuntu Server Linux 8.1. It really is amazing how small and quiet it is. Supposedly draws like 60 watts of power. I eventually either want to RAID 0 the hard drive, or move to a SSD.
Two things still are nagging me in the move. My shell prompt says “ericdano@(none):~$” and when I do a sudo, I get “sudo: unable to resolve host (none)” I spent a good hour or so googling for a fix for this, and nothing has worked.
Second thing is that I cannot connect to the MySQL server on it from remote computers on the same network. Again, I thought I just had to grant privs to a user at %, but that doesn’t seem to work.
Other than that, I’m very happy with it. It is a lot faster, upgrading things should be even more simple than they were on FreeBSD. Plus, the end of the month they release version 9 that has ext4 filesystem on it which should make things pretty amazing.
Posted by ericdano on Apr 8, 2009 in News, Thoughts
So, I finally decided to retire my ancient server. It is what is running this site. A Tyan Dual Pentium III board running FreeBSD 4 with an Adaptec RAID card mirroring two 40 gig drives. It is huge, loud, and drains a lot of power. And the performance is lagging recently. I decided to get an <A HREF=”http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=Wind_PC&class=npc”MSI Wind PC</A> to upgrade it. 2 gigs of ram, 250 gig hard drive. It will draw hardly any power, be smaller, and quieter. Probably going to put Ubuntu Linux on it (Server version). I will miss the RAID thing though, and probably will have to think of something to keep all my data safe. Perhaps taking out the DVD drive and getting another SATA drive to run software RAID or Rsync or something.
And, I can use it as a bittorrent client so I would not have to have my Windoze PC on downloading torrents. That is a good thing too. Should come this week. I think. I hope. We shall see.
Ok, there were some major disappointments on the Anime front. Ride Back, Tytania, Viper’s Creed, Crazy Shrine Maidens. These failed in my book. Soul Eater finally finished. That was a good anime. Index was pretty good too.
Ones that are on-going: One Piece of course is the best. Chromed Shell Regios, Sora wo Kakeru Shoujou (The girl that jumps through space) are good. Bleach? WTF is going on there. It catches up to the Manga too often and goes off on lame ass fillers. Meh. White Album……kinda of like soft porn. It won’t be back till the fall, but I’ll wait.
There are probably some others that finished, but I don’t remember.
New ones. The one everyone is talking about is a reboot of Full Metal Alchemist. If you recall the original series and the movie, you’ll recall a number of characters were killed off, and that Edward and Al were stuck in some sort of parallel word with no powers. Well, the new series forgets all that and pretty much seems to ignore everything that happened in the movie, and from like episode 15 of the original series. Stupid.
Finally hooked up Twitter to Facebook. I have a Facebook account, who doesn’t, but never use it. I do use Twitter a LOT, so…….now Facebook will get all my Tweets and crap. I suppose I could/should get a Plugin for Wordpress to follow my Tweets…..
I still don’t see the point of Facebook though…..seems like……I dunno, Myspace except less trashy?
Saw this <a href=”http://www.cinematical.com/2009/02/27/discuss-good-music-from-mediocre-films/”>article from Cinematical</A> listing 3 movies that were bad, but had great soundtracks. Dragonheart was one of them. Awesome film score I must say. Waterworld has a great score too.
Still think that Anime soundtracks are way better generally than american movies. Especially TV shows. Most of those soundtracks are just stupid.