In which Dina patiently uses our pumpkin carving saws on two large specimens.

We took a short trip north to the coast in the spring, camping a few nights at the Bodega Dunes site in Sonoma Coast SP. This bird was interested in our activities, although not as aggressive as some distant cousins at San Simeon.

NASA Ames had an event last year, with much model rocketry on the airfield. This model Saturn V was one of the most impressive rockets fired, and I was happy to catch it as it took off.

The dock at the cottage. Weathered, if not gnarly.

I was amused by the modification to this sign. (O.P.P. is short for Ontario Provincial Police; C.P.O. for Community Policing Office; C-3PO for a particular protocol droid.)

“Today, a megayacht is indispensable,” said Olivier Milliex, head of yacht finance at the Dutch bank ING. “It’s not like 15 years ago, when a yacht was a luxury item.”

Hmm. I don’t have one, so I think “indispensible” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “megayacht ownership is assumed”?

I did get to admire the CBC election night coverage. Check out the density of this snapshot of reporting from a British Columbia riding:

The screen is reporting 22 numbers—more when more parties or independent candidates were standing—which seems pretty high for a television graphic (plus the party associations, candidate and riding names, and the riding’s location in the country). The beige field is a good neutral background for the presentation of the range of colours needed to handle the multiple parties participating.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the confusing artwork behind Peter Mansbridge and his panel, which lacked the elegance of the reporting screen. (The panel’s banter wasn’t that entertaining, but I get the impression Senator Segal is quite an operator.)

Thanks! dina

Supervolcano, a docudrama about a mega-eruption at Yellowstone, was shown in the UK this past weekend on BBC and will be shown here in April on the Discovery Channel.

Overview. Last year, we shipped out a total of over 850 MB of data, through the thin little upstream pipe our DSL line offers. Log analysis translates to over 150 000 hits and over 10 000 visitors. Over the year, 24 blog posts were written, three by Dina. Fortnightly posting probably doesn’t mean much, but demonstrates that the domain hasn’t been abandoned. (Perhaps populated by blue sloths, blue snails, or…)

Content. Pages from Benjamin‘s alphabet book remain the most popular real content—and the most often requested by searches. We started a subsite for Nathaniel and a second blog to keep friends apprised of Dina’s father’s illness. The various syndication files are regularly requested, and the traffic from the blog aggregation sites and the search engines increased noticably for the last third of the year.

A few people are still downloading the dockapps I wrote a couple of years ago. Beyond some logfile software and a few tips, we didn’t provide very much new technical content. The distribution between technical content on my blogs.sun.com blog and on blueslugs.com is consistent; I don’t see a reason to merge the two. (For instance, reviews will remain on this site.)

I attempted some quasi-journalism/opinion about some of the local elections; as that writing is mostly related to my interest in Redwood City as a place to live, it will probably continue at some erratic rate.

System. The server hardware is unchanged, except that an APC UPS was installed to insulate the system from the local power sags we’ve been seeing. The small Shuttle system barely taxes the UPS so we should be able to survive even half hour outages easily. (By survive, I mean preserve uptime(1).) With Nathaniel’s arrival, the office (and so the server) was relocated to the cottage (where I spent many a late night the past six months).

blueslugs.com is now running a recent express release of Solaris 10 x86, complete with smf(5) service conversions for some of the software services. Much of the server software is precompiled and fetched from blastwave.org or one of its mirrors.

Future. I don’t think there’s any pressing need to modify the server’s hardware; the software we’ll upgrade occasionally with new Solaris releases. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures with the phone on my camera (or whatever)—so much so that Ben’s not satisfied with a toy cellphone that lacks a camera. Those images need to reach the web somehow. No resolutions to post more; perhaps a little one to post better.