Over lunch today, my close friends at IBM informed me that my hyperlinks were broken. Thinking it was some server problem, I assured them it would be fixed soon. Well, about an hour after they left, I decided to check and see what was up. Apparently my .htaccess file was deleted, and luckily I had a backup. The .htaccess file for this website allows the “permalinks” to forward to the appropriate file. So, what appears to be /about/contact is actually redirected in .htaccess as /index.php?pagename=… Complicated, but alas it’s now fixed…thanks to backups.
This evening, I was making my nightly rounds of the various blogs that I read and I came across something very interesting. Dave Hitz, the Founder and Executive Vice President of NetApp has a blog. In his most recent post, “People Die,” Dave learned about some real world business situations dealing with storage:
I learned that if an airline can’t access manifests and passenger lists, then their planes aren’t allowed to take off. After 4 hours, if they still can’t access their data, then every plane in their fleet is required to land at the nearest airport!
I learned that if a drug company can’t produce the right drug testing data, even 10 or 20 years after the drug is approved, then the FDA can shut down production of that drug in every factory that the company has.
View: Network Appliance, Inc. – DaveBlog
Today begins our final week in Tucson. Rebecca and I will depart for North Carolina on the morning of October 1. This week will be very hectic as we prepare for the move. The good news is that Rebecca was able to transfer with her current employer, D.R. Horton.
We are both very excited but very stressed.
I have just updated the travel page to include the weather for the Raleigh/Durham area. I also added “Places I’ve lived,” which is debatable whether or not it should be on the Travel page or the About page. Basically it’s just a list of the places I’ve lived with the hyperlink reference to Google Maps for each town or city.
For those of you out there with degrees in Computer Science, you will definitely find this humorous. I think even those of you who don’t know anything about CS will even find this funny. A “computer science gangsta rapper” named MC Plus+ has all of his songs* from the album Algorhythms available for download on his website, www.mcplusplus.com.
MC Plus+ is the founder and indisputably the #1 greatest computer science gangsta rapper ever. He is to CS gangsta rap what a blue screen is to Windows, what Vaseline, maple syrup and sour cream are to a good time. He’s putting CS on the map, producing raps for students from computer science departments around the world. With another 4 years still at Purdue, trying to get that PhD, he has promised to keep producing CS hip-hop for all the grad students in the struggle.
* Warning: Songs contain explicit lyrics
As most of you know by now, Hurricane Rita is now a Category 5 hurricane. It has been for the last 24 hours or so. Looking at the coordinate map, it’s slowed down a bit this morning, but not by much. Last night, the hurricane had winds of 175 mph and the pressure was at 897 mb. This morning, the winds are down to 165 mph with the pressure at 907 mb. The forecasters are (hoping and) predicting that Rita could be a Category 3 before it hits Texas. I still urge anyone near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to not take any chances….go somewhere safe. Here are some interesting links on hurricanes:
Hurricane Rita – MSN Virtual Earth
Hurricane Rita – Tracking Coordinates
Hurricane Tracker
WRAL Stormtracker
NOAA National Hurricane Center
While reading Robert Scoble’s blog, I saw this entry about the College Puzzle Challenge. A quick glance at the puzzles from last year’s event proves that I would have no chance to get one right. This particular one (5AMU3L 5AY5) is very interesting, and even though I know how to do the conversions, I would have never guessed that. The problem with the puzzles is that they give you no hints on where to start. When you see a large sequence of numbers, that appear to be in base 3, you really have what seems like an infinite number of possibilites. Maybe that’s why I didn’t go to MIT, Columbia, or Cornell. 
This has been out for almost a week now, but as usual, I’m just now sharing it with you all. If any of you have been reading about the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), you probably already know about this. Bill Gates teamed up with Napoleon Dynamite to make a funny spoof video…you should check it out:
View: IFILM – Viral Videos: Bill Gates Goes to College (2005)
What a sad, sad time. The house that I just recently built has now been on the market for 1 week now. I delayed in blogging about my house sale, but now feel it is time to blog about it. The process has been pretty nice, thanks to our Realtor, David Houge. I highly recommend him if any of my readers are in the Tucson area looking to buy or sell a home. He is very knowledgeable, and very helpful.
My house is listed under the MLS #2525401:
House Listing 1
House Listing 2
House Listing 3
After seeing a post titled Of The Joys of IE 7 RSS Feeds from Dan Foesch, I decided to try the IE7 RSS Feed for my site. It appears to work perfectly. I am using IE 7.0.5112.0 in Windows Vista Beta 1. Of course, Dan wrote his feed page himself basing it off of Slashdot, whereas I’m relying on the Wordpress feed generation. Apparently IE7 uses case-sensitive tags…nice find.
