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Travel, Time, TV, Chromium browser, Linode upgrade

Gosh, my blog has been full of work, work, work and seriousness these past few weeks.

I did mention my jaunt off to San Francisco a couple weeks ago to visit MJ (yay!). I stayed in last weekend and worked on projects, but this weekend am doing another insane-weekend-trip and am road tripping down to New Orleans with my friend Brent on Saturday, who wanted company during the 20 hour drive down. Sunday I’m taking an evening flight from NOLA back to PHL. It’s a good thing I enjoy flying! Sleep? I’ll find some time to sleep, but I’d also really like to check out NOLA for a couple hours too since I’ve never been there. Yeah, I’ll sleep on the plane.

I neglected wallaceandgromit.net again, but this past weekend I managed to get through the backlog and post two entries:

It’s sad that I have been so lousy at keeping it updated, once I get going with an update I have fun but motivating myself to doing it has been tricky. So I have a new strategy! 3rd Thusday of the month is now on my calendar as my wallaceandgromit.net update evening. Speaking of which, I’ve started getting much better at budgeting my time. I am not sure I’m actually getting more done with better time management, but I am feeling less stressed and much less guilty about taking breaks to zone out and watch X-Files.

X-Files! I’ve been snagging the series DVDs as they go on sale (can frequently find each season for $20, selling their TV shows so cheap is one thing FOX really has done right, I couldn’t justify the cost at all otherwise, you know what I’d do instead? Torre…. uh, not watch them at all, of course!). So I now have up through Season 5, and the movie, on DVD and am currently watching Season 3, I forgot how much I loved this show. There is something so comforting about the government conspiracies and aliens of the 90s. Considering stopping here with my collection, the show certainly went downhill after the movie, even if Season 6 was still watchable, 7th was a disappointment. And after Mulder left? Sorry, terrible.

Also on my watching-radar is MST3K. They’ve released a lot of the episodes on DVD, but there were still gaps in my collection which I’ve now filled. Exciting! All MSTs at my fingertips! I’ve seen most of them already, so I’m having it on in the background while I’m working on other things, watching them all from the KTMA era, pausing frequently to enjoy. I’ve also been watching the new season of Bullshit! and have Burn Notice queued up to watch soon.

I’m in love with the Chromium browser. I never tried any of the Linux builds because of their “this is unstable and crashes all the time” status, but lately I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds. Given the smaller memory footprint of FireFox and my limited needs there I decided to give it a go on my Mini9. I was quickly pleased with the similar behavior to FireFox keybinding-wise, nothing new to learn here and after giving Opera a chance again recently I learned that I’d grown to accustom to the FireFox addressbar smart completion that I can’t live happily without it – the Chromium browser build has it! So I could hit the ground running with use, but what really stole my heart? It’s light and FAST. Even in XFCE the tabs are smooth, popping tabs out into new windows is easy. I have over 100 labels so I’d grown used to Gmail being a bit sluggish in FireFox on my mini9, so used to it that I didn’t quite realize it was slow until I saw how fast it was in Chromium browser. So this morning I hopped on my desktop for work and was quickly annoyed with how slow FireFox was. Wow. As of this evening Chromium browser is now running on my desktop too.

I upgraded my Linode from a 360 to a 540 today. For the extra $10/mo I get an additional 180M RAM, 8G of HDD space and 100G of transfer. It was the RAM that was causing my heartache. I’ve been fiddling with the Apache2 configuration file to keep Apache running within the 360M limitations, but as I add more services to my Linode it quickly became apparent that it would be much less trouble and I’d get better performance from biting the bullet and going up to 540M. The process was easy, I submitted a ticket and my Linode was only down for about 10 minutes while the data was moved, it all came back up perfectly like nothing happened. Hooray Linode!

Now I need to get to sleep.

2 Comments

  • RoboNuggie

    I thought season 8 was very good (9 not), the best since season 5. I liked Dogget (sp?)…. he has some great stories in his initial run, not so much in the ninth apart from a couple, one being ‘Closure’ – very tear-inducing…. and the latest movie is a must see, enjoyed it immensely, quite dark in it’s subject matter. Then again, I always preferred Millenium to the Xfiles, but that’s me.

    Is air fair cheap over there? The number of times you are plane hopping I sure hope it is ;o)

  • Charles Cox

    Burn Notice is one hell of a great tv series, i love spy movies and tv series like this one.;-*