Peaceful Revolution

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Lloyd

Having watched the first part of the BBC documentary film series, “The Power of Nightmares” written and produced by Adam Curtis, which is freely available for download, I found it to be an interesting lesson on the recent history of Egypt, one of birthplaces of modern Islamic terrorism.

This context makes the peaceful overthrow of the Egyptian Dictator Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak all the more awesome!

I’m eager and anxious to see what comes next for the Egyptian people, and other people peacefully fighting for their freedom!

The Best Long Introduction to a Company and a Product

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Lloyd

On Monday Asana had an open house publicly revealed the state of the project management web service they are developing. Justin Rosenstein did an amazing job presenting the vision of Asana and doing a demo of the Asana product.

I don’t think I’ve seen a better long introduction to a company and a product. The talk is about 45 minutes, and Justin maintains his mellow. He is articulate, cheerful, and on point throughout.

Ma.tt: not a robot

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Lloyd

Even after working for Matt Mullenweg for over four years now (my longest job!), it still totally pumps me up how forward thinking, thoughtful, and human Matt is.

From the ThemeShaper article “Premium Themes on WP.com, the backstory“:

“…it became obvious to me that we had to figure out the GPL issues first so introducing a WP.com marketplace wouldn’t inadvertently harm the WordPress community by sucking the air out of .org theme development, so I held off the revenue and success we knew this would bring to work out the GPL issues out with the community.

…

But very explicitly this is an experiment. We’re not psychic and there are many open questions: Will anyone buy these things? How will the private forums work for support, both for our users and partners? How long does it take us to review and get a new theme online? What’s the most effective price ranges? How many themes and partners should we have? How do we promote the premium themes, while balancing adding new free ones? Will any of them ever be more popular than the Smoothie? (51,109 blogs and counting.)

Go read the full article.

Could WordPress have a better BDFL?

Aside

My six month old daughter reminds me that the world is our playground.

It’s in You to Give

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Lloyd

One of my goals for 2010 was to donate blood regularly.

I’m proud to report that I donated blood four times in 2010 bringing my life time donations to 20.

I’ve already given blood once in 2011!

Because blood is the most precious gift.

Call 1-888 2 DONATE [Canadians] to make the appointment to save a life.

Victoria Elementary School Rankings

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Lloyd

After hearing it discussed on CBC Radio yesterday, I spent some time looking at the Fraser Institute’s controversial “Report Card on British Columbia’s Elementary Schools 2010” primarily based on BC’s Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) Testing.

As to be expected, it looked like the Victoria public schools that did the best in 2010, and consistently over the last 5 years are in the “best” neighborhoods.

I’m encouraged that it looked to be fairly equal English and French immersion schools, as we don’t intend to go French immersion. We have heard that if enrolling English consider a full English school.

It’s kind of sad, but expected that our severely underfunded education system would be most successful were supplemented by parents, and where parents put more value on school excellence, and have the energy to be more active in their children’s educations.

I was disappointed, but not surprised that the closest school to our house, Cloverdale Traditional School did not do well. Although, surrounded by some nice neighborhoods, there are also commercial areas close by and (relatively) less expensive homes. I was hopefully that the focus on tradition of the school would give it a significant boost. The reported 49.4% ESL surprised me.

I’m looking forward to reviewing the 2011 reports for elementary and secondary that will come out next month. Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) will be doing a report for the Western Provinces for the first time this year, but only for secondary schools.

Joyent RASH

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Lloyd

Just as I was starting to get in a writing flow my shared web hosting at Joyent had a 31 hr outage.

I never really know what I should expect from shared hosting, it’s all Random A$# Shared Hosting (RASH), but this still pained me.

I emailed Joyent support yesterday:

“Regarding http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=942&pc=2 why is there no final resolution on that thread? Why did it take ~ 31 hours to resolve this issue? What is being done to prevent this issue in the future?

It’s also upsetting when an issue is downplayed as “performance issues” or “slowness”. I couldn’t publish content to my site at all for over a day and a half, and Google Analytics show that few visitors made it to my site those days and those that made it might be thanks to the front end content delivery network CloudFlare.”

The response only made me feel a little better:

“The why didn’t it get updated would be my fault as I didn’t post when the resilver finished.

The why it took 31 hours, is that is how long the resliver process took (minus the losing 5 hours on the first replacement drive failed and had to be replaced a second time)

Sorry about the issue.”

I know I’m a bottom tier customer, and it was a long time ago that Joyent was really in the shared hosting business, but I still imagined them being able to resolve almost any problem within a handful of hours.

It’s worth noting that Joyent has been pretty good to me these past 5 years.

host-tracker.com free 30 minute interval:
2011 :ast week uptime:78.40% Downtime:1 day(s) 7 hour(s)
2010: Yearly uptime: 99.96% Downtime:2 hour(s) 52 min(s)
2009: Yearly uptime: 99.71% Downtime:6 hour(s) 31 min(s) – started monitoring only 2009-03

2008: The first half of 2008 was a dark year on textdrive, and I whined to some people I knew at Joyent back then.
2006-2007: was OK on textdrive.

Super OJ

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Lloyd

After having an unhealthy breakfast this morning I had a glass of orange juice. I just realized that ever since learning that the vitamin C in orange juice inhibits the conversion of nitrates to nitrosamines in your stomach, I’ve been viewing OJ as a super food.

OJ can’t save me from poor eating!

A Fool’s Wisdom

A fool and his blog are soon parted.