Burvil's Life: Sanctification in Progress

Doesn’t seem to be any bugs with this version of WordPress, so I’m trying this again in debug mode.

Well, I’ve finally migrated my site off a friend’s server. He was gracious enough to host it for a number of years, but it’s kinda nice to configure the OS, install packages and not having to worry about disk space. I still have to configure some things here and there with the stats packages I use, but for the most part, things are set up. It’s also been a nice learning experience going through the server logs and seeing what kind of attacks come from script kiddies out there. It seems a fair amount seem to be from botnets, as they often use brute force to guess at paths like http://domain/phpmyadmin and so on, and the OS that shows in the browser is often some version of Windows. Of course, there’s the usual robots – google feedfetcher, googlebot, msnbot, yahoo, ask.com, etc. as well.

In putting this site up again, I’m reminded of my good friend and coworker Brad that passed away last year. I put up a photo gallery of him, but realized I hadn’t really wrote about it. Hopefully, I’ll see him in heaven one day.

Christmas was quiet this year. We had dinner at a friend’s place, talked with family and relaxed at home. We’re over on the travel budget this year, with our trip to France and my brother’s wedding. Susan’s still recovering from a cold, too.

I’ve finally got our pictures from France online. I had installed wpg2 to integrate with WordPress, and I think it messed things up. I’ve fixed it, and it’s available here.

I don’t understand why support for servers that cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars is such a hassle.  I can’t remember a support call with any vendor I’ve worked with where it’s been painless – the one very notable exception is Netapp, where the few problems I’ve had were very minor and addressed very quickly.  (I’ve never worked for them and have absolutely no connection to them, financial or otherwise).

The vendors in the ‘support sucks’ boat include:  HP and Sun; Redhat, IBM can sometimes be bad, too.  Case in point – I’m on the line right now with HP.  I called the support number, and the automated voice system didn’t recognize the server name I put in (it did list Proliant and some other server systems, but nothing for my system).  I think for that reason, it dumped me to the consumer support line, and the support rep dumped me to another bucket, and after being on hold for a who knows how long, I was routed to the HP-UX PA-RISC department.  (Each time I had to give my name, etc.) .  The rep tried the contact the wrong (hardware?) team first, then realized it’s a software problem. I just got off the call, where the rep escalated to the next available engineer.  Again.  Well, at least on this call, the rep told me to call 800-633-3600, not 800-HP-INVENT – at least that’s one less level of annoyance.
This happens each time I call HP for this box, and it’s quite a waste of time.  Most times, the rep tries to connect me to an engineer in Atlanta, but isn’t able to get a hold of one (I usually wait at least half an hour).

That said, HP support is truly the worst of the vendors I mentioned in terms of wasting time.  Although redhat support you need to put in a case on the web and periodically check it, at least you aren’t tied to the phone, and they respond fairly quickly.  IBM also is very prompt, although there was a lot of back-and-forth communication and phone tag. And Sun usually calls back within a day.  I’ve been calling HP about this for the last week; in that time, I’ve called four times.   Even if I’d called the direct line, I think it would still take this long.
All to get HP-UX to print to a user’s printer.  This is the post I put on HP’s ITRC forums.

Hm, well, I just googled my name again, and now the hit doesn’t even show a link for the cache of this site.  But the address I deleted still shows in the summary.  Yet, I know from googling ‘burvil cache’ it does show the last post.

I’ve updated my page a couple times since 2/7/07, but google still has that date cached. In fact, if I remember correctly, it got a subsequent update, but then reverted back to the previous one. That previous one had a gmail address, which I’ve taken out. So I did a quick google search, and found someone else’s – jshin1987 at gmail dot com. I wonder if google will change its cache this time…

Susan and I saw Amazing Grace this weekend in the theatre.  Here’s the review at Crosswalk.com.  We thoroughly enjoyed it – I was in tears at the end, we were both inspired by the portrayal of Wilberforce’s mission to end the slave trade; to buck the trend of society.  The turning point in the movie may not have happened, at least we couldn’t find anything about it when reading up on it at Borders or on the internet, but was funny all the same.  We highly recommend seeing it – worth the price of movies these days.

Just talked to some friends at Susan’s old church that started a side business, renting out bumper cars for kids’ parties. Seems interesting – pretty unique idea. Their URL is <removed>.

Update: Link no longer works, disabled.

OK, here’s a narrative our trip that we (OK, Susan) wrote. Since it’s 3 pages long, here’s a teaser…. or, click here to read the full story.
After Thanksgiving, Susan felt a strong desire to celebrate our upcoming anniversary in France and also to see Donna and Didier and their family, who moved there. Donna was Susan’s roommate for six years in the past, and both our families have become good friends.

….

We loved the Louvre Museum! It was very grand, and highlighted art from various centuries from various parts of the world. Yes, we saw the Mona Lisa. It was actually not that big in person and didn’t seem that impressive. The nice part was that we could check in our heavy coats and bags for free while we were in the museum, so we could walk around the museum unhindered.

Well, Susan and I went to France for our anniversary not too long ago. Plus, it was kinda her birthday and Christmas present. We went to Paris and Toulouse, for a total of a little over a week. Pictures and more details are forthcoming.

I’ve installed Gallery2, which was fairly straightforward, but I’m finding that integrating with WordPress is a bit of a pain. I tried installing WPG2, which technically works, but the formatting is completely messed up. I also tried installing Lazy Gallery, which was meant to be simple. I also found from a google search another person that was tired of trying to integrate with Gallery, and gave up entirely. I’ve been tempted to go that route, as I don’t have time to configure all the bells and whistles anyway, even though setup itself was easy.

Anyway, pictures from our trip as well as more written details of our trip are forthcoming.

I’d say it was worth it, as I needed the time off. Since I’ve been back, work has been quite busy, as I had to put in a couple weeks of being on call as well as catch up on my usual work. Even though I haven’t gotten late night (or early morning) calls, it’s still been a steady stream of 2-3 per week during off hours.