Here are some photos

I found out today that Bulwa has been publishing top notch content for many many years now. In his 2004 article on a murder in Hillsborough he puts on his Columbo hat and finds an interesting connection between this murder in which the victims and suspects were Asian and three robberies in the prior 6 years, also involving Asians.

"Home-invasion robberies involving Asians are not unheard of, however, even in Hillsborough. Police said today that three other Asian families in the town had been the victims of such robberies since 1998."

So it looks like Hillsborough is having an epidemic of either crimes committed by Asians or crimes against Asians. I'm beginning to see the connection. I'm not sure here if the Asians are the good guys or the bad guys but they're clearly at fault, either for being victimized or for victimizing. I'm sure it's unrelated to the fact that Hillsborough is 23.6% Asian.

It looks like his keen observation however didn't make it into the revised draft of his article. It's too bad because this kind of investigative journalism should've gotten him a Pulitzer.

Today Philip Kaplan, co-founder of the website Blippy responded to news that Blippy had revealed users' credit card numbers online, which google crawled, indexed and shared with the internets. In this blog post, by Kaplan, we get some real gems.

Kaplan explains that the problem of Blippy revealing users' credit card numbers on the internet is "a lot less bad than it looks". He goes on to explain why it's less bad :

Here Kaplan somehow tries to skirt around the fact that though the "raw" data typically contains harmless data, in this case it contained users' credit card numbers and that the data was put up on the internet.

He continues, trying to somehow explain that the real problem is that Google indexed their site, not that they publicly shared users' credit card numbers. To me this seems like a burglar telling the judge that the one to blame is the snooping neighbour who saw the burglar robbing a house and called the cops. If that damn neighbour had just minded his own business we wouldn't be in this whole snafu.

Kaplan finishes with this winner by explaining how it's ok that his company revealed these users' credit card numbers to everyone on the internet because you and I share our credit card numbers with waiters, clerks and "hundreds of other people" all the time. Wow, he's right. Blippy isn't the bad guy here. The bad buys are google for catching them and revealing their blunder, and every merchant in the world who requires our credit card numbers in order for us to purchase goods. It's so simple.

I'm no expert, but it seems to me that "co-founder a PR expert does not make". I can easily imagine a companies response to a mistake like this which would at the very least not further detract from my trust in that company, but having the founder come on and clarify

• how we're really blowing this out of proportion
• how we should be focussing on what that nefarious google was doing indexing their pages
• and how we broadcast our credit card numbers every day already to all of the merchants that we buy things from

Tune in tonight to catch the third monthly episode of Ample Mammal (AKA The Polish Ambassador) live on my show. You can hear a kickin' live set every third Thursday of the month at 7pm on KALX Berkeley 90.7FM. Ample Mammal will be serving up some dirty electro tune cake with mashed up hip hop frosting. If you aren't up and dancing within the first five minutes of the set, you are entitled to a refund at the door. Tune in online or find is in the RF at 90.7FM.

I've had a mixed couple days here. This morning's commute took an hour fifteen. Twenty minutes on the bike had I ridden. I can't really complain because while picking up some high-value BART tickets today I drew the "BART favor in your error. Collect $15" monopoly card. I handed over my two commuter checks for $45 and $60, and was given two bart tickets, I turned to walk away and checked the value on the tickets to make sure I'd gotten the right one's only to find two $64 dollar BART tickets. I figured I'd just handed over different commuter checks than I'd thought I had but after catching my train when I looked at the stubs they were indeed $45 and $60. Anyhow, brightened my morning despite the delay

This, however, is not the real news (or related to the photo above). The real news is that next week Tuesday Feb 2, your humble Concrete Skyline will be engineering the live performance of none other than The Album Leaf, live on KALX. That's right, I will be working with Jimmy LaValle and the band on Tuesday. For those playing the home game, The Album Leaf is one of my favorite bands. I'll also be at their show at the great american on the 12th. So tune in Tuesday at 1pm or listen online.

5 Tested and working 1U HP NetServer LP 1000r Servers

2 Non-Working 1U HP NetServer LP 1000r Servers for parts

Each server is a dual CPU 1GHZ to 1.266GHZ (see table below for exact CPU info)

With 2GB Memory to 512MB Memory (see table below for exact memory layout)

And 108GB Storage to 36GB Storage (see table below for exact disk info)

This is 5 working 1U servers of the same model with slightly different specs (see below) and 2 non-working servers of the same model to be used for parts. I've tested these and used them in production environments. I've wiped the machines and installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.10 with LAMP components and Ubuntu Desktop. You're welcome to come by and test them out to confirm they're functioning to your expectations.

Great for a small lab. I used them to host a website in a datacenter (utilizing the extra systems for parts replacement and development/staging test setups) over the last few years.

I've got 5 power cables you can have if you need them.

I'll sell the whole lot together.

Detailed specs breakdown

After the break youll find a full dmidecode and SMART drive output for each working server.

I watched Michael Moore's "Sicko" when it came out and found it interesting. It had the same weaknesses that all Micahel Moore's films have which is fascinating information sifted into an overall disingenuous and misleading story. It had lots of really cool information that I was not aware of. It also had Michael Moore with a megaphone on a boat floating off the coast of cuba whining at Gitmo. At the end of the film I'm left pretty much where I started. There's all of this information that I now know, but at the same time I realize that it was delivered to me by someone attempting to manipulate me. I have to pick through it and find small nuggets of fact and try to disregard the rest of the film.

Today I watched a great episode of my favorite TV show, Frontline produced by WGBH. The episode is called "Sick Around The World" and really does what Sicko should have done. It gives a balanced and thorough examination of the healthcare systems in 5 other rich industrialized countries. I highly recommend watching this since it gives desperately missing context to the question of what should a healthcare system be.

My visit to Seattle in February

Emily Carmichael visits SF to show her films, The Adventures of Lido and Ix and Young Love in the 2009 SF Indie Filmfest

Various photos from this year

Added photos of London over New Years

A few photos of filming of Real World Old : Permanent Vocation - Login required

Various photos from last year

A giant pile of bacon

The John Francis in the studio earlier this year

Jacob and Lisa's engagement night at the Albatross

Visiting Seattle for Allegra's 4th birthday

Dinner at Shabu House

Since January of 2007, we've been living on an additional server, odessa, hosted out of datacenters in first Santa Clara and now Rancho Corodva. I've been migrating sites and functionality over from gloria to odessa for the past two and a half years (wow, didn't realize I was that slow). A few weeks ago I finished the final migrations steps, shut gloria down, drove to the tortilla factory in a borrowed car and picked up the server.

What this means is that we are now running fully on a modern operating system (Redhat Enterprise Linux 5) with modern software (php 5.1, mysql 5.0, apache 2.2) that's easy to keep patched and updated, and easy to find software for. This is what allowed us to move to Movabletype 4.25 for the blogs and Gallery 2.3 for photo ablums.

I leave you with some photos of the tortilla factory and the now retired gloria.