chriskarcher.net

Last week I was complaining about my life getting kind of boring, but that’s all changed this week. Today is Justin’s 21st birthday and we celebrated last night by heading downtown right at midnight. After seeing how cheap the drinks and uncrowded the bars were, I might start making Tuesday trips downtown more regularly. Justin got smashed pretty quick, but was able to hold it all in like a champ until around 1:45. As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours, and it poured for Justin pretty hardcore in the bathroom at Buffalo Billiards. He was a trooper though, Happy Birthday Justin.

What’s been taking almost all of my free time lately is that we found a dog! The other afternoon when I got home from work, it pounced on me as soon as I got out of my truck. It looks like a young pitbull mix that’s white with brown spots, probably no more than 8 months old. It didn’t have a collar or tags on it, so we took it in and have been taking care of it all week. I’m going to put some signs up in the morning, but I’m really hoping nobody claims it. She’s been a blast so far and everybody has loved her. I took her to the pool yesterday when we were grilling before going downtown hoping that she would be friendly around everyone. As soon as I took off her leash, she ran straight to the water and jumped in. She may have been a swimmer in a past life, but it doesn’t look like any of her skills transferred into her new life. She sunk straight to the bottom and I literally had to jump in after her and pull her out. Over the course of the night she got better swimming around the shallow end, I’m sure she’ll make a good lake/river dog. We haven’t named her yet, so I’ll post some pictures of her tomorrow and take any name suggestions.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated anything, quite simply because nothing has really been going on. I’m just relaxing right now watching the Texas v. Florida CWS game, hopefully Texas will be able to close it out today. Justin’s 21st birthday is coming up next week, so we spent Friday night and all of yesterday out at Wind’s lake house. Friday night, we just floated around down in the lake drinking and swimming around. For the most part, it would have been an uneventful night if Katie hadn’t brought her friend Kacey along. She hadn’t ever hung out with any of us, and right from the start it looked like both Wind and George wanted to become much “better” friends with her. Throughout the night one would’ve thought that we were on one of those reality dating shows because both Wind and George would take turns at pulling her off to the side at some point and have some 1 on 1 time. At the end of the night however, Wind came out triumphant and disappeared with her for probably an hour to another part of the lake. I may be completely wrong here, but I don’t think he was swimming around showing her the great fishing spots in the lake. By the time he finished showing her around the lake we were all inside getting ready to sleep, and everyone got quiet when they got back creating a nice hollywood-quality awkward moment. They didn’t get their fill out in the lake though, and as soon as the lights turned out the lip smick-smacking started. I figured the noises would only get worse, so I put a pillow over my head and fell asleep.

I finally started reading The Da Vinci Code a couple weeks ago and it’s really interesting so far. The chapters are really short which makes it easy to pick up and read whenever I have some time. Last week I received a card from my Grandma for my birthday. Funny thing is though, my birthday isn’t until next month =D. Gotta love Grandmas…

As I finish writing this, Texas is now up 6-0 after a HR by Maroul. Looks like Texas has this one in the bag…

Not a whole lot of exciting stuff going on lately. Now that I’m a working man, I don’t get to do too much during the week. The internship by the way is going well I think. They’ve been keeping me busy with different projects and I like the pace of everything so far. The stuff I’ve been doing so far has generally been new to me which keeps things interesting. The people I work with are all cool as well and don’t seem to mind me asking for help from time to time. The company is in the process of interviewing some new developers, so on Friday we all got to go out to lunch with the interviewee on the company’s bill. They say in the economics world TANSTAAFL, but if it’s free to me then I’m happy.

I was reading online about how Google is going to take down PayPal with a new service called Google Wallet, and it reminded me of an idea I had a while back about Google phasing out Microsoft. Google easily has one of the biggest computer farms in the world for it’s search engine with over 300,000Ghz of processing power and 6,000TB of storage space. What if they built a similar farm and started offering computer accounts to be used by the public? Instead of having to a buy a new computer that may cost upwards of $2,000, a customer would just have to buy a thin client (manufactured by Google perhaps?) capable of opening a VNC connection and pay a monthly fee for their Google account. The user would just fire up their thin client and open up a remote desktop on the Google machine’s where all their information is kept. Google loves linux and is a big open-source advocate so they would be able to offer all sorts of free software to their users. A customer would never have to worry about losing their data because it’s redundantly stored by Google. A customer would never have to worry about their computer crashing because all the computers are managed by Google and are easily replaced. At most the customer would have to buy a new $200 thin client and then they’re up and running again. I’m sure there are many issues to be raised with this idea, particularly ones of privacy. Also, given current bandwidth limitations, computer gamers wouldn’t be interested in something like this because streaming a game over the internet isn’t possible. This is definitely a viable solution for families however, where nowadays it’s not uncommon for every kid to have their own computer. Just remember, you heard it here first.

I may have sung the praises of Blue Host prematurely, as there have been some problems with my hosting past couple days. The http and sql services on the Blue Host server have been periodically going down, which results in anybody trying to visit the website not being able to do so. Today all the important services went down several times again, and every time they would get one service back up another would crash. I watched their machine get torn up like this all day long, and decided to give them a call after I got off work to see what the problem was. After waiting on hold for a decent while I spoke to a guy who said that the particular server my site is hosted on was on the receiving end of a DDoS* attack. Why somebody would want to bring down one of the Blue Host servers, I don’t know. It may be the case that the guy I spoke to was just trying to cover up one of the server going crazy for a reason they didn’t want to admit, like the server being overpopulated with too many customer sites. We’ll see how it goes over the next couple days.

People are still downloading myDesktop Online, and several other sites have picked it up for download (try googling it). Now that I see that people are actually interested in using it, I’ll start thinking of some features for the next version. Somebody suggested including an option for the monitor to not take a screenshot if certain “sensitive” (sensitive as defined by the user) windows are open, and I can see some situations where this would be a good idea. There are also some bugs that have been uncovered now that people are using the program as well. One particularly bad bug causes the program to eat up ALL of the system memory and then crash. The problem is that the bug only hits after hours of running (sometimes days) so I can’t really sit around and watch a debugger waiting for it to hit. Anyone have any suggestion for debugging something like this? I’m all ears….

* - A DDoS attack is when somebody decides to try to bring down a server by using a farm of computers to generate bogus requests. The point is to overwhelm the server with these requests so it eventually has to be brought offline.