Incoherent ramblings

Glamping CanyonLands is open for business!

October 15, 2020 Incoherent ramblings

 

My brother and his wife are awesome and fearless. Despite the all the uncertainty and chaos in this climate of dictatorial lockdowns, restrictions and pervasive fear-porn, they have opted to start their own glamping (glamous camping) business, Glamping CanyonLands. They’ve bought a bare bones desert property in Utah that literally had nothing.  They’ve now transformed this nothing into a facility with a washroom and shower (and everything that was required to do so, like water heaters, pumps, septic, …), built parking, and are currently providing three sets of luxury tent accommodations.

This video highlights some of the surroundings and the facilities.  They’ve only been open for a couple of days, but already have a nice set of reviews.

During the night, the location is perfect for viewing the milky way. During the day, it can be your staging area for awesome desert hiking, sightseeing and photography.

My Kiva loan stats and rationale.

October 2, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , ,

For most of the time that I was at IBM (before leaving to LzLabs), I was enrolled in the Employee Charitable Fund (ECF) program.  The ECF was a really easy way to do charitable donations, as the donations were small biweekly payroll deductions.  As all the charitable options were official Canadian charities, I also got that tiny little tax deduction kickback as well.

Despite those benefits, I never really liked the ECF charity options, as it felt like my money was just going into a black hole.  I heard about Kiva on the “How things work” podcast, and decided to bail from the ECF for a while and make some Kiva loans instead.  Kiva is a microloan service, where you can loan selected individuals money in $25 increments.  You get to pick who you want to loan to.  As you get paid back, you can funnel those funds back into new loans.

Switching my funds to Kiva loans isn’t a charitable donation in the traditional sense.  In particular, it doesn’t count as an offical Canadian charitable, so I don’t get any tax kickbacks.  Those are usually just pennies anyways, so that’s not a big loss.  If you are in the US you can get a tax kickback for donations to Kiva itself, but not for your loans.  However, I treat my Kiva account like it’s a one way donation, funneling money in, and recycling all of it into new loans when I get payments.

In a rather timely fashion, as it’s was my end of month “Kiva donation time”, I got a notification of leanpub royalties today:


Leanpub is a pay what you want e-book publishing service that provides the purchasers with automatic updates, and purchaser only forums for Q&A.  I didn’t really expect anybody would buy my stuff on leanpub, since I also make pdfs of all those books available for free.  However, I don’t feel guilty about that for a couple reasons.  One is that the purchaser has freedom to pick their price, and most seem to go over minimum.  The other reason is that I have been funneling my leanpub royalties when I get them into my Kiva account.  Usually, y leanpub sales, as they are batched and sporadic, don’t cover my regular Kiva contributions, but this month, they did.

Having been making kiva loans and contributions for so many years now, I’ve got a pretty decent distribution of countries covered:

I regularly reset my ‘Saved Search’ to remove the most frequently leant to countries, and it looks like it’s time to do that again.

I’m pretty selective about the categories that I select my microloans, and that bias is obvious looking at the distribution of the loan categories I’ve selected:

I particularly like the construction loan category, since I can pick somebody looking for tools to improve their business.  I like the self sustainability of that.

This strategy of small regular loans that feed back on themselves really accumulates nicely.  I’ve been making only small monthly contributions, yet that has added up to $6K of total loans over the years, and I’ve now got $1500 of loans in the pipe.  I’ve lost only about $100, which compared to the management fees of a typical charity, is actually pretty extraordinary.  I’ve also lost a small amounts to donations to Kiva itself.  They are asking for lots per loan these days, and I cheap out those contributions, but that has probably still added up.

Attack took out my godaddy hosted wordpress blog for most of a day.

May 29, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , ,

Guilty admission: The title of this post is click-baity, as the attack was not likely on my blog, but something colocated on the server that my blog happened to have been hosted on.  In particular, the math, physics, complaining about COBOL, rants, and other random garbage that you’ll find on this blog does not likely warrant a DOS attack.  This isn’t the story of my offending somebody enough to get DOSed, but is just the story of a painful interaction with godaddy customer support.

I used to use a wordpress hosted blog, and eventually decided that I wanted flexibility enough to pay for hosting.  I experimented a bit with amazon hosting, but the variability in price scared me off, and I ended up buying my hosting from godaddy.  I don’t remember anymore what other options I considered, nor why I ended up settling on godaddy’s “managed wordpress” offering, over any others, although low initial cost was a factor.  That hosting has generally been problem free, but their IT support, when there is trouble, has proven to be less than desirable.  Here’s that story in case anybody else is considering using godaddy for their own hosting.

Yesterday, I happened to notice that my blog was completely unresponsive.  I only noticed this because I wanted to make one small change to one of my pages.  All told, to get this resolved, I spent about 3 hrs with their IT support (1/2 last night, and the other 1/2 today).  Ironically, by the time I got to the fifth support professional, the problem resolved itself.  I am glad that I don’t run any sort of business off of this site, as the downtime was at least 16 hours.

My 1.5 hrs on the godaddy IT chat support with Parjeet, Jaspreet, and Shibin was a complete waste of time.  Parjeet (who’s name I am probably butchering, since I didn’t keep a copy of my chat log with him) managed to get the blog restarted.  However, it appears that he also disabled all the plugins at the same time without telling me.  He also didn’t identify the root cause.  Jaspreet insisted that the issue was the content I was hosting, even though that content was not an issue before yesterday.  He gave me various self help options (plugin tuning, …) despite the fact that the blog was performing abysmally even with all plugins disabled, and had been okay prior to the reboot, and despite the fact that even the admin pages were slow, which have nothing to do with the content being served for normal blog page or post content.  He also was not able to identify the root cause, and I insisted on dealing with his manager at that point.  That claimed-manager was Shibin, who was helpful seeming, but was not able to do anything, nor able to find somebody who had access to the server logs to diagnose the issue.  When I gave up for the night, he promised to email me the results of his investigation, but no such email materialized.

I was busy with work all morning, and at one point when I had a pause in my day, I thought of checking whether the response time issue had cleared up.  It had not, and the blog was still effectively down today, with 30 second response time for any page access.  Because of the complete ineffectiveness of godaddy’s 24/7 IT chat support, I opted for a half hour on hold to be able to talk with somebody directly.  With headphones available, that time on hold wasn’t a write off, since I was able to keep working the day job — but I have to say that godaddy has some of the worst “on-hold” music that I’ve ever heard!  Once I was finally off hold for the first time today, my support guy (I got today’s support guys names mixed up, and only recall that one of them was named Joshua) investigated what he could, and ended up having to pass the buck to their tier II support, because he didn’t have access to the server logs.  That put me on hold for another hour or so.  When I finally got to deal with somebody who had access to the server logs, the blog coincidentally became responsive without any intervention.  It turns out that there was an attack on one of the servers.  Either that attack, or the godaddy throttling that was instated as a response to that attack finally abated when I was on hold waiting for the tier II support.

The godadday response to an attack is pretty deficient.  If the server that your blog is running on is attacked, they throttle the performance of that server to mitigate the effectiveness of the attack.  The idea is that the attacker will eventually just give up.  That is done apparently done at the server level, and not just for the instance that is under attack.  It seems pretty dumb that godaddy doesn’t migrate the VMs that happen to be unfortunately colocated with attackee onto another physical host.  That’s not a good sign for anybody that wants a service that requires continuous uptime.

When I bought godaddy’s hosting initially, I do remember that it was one of the most cost effective options.  The godaddy hosting price went up considerably sometime after the first or second year of initial service, but I haven’t taken the time to figure out how to migrate to something else.  Perhaps amazon is worth looking at again? Basically, I’m allowing myself to be exploited financially a bit because the time cost to figure out how to migrate to other hosting is probably higher than the monetary cost of the blog hosting itself.

The support interaction that I had over the last two days might be enough of a kick in the butt that I’ll take the time to look at other hosting options, and how to do a migration.  One thing that I do recall was nice about amazon was they offered ssh access to the machine.  I only get sftp access on godaddy, which can be a pain in the butt, and is very inflexible.

You might wonder why I even bothered switching from wordpress.com hosting, which was free.  I did that to have the flexibility to install my own non-wordpress.com sanctioned plugins.  For somebody who is crazy enough to blog a lot of mathematics, that was very worthwhile, as I’ve been able to run a customized version of the Mathjax-Latex plugin, which renders very nicely, and allows me to replicate many of the latex macros that I use.  That streamlines my latex-to-wordpress conversion considerably, and has saved me many many hours.  That saving is in comparison to the time that would have been required to blog the same mathematics with the default wordpress.com latex plugin.  Recently, I also installed the Mathematica Toolbox plugin, which looks like it will allow some fun interactivity, much like the original Wolfram CDF plugin had before it became useless and eventually was no longer supported (i.e. it only worked in 32-bit browsers.)  So, I don’t think that I’m going to go back to wordpress.com hosting, but it’s definitely worth some investigation of the options.

How absurd: facebook marketplace has promoted me to arms-dealer.

April 7, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , ,

I tried giving away some of Lance’s old model rocket stuff, but facebook has determined, even after appeal, that I am an arms dealer:

My listing description was:

Rocket launching base and trigger, a few engines (2x B6-6 and 2x 1/2A3-T4) and igniters, and some recovery wadding. The metal post that was originally on the launching base got lost somewhere along the way, but any straight conductive rod of the same diameter should do the job.

Available for porch pickup (M4X1C2, cabbagetown: Parliament and Wellesley)

The message from them, after my appeal, specifically says that this has been determined to be a weapon:

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in trouble with the law for weapons sales (there was that time back in grade 3 when I made the best ninja stars in my school and opened a little business for myself.)  I used to call myself a drug pusher when I worked for Bowles pharamacy, making sure that all the little old ladies (and that super stinky guy at 59 Edgewood) got their fixes.  Now I can add arms dealer to my resume along with drug dealer.

Incidentally, if you want some old model rocket stuff, including 4 weapons grade engines, please send me a message, and you can have it.

Inka brand “coffee”: a silly nostalgic find

March 10, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

Dad was never functional before his morning coffee.  He usually headed down to the “Goof” for his fix.  He’d complain bitterly that it was horrible coffee, but that didn’t stop him from drinking it daily.  When he didn’t go to the goof for his fix, he’d stand beside the percolator like a zombie waiting long enough that he could interrupt it and pour his first cup of the day.

Dad, who survived on coffee and cigarettes while seated long hours at the glass blowing torch must have known you could have too much of a good thing.  So, when he’d finished mainlining coffee for the day, he switch to Inka brand “coffee”, a roasted grain beverage.  I didn’t know the brand was still in business, but blundered upon it today at the local grocery store:

I was looking to buy such a roasted grain “coffee” mix today anyways, as I’m now old enough that coffee after 7:30 pm equates to a high probability of a night of insomnia.  Finding dad’s old brand triggered a surprising number of memories, and provided the perfect way to cross off that shopping list item!