As of about noon today, I’ll be offline for roughly a week – no internet access from (either) home, no computer access, no nothing. The move is in its last phase and I’m headed off to MA tomorrow morning to get myself moved into my new place in Hadley. I got a ramshackle old 3 bedroom farmhouse less than 5 miles from work, thank god for a little elbow room after a year and a half in my cottage. Anyway, I think I’ve responded to all outstanding emails – if I missed yours, apologies, I promise to reply as soon as I’m back on the net.

The server will not be going down as Andrew has graciously agreed to let it live on his network until I can get things up and running in MA. Please be kind to the machine until it’s back on my own network, especially in the evening hours when Andrew is likely to be playing Battlefield 2 and not too happy to have his latency increase – stay out of the image gallery unless you absolutely must, and if you must, do so during the day.

If you need to get ahold of me, use the cell phone number found from the contact links above.

So I’m in the midst of moving. I went with a pod this time. So far so good, I’ll post more as soon as the process is finished. But the reason I’m posting is this site may come and go over the next several days and at some point between now and March 1 it may go away for several days or possibly even a week or more. Much depends on Charter internet service in MA – we’ll see how quickly they turn around my order for service, and whether they block port 80.

The webcams will be down as well, yes, even the working one, as of tomorrow morning when I bring down my media server.

The one downside to using pods is I will lose access to my stuff for about a week. Good thing I got some practice keeping myself entertained with the recent power outage – soon enough I’ll have no access to any of my toys and be stuck sitting around a barren cottage. I’d go hiking but the weather’s looking to be pretty cold so I doubt that’s on the agenda. We’ll see how it goes. For now you can expect infrequent to nonexistent updates here until after the first, barring some alternative arrangements (like parking my server in Andrew’s basement for a couple of weeks).

So we had a minor natural disaster – 70+mph winds came blowing through and knocked out power in the region. Figures Saratoga Springs and Greenfield Center suffered the worst damage in the entire region. Parts of Saratoga had no power for three days and I lost it from Friday morning through late Saturday night. So what’s an internet geek to do in such a case? Well…

• Read a novel. Actually, 1.5 novels. I started Kim Robinson’s ‘Red Mars,’ then decided it was not to my taste 1/3 of the way through, and switched to Octavia Butler’s The Fledgling. Given that the only candles I had in the house were tea lights, and they were scattered everywhere around my living room, I figured a vampire story was appropriate. It was a decent book too.
• Lacking any news at all for more than 24 hours, start to imagine that you’re having a repeat of the widespread power outage from several years ago.
• Curse the lack of gasoline in your car and your inability to acquire more.
• Realize you should have withdrawn some cash from the bank since you have no way of getting any more. Vow to always keep $200 in cash hidden in the house from now on.
• Curse well water, pumps, and the lack of flushing toilets or water of any kind. But especially the toilets.
• Daydream about the hot shower you so badly want.
• Muse in wonder at just how quickly the fabric of modern society crumbles with the lack of power.
• Lay around on your couch thankful that you have a gas heater that’s still working.

Now here’s something pretty unique – Prospero is a sort of peer to peer banking system. You create an account and then can either choose to lend others money by bidding on their requests for loans, or you can borrow money. To help spread the risk of users defaulting on loans you can also band together in consortia to help spread the financial risk across your membership. Consortias also help build a credit history for your members which increases your chances of succesfully getting other users business. This is pretty cool stuff. I’m immediately sure that this will be ripe for abuse in the same way that paypal and ebay have been, but despite this I’m sufficiently interested in trying it that I’ll risk some money on the concept. Anyone interested in joining together in a consortium to spread the risk? We could each put up $100 and see how it goes. Who knows, we could be the next Bank of America. Post in the comments if you want in.

[via Futurismic]

As a brief aside, whoever’s in charge of Prospero’s website has done a fantastic job – clear, helpful infographics and a nice clean style.

Want to work in the exciting field of instructional technology? (No, really, it is exciting. We’re in the midst of radical change and there’s tons of opportunity in the field). My position is now posted in a variety of places. If you’re interested, or you know someone who might be, pass it on.

I’m a gadget freak, of that there’s no doubt. Even analog ones occasionally interest me. Case in point is the Aerobie Aeropress, which had its moment as a web meme a few weeks ago. I bought one on a whim and have been using it on the weekends for the last couple of weeks. This thing makes the best coffee I’ve ever had. It’s relatively easy to use once you get a hang of how to work it, and cleanup is a breeze compared to a french press. My only complaints are that by the time I have my cup of joe in hand it’s substantially cooler than I like it and the maximum capacity of the thing is perhaps half of what I would normally call a cup of coffee. Still, it’s become the way I make coffee on the weekends when I have the time to do it. It’s actually faster at brewing a cup than my pot is, but it’s a hands on process. Anyway for ~$30 this is definitely a worthwhile investment if you’re a coffee fan, even if it’s just for the novelty of trying an alternative approach to brewing.

I’ve been working my way through Chris Pine’s Learning to Program:

It’s a great book, though it’s taking me longer than I expected to work my way through it. There are exercises at the end of each chapter and a couple of them have taken me several days to work through. Most recently I was stuck on one for almost a week. I mention this in the context of my first Amherst nightmare because I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a dim sense of dread and anxiety over the new job at Amherst. Nothing especially surprising in that, I had the same kind of thing going on when I was getting ready to come to Skidmore. What was cool though was that as the dream state faded, like a flash bulb the solution to the exercise I was stuck on popped into my head – ‘just use array.sort!’ (I’m paraphrasing for brevity’s sake). I fell back asleep but remembered the episode when I woke and sat there over coffee fiddling with the program I was working on and lo and behold, it worked. Three cheers for serendipity!

First Sunday of the season without football to watch, so Soolin and I went for a hike for the first time in months – since our fall hike in the southern tongue mountain range to be precise. A variety of things – football, illness, deer hunting season, the holiday season, and the weather, have all conspired to keep us out of the woods. It was great to get out again. The weather was fortuitous – it threatened rain and even sprinkled on us a couple of times, but as I was driving out of the park at the end of the hike it really started to come down. We just missed a drenching. Since I couldn’t get my rear out of bed this morning we only did a short hike, roughly 3-4 miles. They recently opened up a trail system abutting Lake Moreau State park northeast of Saratoga Springs which meanders along the range separating the park from the Hudson river. We went up to the first overlook and then headed back. It’s a pretty easy hike but a bit of a cardio buster as most of it is pretty steep. The views are not all that great from the first overlook as they look back east and south instead of towards the mountains to the north and west. I’m going to head back again the next time the weather’s warm enough and do a longer stretch. You can do an 8-9 mile look that takes you all along the ridgeline which looks to have some pretty good views over the Hudson and towards the heart of the Adirondacks. Anyway I took a few photos and posted them in the gallery, including a panoramic shot from the high point of the hike.