Here’s another photo from a hike last weekend that I forgot to upload last week. Brady wasn’t too psyched to see how steep this was. In 20 years he’ll look at this and wonder what the heck we were thinking, but it all went fine.
Birthday hike
Spent the day after my birthday on a family outing up to Greenfield that started with the hike the photo below was taken on, then hit the People’s Pint for lunch and Greenfield Games for fun. Great, great day.
Reflections on the Giants’ season and the Super Bowl
If you read through my posts about football here over the years, you’ll conclude I don’t know much about football, despite avidly following the Giants, and more generally the sport, since the mid-80’s. I doubt I’ve missed more than a handful of Giants games in the last 25 years – literally. And yet I went into this year’s Super Bowl figuring the Giants to lose by 7+, and over the course of this season, never, including during every playoff game, figuring the Giants had a strong shot to win. * Shame on me. Some quick hits:
* Tom Coughlin gets a pass from me, from now until he retires. Twice he’s brought underdog teams to the Superbowl and against everyone’s expectations come away with the win. Their consistent mid-season collapses have driven me mad the last ~5 years, but I cannot argue with success and I give him a ton of credit for it.
* Eli Manning really came into his own this year, and was the most significant factor in the Giants success this year. This is not to take anything away from JPP, Cruz, Osi, and a number of other contributors, but Eli was playing behind a mediocre line with an underperforming running game all season, and yet he had a career year, bringing the team back from behind seemingly half of their games. Unlike in many of his previous seasons, he also couldn’t count on an above average defense to help keep the team in the games. It was on him, more often than not, and he stepped up. I also think if there’s anyone left who still thinks the Giants ‘overpaid’ to get Eli from San Diego back when, they need to go eat a bucket of poo. If you didn’t think he was worth it after the first win against the Patriots (and if not, what’s wrong with you?) you have no leg left to stand on now.
* The Super Bowl was phenomenal. As I said, I figured the Pats to win, based on their passing attack being better than our pass defense and their having a chip the size of Manhattan on their shoulders after the Giants stopped them from becoming the de facto ‘best NFL team ever’ the last time they met in the Super Bowl. Plus, the Giants had played ‘stink up the joint’ let-down games all season (the loss to Seattle, the 2 Redskin losses, the Miami ‘we only won because of Eli’, and the loss to the Eagles, facing a washed up bust of a QB and a team on the ropes) , and their entire playoff run, including the Super Bowl, I kept figuring on it happening again. Wonder of wonders, it didn’t. The Giants did just enough to win. Tom Brady safety on the first Pats Drive is my 4th favorite superbowl play ever, after 1) Ingram’s 3rd down catch in the Giants’s Bills Superbowl where he broke through like 7 defenders, 2) The Eli/Tyree hookup where Eli eluded a sack then tossed a ball that Tyree caught off his helmet in the first Pats/Giants Superbowl, 3) Eli to Burress FTW in the first Pats/Giants Superbowl. I love the safety so much because at the time it felt like it was a tone-setter, and suddenly after coming into the game full of apprehension, I had hope, hope I tell ya! 😉
Truth be told I didn’t ‘enjoy’ the game until it was over. I spent most of the game pacing back and forth in front of the TV, waiting for Brady to put it together, leading to me freaking out by the end of the 2nd and all of the 3rd quarter. I was convinced we would lose. I’ve taped the game so I can watch it again and actually enjoy it on a play by play basis.
* I still dislike Kevin Gilbride and wish he was off coaching some other team’s offense. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to reach into the screen and strangle him over the course of a season of ‘let’s run it into the line for a -2/+2 running play, for the 9th time this game.’ Maybe he’s a genius and knows that keeps the safeties up near the line to open up the passing attack, I don’t know. Certainly he has Super Bowl rings and all I have is this blog full of inaccurate football predictions 😉 Still, I loathe his predictable play calling and wish he would play to the teams’ strengths instead of doggedly sticking to the same script game after game.
I hope Cruz and JPP get paid this offseason, they deserve it. I’d be happy to see the Giants find a way to bring Manningham back for another year, though it seems unlikely. I’d love to see them find a tight end of two – I don’t hate Ballard but figure we can do better. They need to find offensive lineman, at least one more solid linebacker, and they need at least a couple of defensive backs. I think it’s time to say a fond farewell to Jacobs. Next season will be tough for them – tough schedule (lets hope the Eagles coming on strong towards the end of the seasons is not a harbinger of next season), everyone gunning for them, and some serious gaps on both sides of the ball. Still, given what they pulled off this season?!?! Who knows 😉
*( I did think they *could* beat the Falcons, and I thought they had a decent chance against San Fran, but based on how uneven they had played all season, I went into each game figuring ‘this is when they have their down game.’)
Contrasts in customer service: Newegg and Amazon
Here’s a little story that perfectly captures the differences in customer service and care companies choose to use, and how it has consequences for them.
Several weeks ago I pre-ordered ‘Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning’ for the PS3 (terrible name but the game is pretty good) from Newegg.com because they had it for $15 off. The day it was supposed to ship, they alerted me to a billing failure and asked me to correct it, which I did (somehow, the expiration date on my CC was wrong, which was hard to explain since they had it in their database and I did not change it). 10 minutes after I update my billing they charge me and tell me my order has been processed. 10 minutes after this, they email me to tell me my order was cancelled and they would refund my money in 2-3 days. Digging around, I discovered a lot of folks who had pre-ordered the game from Newegg had also had their pre-orders cancelled after their credit card was charged.
I’ve done business with Newegg for a long time and generally had really good experiences with them, so I was willing to cut them a little slack and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, chalk this up to automated systems misfiring, but this was still pretty irritating.
Anyway, I managed to pre-order the game for the full retail price on Amazon that same day, and several days later had the game and was playing it, only for $15 more than I had planned to pay. 3 days later, Newegg refunded my money. a week after that, Amazon sent me a no strings attached $20 gift card because they had dropped the price of the game on their site and were honoring their price protection guarantee.
!!!!
Get the difference there? Newegg, possibly scamming me or maybe just a little incompetent. No apology, and they sit on my money for 3-4 days. Amazon, bending over backwards to make sure I remain a happy customer.
Today when I had to order some parts for a gift I’m putting together for my nephew’s birthday, guess where I shopped?
Actions have consequences and all that.
Testing embedding a pinterest item
I’m experimenting using Pinterest. Below is one of the items I’ve added to an ‘Indie Games Worth playing’ board over on Pinterest. This is a screengrab from T.O.M.E., which continues to evolve and remains one of the most sophisticated roguelike games available:
Getting psyched for the Giants game
OK, truth be told we took this right before the Falcons game a couple of weeks ago, but the sentiment is the same today 😉
Brady loving his first sled ride
We finally got a chance to take Brady out in the sled he got for Christmas. As you can see he loved it!
Why the site was down for a month, or: why I’m abandoning Ubuntu
metamusing was down for a month due to a catastrophic update experience with Ubuntu. I had been running an LTS release for the last year or so. In December a patch came out which somehow broke apache on that release – it was running, but not responding to requests. I gave that a few days to resolve itself via subsequent patches, and when it didn’t, decided to update to a newer release. Turns out moving from that LTS release was a convoluted process which involved updates to specific versions in the right order.
The first update went fine. Everything was back up and running, including the previously broken apache, but having looked over what it took to get to a current version from where I had been, I figured I may as well take the time to get current now because the issue was only going to get worse as time passed. I proceeded to the next update.
The second upgrade also went fine, leaving me only 2 updates away from current, so on I went to the next one, which did not go smoothly. I ended up at the command line on reboot with a broken xwindows and no networking stack running, for reasons I never determined. Xwindows failing on update has happened periodically with linux distros and while I understand the whys of this, it’s still one of the most frustrating aspects of working with the OS for me. Anyway, after screwing around for an hour trying to repair things with no success I gave up and decided to do the last update to the current release, 11.10, using a CD rather than from the network. This turns out to have been my fatal mistake.
Everything appeared to go smoothly – I booted to CD, it correctly recognized the version of ubuntu currently installed on the machine and asked me if I wanted to update it, which I did, so off we went. During the install process there was a single error message which I had not seen before which was worrying, to the effect of ‘some packages cannot be upgraded and will need to be reinstalled.’ It did not enumerate them nor offer me any options, it just reported the problem. Everything else finished and I rebooted…to discover that the update had gone disastrously awry. A random sampling of the oddness:
- Apache was no longer installed, and there was no longer a /var/www directory where I had gigs of binary data (most of it pictures).
- Mysql was no longer installed and none of my table data was present any longer (!!!!)
- A huge swath of my previous software stack was gone, including the data that accompanied it.
- The usr directories of my wife and I were still present, but her account was not.
- the stuff I had installed into opt was still there, along with the data.
As you might imagine, I was furious. I still am. On the one hand, no doubt this is somehow my fault. I was rushing through this. I do not keep good backups beyond the wordpress tables that have my blog. I’m hardly the most clever linux user and my job has removed me from daily use and the good practices that helps enforce. On the other hand, I’ve been running linux at home since ~’97. I’ve had head crashes, disastrous red hat upgrades which pushed me to Ubuntu, a cpu cooler retaining clip breakage which caused one of my machines to bake itself to death, including its drive, yet despite all of that, never a loss of a whit of data. I’ve always managed to recover everything. But not this time. I won’t descend into details, but I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out how to recover data from that drive, and as far as I can tell, short of paying through the nose those mysql tables are gone, and they’re really the critical missing piece. Everything else I can either recover from the drive, or I have partial or complete backups of, but the sql tables with all the structure to 12 years worth of images in my image gallery? They’re gone.
So…to hell with Ubuntu. I get this is my fault, but at the same time, I won’t run that distro again, and I might be done with linux at home. I should have had backups, but it never should have destroyed my data – that upgrade script to 11.10 was somehow disastrously broken.
Where does that leave things? I moved my hosting over to site5 for the time being, and my media server stuff over to a windows machine. I think I’m going to pick up a mac mini and move to that for some of this stuff, but maybe keep the web on a hosting provider and not in my house. I’m evaluating image gallery approaches now. I’m not going back to menalto’s gallery – they’re not keeping up with the times. I’m not sure what it will be, though Piwigo is looking promising so far. I want video support, mobile support, social networking sharing support, and effective, well-maintained wordpress integration. Suggestions welcome. As far as the old linux drive, I may still pay someone to try and get those sql tables off of there – they have the first year of my son’s life in pictures, with all the family comments on them. I have all the pictures, but that structure and the comments are the absolute worst loss out of this, and I want them back if I can get them without breaking the bank.
Partially recovered from a metamusing disaster
I’ll write more on this later, including a sad rant on an ubuntu upgrade which went very badly, but for now: the site is a little back, most importantly with the years of content from my blog. The photo gallery is a total loss (!!!) but at least I’m back up and partially running. I’ll explain more later.
Soolin update
Sadly, Soolin’s real 7th birthday gift was to undergo surgery to remove a fatty deposit which had been growing at an alarming rate over the last several years. We first noticed it three years ago when it was a small golf ball-sized lump in her armpit. By March this year at her checkup it was mango+ sized, and when they finally removed it Monday last week it was three pounds and about the size of a football sliced in half.
If I could do it over again I would have asked them to remove it last year, because when they removed it they discovered it had infiltrated the muscles under her arm and were not able to entirely excise it. Still, they took ~3 pounds and the overwhelming majority out. The hope now is that it won’t recur. The infiltration of the muscle works against this unfortunately, but the odds aren’t terrible (~40% is what google tells me) and even if it does, hopefully it will grow at a slower pace.
By and large her recovery from the surgery has been messy and unpleasant for her but relatively smooth. She has staples along an incision that runs from her armpit to her navel, and she had two drains installed which protected her from too much fluid collecting in the void left by the excised tumor. I had to apply hot compresses twice a day to the region and keep her dressed in a tshirt to help corral the bleeding. Her first day she barely moved and was in obvious discomfort (and on painkillers to help with it) but by the second day she was starting to perk up and move about, and seemed even better on the third day. Unfortunately she had a relapse possibly caused by us letting her go for too long of a walk that began on the 4th day and had her bleeding fairly heavily at times and again becoming immobile with discomfort. This lasted a couple of days. She had her drains removed last night and seems to be doing well – she tried to roll around in the leaves this morning when I took her out, throughout it all her appetite has been strong, and she’s starting to show signs of her normal playfulness. I’m fairly optimistic at this point. She’s still leaking from the areas where the drains were, but the flow is significantly less.
So…could have been better, but could have been much much worse, so all things considered I’m thankful that it’s looking good, and she handled it well throughout. I’ll post a few pics to the gallery with the warning that a couple of them might be disturbing.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 