by Matt | Sep 27, 2005 | Travel
Well, it was a hell of a week. Having left on Wednesday, it seems like we’ve been gone forever. Our place is fine, no damage, just a few downed trees here and there. I can’t even tell if it rained. Our last place had some leakage issues with the window panes but our new place seems to have weathered the storm nicely.
Pearland was a bit crazy. The nearest supermarket didn’t have anything. I went in to get some spagetti for dinner and came out with that and some Ramen… and it took 30 minutes to get it. One gas station was out of everything, the other only has unleaded and there was a considerable line.
Things should be back to normal in a day or two, once gas and food is more widely distributed.
The trip home was a bit shorter than our trip out to San Antonio. It was scary to see all the abandoned cars along the road, especially the ones pointed in the wrong direction from when they opened up the other lanes of the highway. Gas was definatly in short supply on the way home, but luckily the traffic was at least moving and we didn’t get stuck.
The stay at the ranch went well. I think everyone was one everyone else’s last nerve by the end of the week, but murder was avoided. We had her parents and brother, her two grandparents, and three dogs. The dogs did well, with the exception of eating strait through a phone book, they seemed to be ok so long as they were fed well.
Life is returning back to normal. I’m back at work today and we’re cleaning up the yard and hooking computers back up.
I’m very tired and my back hurts from sleeping on a paper-thin matrise all weekend.
I do want to say thank you to Jason for the offer to stay with him in Memphis and to Chris and Nagle for thinking about us. I appreciated it very much and it was a great feeling to know that my friends would be there for me if I was in trouble. Thanks guys. You rock.
by Matt | Sep 24, 2005 | Personal, Travel
Well, day three and we’re still waiting. The crazy media machine has made it next to impossible to stop watching the coverage.
We’re still here at the ranch, dry and bored.
Luckily the storm went east in the last few hours, missing Houston by about 80 miles. Of course, 50 miles isn’t a whole lot when the storm is about 120 miles wide. The Texas Louisanna boarder took the brunt of it. Houston was luckily on the clean / weaker side of the storm. Power is out in most of the area, and that’s to be expected, so no one is headed back to town yet. Geting 2 million people out was a pain, but they had 3 days. Letting 2 million back IN tonight and tomorrow will be insane.
Thankfully, I don’t work Mondays and no one else seems to care about heading back right away, so I think we might wait, let the crazies go home, and head back Monday night.
Looks like everything worked out.
Later.
by Matt | Sep 21, 2005 | Friends and Family, Personal, Travel
Well, we’re up from a cat3 to a 4. Evacuations are being called for all over. I’ve already taken all the computers apart and I’m sending this via my Sidekick.
Last night was crazy. People fighting over gas, long lines, people freaking out. It was a little over the top. In situations like this, people really need to keep calm. To bad the goog ol’ media machine ramped up and has been scaring the shit out of people for over a week.
We’re heading west/north west to outside of San Antonio. We’re actually leaving this morning. We’re about 12 hours ahead of the mandatory evacuations. Mostly because we have Lauren’s mom, who just had surgery, as we’ll as her two grandparents who can’t evacuate themselves, plus 3 dogs. Luckily, our route west is also NOT a planned evacuation route, so traffic, a day early, should be lite.
Take care everybody, see ya on the other side.
by Matt | Sep 20, 2005 | Personal
So, I call Time Warner and get them to run some packet loss tests on my modem. Finally, I get a wave of bad connection to happen while I have a tech on the phone. First it starts out with 10% packet loss to Dallas, then, while he’s talking to me I hear “ohh, it just jumped up to 25%, no, make that 30%, ok, I’ll schedule a technitian to come out, when’s good for you?”
Bout time.
Although I seriously believe the problem is not at my end. Continued ping and trace tests to Dallas show the same things. Routers just inside Time Warner and just on the other side, inside Level3, have massive and inconsistent packet loss. Tests to more major sites, Google, Yahoo, etc, get routed around the troubled router, but as things tend to happen, the server I’m trying to get to is IN Dallas.
Of course, just as a tech is scheduled to come out, we’re going to have a hurricane. Alright!
THe hurricane thing actually has me a bit worried. I’ve only lived through one and it was just an evacuation. I’ve lived through a blizzard and some ice storms and such, but a hurricane is a whole different beast.
Our evacuation plan is to head west near San Antonio. We have a room reserved at a vacation ranch we like to stay at, so at least we’ll be comfortable and happy. We’ll probably start packing up a few things tonight if I had to guess. Everyone is getting pretty serious about this down here. Gas is up, people are buying plywood, the whole deal.
What worries me the most is the fact that the town we’re in is in a huge flood plain. Meaning, for those unfamiliar, that when it rains, it all comes to us, away from the city. Apparently, the last large flood really messed up our neck of the woods. That in itself has led me to decide to take the harddrives from my machine (if not the whole system itself), the xbox, and anything else that isn’t nailed down.
I’m also considering sandbagging my porch and front door, although I don’t know if it would help any. I’ve also got to think about if we’re taking 1 car or both. Both is where I’m leaning at the moment. Yeah, the gas will be more expensive, but both our cars are pretty low, and wouldn’t stand much of a chance in high water.
Beyond that it’s just a lot of news watching and trying to figure out exactly when to leave. It’s pretty apparent at the moment that it’s coming here, or atleast close enough to be trouble. Already the area schools are calling off the rest of the week.
My boss and I talked about it briefly. He seems inclined to wait until the last minute to decide. I’m not that brave. I want out of here Thursday morning. Lauren’s family is freaking out a bit and might even leave Wednesday. I think that’s a bit extreme, although, in the wake of hurricane Katrina, I can’t blame anyone for airing on the side of caution.
Whats hard is convincing someone else, someone who’s in control of your schedule, what exactly to do in regards to a schedule. I say cancel the appointments the rest of the week and lets get the hell out of here. But what about tomorrow, or Thursday? Do people expect us to be open? Does my boss expect me to stay and help him?
We’ll see how this all developes, but, if you guys could keep a close watch on the news, as I’ll be doing, and pull for us a little, it would be a great help.
Once again, into the breach.
Matt out.
by Matt | Sep 17, 2005 | Culture
Man, the internet is a crazy friggin place. Last night I was reading on Digg, my new favorite site by the way, that something insane was happening over at Methlabs with PeerGuardian. Apparently, the guy responsible for handling Methlabs and Blocklist.org’s donations, in a bid for power, took control over the web servers, forums and financial accounts of the team. The official PG homepage, the forums and any information coming from BlockList is now said to be compromised. The development team has moved what they could salvage to the SourceForge site that PG was downloaded from and put up a press release about it.
” The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents. The member of the group that had been trusted to handle the finances and servers slowly managed to take over each individual part of the website’s assets, eventually claiming control over the entire group and locking out the majority of staff.
The organisation’s founders, Tim Leonard and Ken McKelland, as well as the majority of the organisation’s staff and developers (including the main developer of the PeerGuardian2 application, Cory Nelson and the staff members responsible for auditing the PeerGuardian Blocklists) have all been forcibly removed from the servers that were funded from donations given to the organisation by happy users, and from text advertising placed on the websites forum and project pages. “
That’s nuts. Goes to show you, you should never let a single person control all of YOUR hard work. At this point, no one knows what to think about this and everyone is urged not to download from Methlabs and NOT to update your blocklists. I’m glad I heard about this, I was just about to.
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