When in Rome...

Key West

Cruise Detour

Our cruise ship has made a minor detour...while we were scheduled to go to Grand Cayman island, due to a medical emergency on the ship we're headed to Key West instead. No big deal for me, I'm excited to have cell service for a day! We are going to miss the dolphin and stingray excursion at Grand Cayman, but oh well.

Other than that things are good on board. Lots of food and old people, and more people that stink than I would have guessed. Lots of shops, decks, chair areas, and frozen yogurt. I've heard that the shows on ship are terrible, and from the "welcome aboard" show we saw yesterday, I can see why people would say that. But there are various scheduled things to do pretty much non-stop, so that's a good thing.

It's hot, unsurprisingly. It's breezy on ship though, so if you can stay out of the sun it's not a big deal.

Currently the ship is docked in Key West, and we're avoiding the rush off the boat by eating some free lunch on ship. An ambulance came and took away the man in need of assistance; hopefully that works out for him.

Looking forward to seeing Key West!

Mark D

I'm on a boat!

Cruisin'

I'll see you on the beach soldier...

Server update (last one)

My photo gallery server is back up and running. A little reinstall fixes everything! Also, the Ubuntu update process is ridiculous, at least if you use the GUI like I did. It took two or three days because it was constantly waiting for my input. If you're not babysitting the process, I guess that's what happens. I think I'm going to get a Mac Mini for the living room and move the gallery server there. I still see some value in having the gallery server, as long as the cool services like Flickr aren't free. Plus the new Gallery 3.0 software is slated to be coming out soon-ish, and it's looking to be moderately sweet. I think that will be a good reason to move it and get rid of my Linux server, again. I just don't have the inspiration to battle with re-learning Linux every time something is messed up. I have no idea what I'm going to do with that box though. I'll have to compare it with what's in the arcade cabinet, maybe that will get a little upgrade.

Moving Update/Server News pt 3

The good news is that I have legit internet again. It was a bit of a pain to setup however. The U-Verse connection goes through my phone line, and I discovered that none of the phone jacks in the upstairs seem to work - only one jack (that's actually a cat5 jack) in the basement actually works. Anyway it's hooked up now.

In hooking things up, I also elected to use the "wireless gateway" that AT&T gave me, as I got way better speeds with it than with my old Linksys router, which sorta surprised me. I was really digging the Tomato firmware that I put on there, but I'm opting for speed and change in this case and instead dealing with the misery that comes pre-installed from AT&T.

Among other things, that also affected my server setup. I was having a heck of a time just getting the server an IP address, although it appears I got that resolved. Apache for some reason wasn't started, so I fired that up and it seems to be working, thankfully. The gallery software is still down however. I suspect MySQL isn't running, but at this point I can't even remotely login to the thing. Between having to physically walk into the basement and my lack of Linux skills (and upcoming vacation), I have no idea when it will be back up. I know Pete just put some photos up there, so I'm committed to getting it back up...at least for a while. We'll see about long-term options. My patience for Linux is growing thin.

As far as the moving goes, I'm as unpacked as I'm going to be. So far everything has been good. Now that I have internet, I can figure out how to get Hulu+ to my TV. Still haven't done so, but now I can! The new Apple TV is cool, though I really don't see it entirely fitting my needs. A Mac Mini may be in my future, despite the price tag. I dunno.

Anyway that's the story. Server is in progress - in my frustration I decided to update to the latest Ubuntu, which probably was a terrible idea. It seems to be randomly prompting me for information during the install, which is making it take forever since I'm not babysitting it. I'm worried that it's going to severely break stuff when it finally completes. Oh dear, such is life I suppose. I may need to get my IT friends over to help me out... =)