Poked.net

Baghdad Burning
Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!

The lame will walk and the blind will see.
This is really amazing

When I was ready, I opened my eyes. There were all these white dots, so very many white dots. When I looked through the binoculars, there were so many white dots I couldn't possibly count them. Back and forth I went, glasses on, glasses off, and they were the real thing - not my imagination, not a vision from a good author who made me think I was seeing them. The real thing, seemingly near enough to touch.

With my eye, I could count somewhere in the range of 25 to 35 stars. With the binoculars, I couldn't keep count. The stars were too dense and the limited field of vision made it hard to keep track of which ones I had already counted.

I lay there for an hour or so, not really aware of time but finally noticing around midnight it was getting chilly.

So I'm going up the elevator in McBryde to the top floor. Not many people are in the building yet, maybe 30 or so. One floor up, the elevator stops to let someone else on. When the doors open, a police officer walks in and tells me to hold the door open. Then he proceeds to push the emergency call button in the elevator and the speaker says "911 emergency...". I thought that there was a real emergency, was getting all excited and stuff. Turns out they were just trying to figure out which lines were which. :(

Why do VT football players beat clemson every time?

We put SHIT in our player's helmets.
Simbex Head Impact Telemetry System

Only computer people would really appreciate this. I just bought a hp laserjet 1000 from officemax, since they were having a sale on them for all the new school supplies buyers.

Anyway, as many know - I don't use windows anymore, and this printer only comes with drivers for windows. Not a problem, since linux already has the drivers installed. But, they dont work. A little research on the printer and I find that the printer doesn't have enough permanent memory, and the windows drivers automatically install the printer's software to the printer every time you restart it - aka, its all being written to RAM, reboot the printer and it no longer knows how to work. Yet someone has already figured out how to get linux to upload the printer's software to the printer. Man, open sourcers have too much time on their hands.

Tag-Board had some growing pains today. I had been getting a bit complacent, but it looks like the database server was on the verge of reaching it's limit. I really don't know for sure, the event stream is too complex to really figure out the exact problem. Anyway, it's fixed now(as in running fine), although more repairs need to be done before I can let the patient out of the hospital.


Interestingly enough, this whole thing has made me think a bit more about Tag-Board. I mean, the site is a phenomenal success. It gives me a good bit of confidence in my ability to make sites successful online. Yet, I can't help but think that I am simply reaping the grain now as it were.

Tag-Board really wasn't anything but a cool idea I wanted to try so that I could have some neat application to my name that other people used. Maybe even indirectly meet and get to know some of those who used it. The original site was black and white, text only. For a long time, there was no option to customize your board at all. The feedback was great though, and I was enjoying putting the software together for other people to use, making decisions as to how to accomplish this or that feature, learning linux, mysql, apache, php (LAMP). But really, the reason I did anything with the site at all was that I could talk to people who were using the site through their Tag-Boards. And that was fun. It was a summer for me that replaced most people's other sources of summer entertainment - video games, pools, retail jobs. I had already been making a little bit of money on the side from other web sites, so I didn't really concern myself with the fact that I wasn't earning anything.

Then my hosting company decided that I couldn't stick with their plan. They initially started charging me $35/month, then $50/month, but even then I was using too much processor power. I had to move to a dedicated server which would cost me $100. None of this was as fun since the site was making no money. Fortunately, I saw all this before it happened and converted it into something that could pay for itself...many times over. It was still fun, I had never owned a dedicated server before, and it felt like I had so much untapped power - I could run hundreds of sites from this one machine.

The problem was that the site slowly kept costing more, and I had to get creative to make sure I had and would always have the money on hand. Users with friendly feedback that I once enjoyed responding to via email .... they became customers who I'd rather not have to talk to. This wasn't really me changing, it was Tag-Board. I had hundreds of paying users, so if the site was down for a few hours there was a level or responsibility associated with it. And the number of people who needed help was rising. It seems as though now there are at least 20 or so different people every day with a problem. And the problems were less interesting - it was no longer a challenge to solve them by improving Tag-Board, I had fixed those problems already. The problems stemmed mostly from a user's inexperience with HTML, or a billing hickup for paying customers.

As it stands now, Tag-Board is no longer really fun. I'm not in touch with it anymore, except for the money side of things. When it was just beginning, I was discovering these new and interesting communities of people - and I was discovering the people themselves. Heck, I met Kim whom I dated for a while in just that way. The reason it became such a success was because of the fun. I mean, its still successful now and will continue to be, but thats because it has achieved critical mass - not because it's getting great improvements.

In many respects, I'd love to jump back to where I started. It can't be done though. I can't start initiating one on one conversation with all the users, there are over a quarter million of them. I can't really work with people's input - the feature set is fairly complete. Anything I add is pretty small or specific to certain uses.

So the question then is "What now?". I need a new project. Something different, probably not computer related - at the very least something a bit distant from Tag-Board. That's why I feel a little lost now. I have lots of opportunity, but no direction. I need a push, a kick. And I suspect I'll have to wait another year or two to find that kick. When it comes, lets hope I get somewhere with it. *Here's to grad school*

Triple Insane Stunt Bonus!
GreenvilleOnline.com Article: Car runs off road at high rate of speed, rolls down embankment, lands on train tracks, hit by train moments after. Everyone in car survives.

those guys must have helped a lot of old ladies cross the street as boy scouts or something

When they get out the hospital, these guys should go wrestle Alligators or something. . .

So that's how you make a Mustang look good.

Well, it looks like Ed had finally announced that his blog is now public. It looks much nicer than mine, might mean I'll have to decorate this thing a little bit. I've been saying that for a year now though, so I wouldnt hold your breath.

On another note, I just saw a recent speech by Al Gore regarding the Bush policy at MoveOn.org. If you are not the best of bush fans, you may enjoy the speech. Either way, its a very nice example of public speaking at the very least.

I should be back in blacksburg within the next 24 hours. I'll have to ask najm what I missed at the party this friday. I get a call on the cell while I'm driving through charlotte inviting me to a international party that evening. I missed out. Hung out with some of sarah's friends at a bonfire instead, which wasn't too shabby - they did have s'mores.

Oh well, I'm now ranting. The links are the more interesting things anyway.

Well, I'm in g'vegas for the weekend. Ed, if you want to meet up or something, gimme a call. Andy, I expect I'll see you later today.

And I just dumped Jen, for those who like drama. I'm a free man again.

Finally! Someone hacked my server a few days ago. I didn't know that anything was amiss until they began launching a DOS attack from the machine. At that point, the NOC noticed and unplugged the machine. We installed the drive as a slave to a fresh redhat install and copied all the data over a little at a time. I think the move is complete finally. Yipee. Now if only I could be sure how the whole intrusion occurred, I'd be much happier.

I also had two books come in while I was gone:
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* DARWINS BLACK BOX: THE BIOCHEMICAL CHALLENGE TO EVOLUTION

Well, I just got back from my vacation with my girlfriend Jen. Took a couple dozen photos which are available here. When I got back, I was pleased to find that my new projector had arrived as well. Jen decided to get a interesting tattoo. I'm going to have to dump her now. I just cant be seen with someone who has such an ugly orange colored animal tattoed to themselves. ;)