Blog/January 2011/Jan 7th

Jan 7th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

Happy birthday; good week at work; "repurposing" old hardware.

I'm not generally inclined to publicize my birthday or make a big deal about it. But this year my Hebrew and Gregorian calendar birthdays coincide, even though I am not a multiple-of-nineteen years old! Since the Hebrew calendar is generally based on the Metonic cycle, which has a periodicity of nineteen years, one's Hebrew and Gregorian birthdays usually fall out on the same day every nineteen years. But the Hebrew calendar is not really based on the Metonic cycle; there are numerous adjustments applied to keep the spring holiday of Passover in the spring season. As a result, our 19-year cycle sometimes gets skewed a bit.

Sarah requested I put a request for "רפואה שלימה" (speedy recovery) for one of her "ladies", who was in the hospital this week. She (Sarah) also got a new lady (this one from Baghdad); and next week she's going on a tour with her elderly charges. That's the kind of touring she likes: no strenuous hikes!

Daniela finished her finals and is on vacation. Her wayward cousin the Airman First Class is coming to visit her in Manhattan. I hope she refrains from showing him the seamy underside of Manhattan she is so used to. After all, she had a baby cockroach alert this week, and I believe she called out the National Guard to control the perimeter.

The work week was good. Not only because my bosses were mostly not in the office, but also because excellent progress was made in my project. So despite some setbacks, things are looking up again, and I my blood-pressure is calming down.

Last week I mentioned the catastrophic failure of my laptop's screen, but that since the rest of it was "OK", I would try to "repurpose" it to become my main "server". This week, I did that -- and if you're reading this page, it's being served to you from my formerly main work-machine, an ACER laptop with a broken screen.

The process was not too difficult. First, I installed Ubuntu Server Edition after having connected an external monitor to the laptop so I could actually see what I was doing. The install went quickly and without any surprises. I then made sure I had the firewall set up correctly. Then I made sure my web-server and database-server software were configured correctly.

At that point, I "dumped" the data from my former site (hosted by BlueHost) and loaded it on the laptop server. After verifying that all the content from the old site was now on the new site, I transfered my DNS records to DynDNS.com, so that even though my site is on a private machine with a dynamically changing IP address, the outside world could find the site. The only difficulty I faced was that during the switchover from BlueHost to DynDNS, the DNS lookups were erratic. Now, however, the change is complete and "ronware.org" points to my resurrected laptop.

SO ... now my site is much more responsive for me and us Israelis, but will possibly be less responsive for those of you in the Exile. Yet another reason to move to the Land!

This week being the 7x7 birthday of yours truly, the menu includes: the most fabulous chocolate cake EVER, meatballs, rice, Chinese vegetables, chicken-breast, BBQ-ribs-in-a-pot, and probably other things I have missed. Oh, and wine -- lots of wine...

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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