see a puffin eat a fish

So i’ve been putting off upgrading wordpress for years. I set this thing up a long time ago and the prospect of dealing with a software upgrade (who knows which old features are no longer supported), backing up my database and remembering all my old ISP passwords was a little too much for me. Well I neglected my blog for a little while, been way too busy with my latest endeavor. Today I come back to this hobbled little thing only to find out that it has been super hax0red, and by hax0red I mean some shmucks replaced the front page of my blog with a malware distro page. So there you have it. So I had no choice but to finally bite the bullet and upgrade Wordpress. Which is kind of exciting.

Now I can ask spam bots simple math questions and turn comments back on. Good times. So i’m back, I think. Doing a lot of moving around with Anna, mostly on the east coast. Working a lot on GroundedPower with my friends, can’t beat that. Oh and looking to buy a used small-ish pickup if you have one kicking around.

I’ve been twittering as a couple of different entities lately and have spent less time here. Right now there’s a lot going on and i’m doing my best to not become another casualty of this economy. Here goes: Recently there were two NPR sightings (err hearings?) connect to me, a pledge week promo I did close to two years ago when I toured NPR in DC and I heard my old coworker Dave on MarketPlace no less, talking about finding a job through social media. Go Dave! I’m still working on Plodt, we’re collaborating with the Eurovision people this coming spring. I hear the Russians always win because they cheat, no surprise there. I’ve also been working on a smart energy project which is super fun. It’s interesting, timely and I get to work with my friends. Not much more I can ask for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Latitude lately and what it means both for the FireEagle badge (Y! Brickhouse RIP) and location based social media in general. I haven’t tried Latitude because it isn’t on the Jesusphone yet but real time location exposed to the Google network creeps me out. Maybe i’m just becoming an old fogey. We all turn the corner at some point.

This is the first summer where Anna and I don’t have an excuse to leave Brooklyn. Two years ago we escaped in August by getting married in Maine and last year we spent the whole summer in Seattle. This summer we’re just here, unless that is we can figure out some time to go to Maine or Amherst. We do have a week or two in Montreal coming up, but I hear it’s even hotter there.

We spent Memorial Day in Virginia Beach where my good friend’s brother, Ben, was getting married to Pitya. The vows were all music (keyboard, violin, singing) and the bride made her vows in the form of a song, providing the groom with sheet music that he had to figure out on the spot.

To make it even cooler, the reception was in an aquarium. We had the run of the place and got to hang out near the shark tank and with the stingrays.

On the work front, i’ve been spending a lot of time on ebay trying to get cheap equipment for my startup and learning the virtues of esnipe.

My biggest catch so far has been a dual processor server with 4 gigs of ram and 164 gigs of hd space (configured into raid level 5) that I got for two hundred dollars. The only drawback is that with the four fans and dual power supplies, it sounds like an airplane taking off. I’m also in the market for used Apple 20″/23″ cinema displays if anyone has some. If only I was living in Boston and could make my monthly trip to the MIT flea. Good times.

I also bit the bullet and undertook a massive code rewrite. I’ve been putting off incorporating our evolving design into the new code but I finally decided that the longer I waited, the more annoying it would be. In the end the process was a bit time consuming but I was able to do it fairly systematically in Rails and not worry that I missed anything. I just went through the whole MVC tree object by object and then updated my migrations and libraries. I then wrote data migrations to convert all the existing data to the new schema. Not bad.

Beautiful stop motion of a man trapped in an elevator for forty one hours. Care of the New Yorker.

The merchant of death, unceremoniously arrested in Bangkok. His exploits mirror ’sympathy for the devil’ lyrics. If this is his end, it’s a very banal one.