Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I went to the Queen Mary Tattoo Convention today. Overall, it was a pretty fun time, even if there were some annoying aspects about it. The sources of annoyance were tripartite:

• They stopped selling the online advance tickets when the doors opened. And they only took cash at the door.
• The parking was full, and they didn’t have clear signs of where we should go.
• They charged us $12 for parking, even when it was two miles away.

So by the time I actually got in the door, I was kind of annoyed. But all that dissipated once I got inside. I got to see several of my tattoo convention friends there. They had three levels of booths set up, along with a stage on the bottom level. The marching band was pretty funny. My friend won a raffle or something for a gift certificate for a tattoo at one of the booths, so I got to watch her get tattooed. She also got a bunch of free stuff handed out from the stage. They were giving out Jägermeister hats and shirts, and she decided that she was going to get one. So she flashed the MC. This brought a cheer from the crowd, and got her both a shirt and a hat. Then they announced that they had some other shirts that they would give to any girl willing to change into them onstage. So she got up on the stage. This delighted the crowd even more. Of course, I got pictures.

It was a fun time.

So here are my pictures from the day. Note that they are not entirely work-safe, thanks to my very dear and at the time somewhat inebriated friend.

I have finished two of the railings now. The monkey bars should be here Tuesday. It will be time for another trip to Home Depot for some more wood. Then I will do the concrete footings for the ladder and assemble the monkey bars.

Found this on Len’s blog. I’m always in favor of contributing to the Advance of Science.

It’s kind of novel. This time, it’s in the Palm Springs Desert Sun:

http://www.thedesertsun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050623/NEWS0805/506230335/0/topics

Once again, they spelled my name correctly. I asked the reporter and he confirmed that the newspaper did indeed have ‘Schwarzenegger’ added to their spell checkers, which of course made spelling my name a snap.

Every so often I poke around in the logs for my web site and see what people are looking at and where they came from. Today I noticed something funny. My statistics for this month said that the number three search string was ‘Ramones’, and looking at the logs showed that I was coming up in an image search. I went to see the Ramones live once, back in 1980, but I certainly don’t have any pictures of that. I’ve also been to see the Ramones dead a couple of times. My picture comes up on the second page of the search results. It’s from the day I rode over to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with the bike club and we visited Dee Dee Ramone’s grave and also the memorial to Johnny Ramone.

But the picture that comes up in the image search is of a squished crayfish. Why that picture? There are ten pictures with that blog entry. None of them have any alt text. How did the Infinite Wisdom of Google select that picture over the others?

Try the search

I’ve read that Google is God. Maybe there are some things Man was not meant to know.

Google maps is great. Check this out:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.177091,-116.046867&spn=0.006287,0.007832&t=k&hl=en

It’s the crater from the 1962 ‘Sedan’ test at the Nevada Test Site. It was an experiment in ‘nuclear excavation’, aka digging big holes with atom bombs. This was all part of Project Plowshare, when they actually were considering using ‘nuclear excavation’ to cut a pass through the Bristol Mountains east of Barstow for soon-to-be-built Interstate 40. Fortunately, this was ultimately deemed a Bad Idea and was also precluded by the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Scrolling south a bit, and zooming out, here is something else:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=36.798792,-115.936747&spn=0.053129,0.062656&t=k&hl=en

This is Frenchman Lake, which was the site of the 1957 Priscilla test. This was the test where they built bridges and buildings out on the dry lake bed to observe the effects of the blast on the structures. Sadly, Google doesn’t have the higher resolution satellite picture for this region, so we can’t see them in the lake bed.

If you zoom out a bit, you see this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.130699,-116.059055&spn=0.100594,0.125313&t=k&hl=en

Every one of those divots in the earth is a subsidence crater left from an underground nuclear test. The Sedan crater is at the top of the image. If you grab the map with your mouse and scoot it around, you can find other valleys there that are also filled with nuclear divots.

I got mentioned in a column in the Pasadena Star News on Sunday:

link to the story

“With California’s barrage of earthquakes, and even a tsunami warning last week, the Web site of the Pasadena office of the U.S. Geological Survey has been working overtime.

And it overloaded briefly Thursday.

Within minutes of the magnitude-4.9 earthquake that struck in the middle of the day near Yucaipa and shook all of Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of people were pointing and clicking on the USGS site.

The number of hits peaked at more than 4,000 per second five minutes after the quake, said Stan Schwarz, system administrator for the USGS Pasadena office.

The system became overloaded and went offline shortly thereafter, but was up and working again about 45 minutes after the quake.

The largest number of hits came from the “Did you feel it?’ map, which doesn’t exist on any other site, Schwarz said.

The USGS’s new tool, which color-codes the likelihood of aftershocks in the next 24 hours, only registered about 6,000 of the 250,000 hits during the peak.

Schwarz said the site gets about six months’ worth of average traffic during the hour immediately following any earthquake that people in Los Angeles can feel.

And, he said, the peak time has gone down, probably as a result of more broadband Internet connections. “It used to be five or six years ago, the peak traffic on our Web site was 10 minutes after the earthquake,’ he said. “You could practically set your watch on it.'”

Ever since the Hector Mine Earthquake in 1999, I’ve made a little side project out of studying the traffic surges our web servers get after earthquakes. As a sysadmin, it’s largely a matter of self-preservation, since I hate it when they go down.

Note also that the reporter spelled my name correctly. This is unusual, but when she asked how it was spelled, I told her, “it’s easy – it’s spelled just like ‘Schwarzenegger’, but without the ‘enegger'”. She just laughed, but I figured that anyone in the newspaper business in California knows how to spell ‘Schwarzenegger’ now.

This evening after dinner I put up railings on three sides of the upper level of Lucinda’s new play structure. I also ordered the monkey bars.

Note to self: I set up natd on Moe today so that Lucinda’s Mac can connect out to the Internet. To do this, I had to recompile the kernel, with these new options added:

options IPFIREWALL
options IPDIVERT

Then I had to add the following to /etc/rc.conf:

gateway_enable=”YES”
firewall_enable=”YES”
firewall_type=”OPEN”
natd_enable=”YES”
natd_interface=”dc0″
natd_flags=””

And voilà. It works. Now Itunes can see the Apple music store and Cathy can load up her ipod with all manner of stuff.

Have I mentioned recently that FreeBSD rocks?

Lucinda had her first sleepover at a friend’s house last night. She said that she had fun, but not a lot of sleeping got done. I guess that’s just pretty normal for those sorts of things. So when she came home today, she ended up taking a nap with Mommy. But still, it’s a first for her, and it was a new adventure for all of us.