Freaky Friday

Waiting

I'm writing Thursday's entry with Thursday's photos today because Google had a hard time performing "scheduled" maintenance in a timely fashion. Starting sometime around 4pm Orlando Daylight Time on Thursday the 12th, and lasting for over 20 hours (nearly a full day) into Friday the 13th, Blogger was down, and so were a lot of bloggers if the twits on twitter were any indication. I guess you could say that Friday the 13th started early for some of us.

Thursday's special speedtrap photo was taken just down the street from my subdivision. Another Orange County Sheriff set up a radar speedtrap aimed at the northbound traffic comming up Apopka/Vineland. He was sitting in the driveway of the Christ Community Church. I pulled into Bay Ridge Blvd and walked back enough with my trusty E-3 and 50-200mm zoomed out to 200mm (400mm effective focal length) and fired off a few exposures. He never saw me as he was too busy checking his PC and his radar gun.

Mark of the Beast

And then there was the horror of filling my tank and then driving home with a mileage average of 66.6 mpg. I don't know what was more horrific, the fact I spent $41 filling the Prius or getting a Mark of the Beast's mileage.

$41 in unleaded regular. In a Prius.

And then there was the LaCie 5Big NAS with 10 TiB of data storage that finally showed up at the office this week. Looking like a blue-eyed midget version of Hal, it's a small box powered with an Intel Atom D510 dual-core 64-bit processor running at 1.66 GHz. It comes with Windows Server 2008 R2 preinstalled. I had it plugged into the corporate "outer net" so it could pick up the Windows Server updates, including the update from IE7 to IE8. Why?

Because the geniuses who run our IT have the simple, blind browser block based on the useragent string from the browser. Normally I'd just install an alternate browser to overcome this block or change the useragent string, but this was Windows Server 2008, a bit more sophisticated than Windows desktop. The NAS was small enough so it was a simpler solution to just move the NAS to another office where I could plug into a different network and upgrade from there. Now it's sitting back in the lab and being prepped to handle all the lab storage.

Son of Hal

Even though it's an appliance I've still got complete access to the system. As such I'm going to install a complete Subversion software stack and then move our current Subversion repository onto the NAS. That should take place sometime next week (I hope).

What did I do today? I took the day off to catch up on projects around the house, and as a mental health day. I didn't take any photographs. My loss I guess. But the weekend is coming up, and then the next week where events are going to be really crowded, really active.

Technical

Top photo was an Olympus E-3 with Zuiko Digital 50-200mm. This has become my speedtrap camera. The other photos were taken with the E-1 and ZD 12-60mm. Yes, it's only 5MP. But it's five awesome MP.