Archive for January, 2008

Compartmentalization

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

So my fiancée and I recently moved into a cute little Victorian flat in San Francisco. Not the fanciest place, but it was a great price for the neighborhood and it’s got character.

One element of character in an older building is, naturally, batshit-insane electrical wiring.

The flat has a pretty classic linear layout: living room out front, den behind it, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and a hallway going all along the side. You’d think this would give a natural way to partition the electrical circuits by part of the house — in case of overload, one room at a time should go, right?

But no. For some mysterious reason, about 90% of the wall sockets are on the same circuit. That means my computer in the den, the microwave in the kitchen, and the space heater in the bathroom.

So if I’m so foolish as to try to fire up the computer to check my e-mail while my oatmeal’s in the micro and my lady’s in the shower, *boom*. It all goes out.

Nice.

Leopard Spotlight

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

Spotlight keeps deciding it has to index my external hard drive all over again. Is this going to happen every time I reboot? Or is it just because I almost never have to boot unless I’m recovering from a crash or power outage?

Sigh. At least it lets me search the internal drive while it’s doing it.

Sunny California

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

Ugly winds & rainstorm hit San Francisco yesterday; our power was out all day, and even the local Starbuck’s eventually went out, so no more internet in the afternoon. :( Some disruption to public transit, but still managed to get around. Yay!

Wiki data dumps restarted

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Maintenance is still pending on the old dump server… I’ve moved the files over to storage2, one of our backup servers, and restarted a couple of dump worker threads. Currently one of those is running on the old server, but it won’t be too fatal if it dies for now. :)


I love Wikipedia!