Month: February 2005

In a move that’s at least as funny as various terrorism investigation blunders, the RIAA managed to file a lawsuit against a woman for allegedly sharing more than seven hundred songs on peer-to-peer networks.

The catch? The 83-year-old woman didn’t own a computer, and in fact died before the lawsuit papers were delivered.

Priceless.

Today’s a good day. I finally managed to beat the mighty Trevor Bauer, who is the top-rated player on my da Vinci Chess site. He’s by far the best player of the 200 or so in the “club”, and he has continually whomped me in our games. I’ve managed to come close to beating him before, but he would come up with something clever to force a draw.

Today I made a few clever moves and he saw his untenable position and resigned. Woo hoo!

(Of course, I shouldn’t be too cocky about it… he’ll probably smash me in our next game.)

“It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”

— John Andrew Holmes

Tonight I had the rare joy of a successful and (relatively) quick re-configuration at BitRelay. Usually when I go to my co-location facility to upgrade a piece of hardware or reconfigure the firewall or whatever, something that should take five minutes ends up taking several hours.

I’m in the process of moving all my servers and equipment to a new facility, where the infrastructure is much more robust. It’s all part of the business maturing from its original fly-by-night operation into a truly professional hosting company. I’m excited for the change (although it’s going to be somewhat complicated to keep a hundred clients up and running during the switch).

So anyway, tonight I was installing my new firewall. The one I had, graciously sold to me by Chancellor, definitely had some troubles. I’d attempted to install it on two occasions at BitRelay, failing both times, and still couldn’t get it running even at home. With the Big Move only a week and a half away, I was suddenly in dire straits because I needed a serious firewall to replace the $2,500 paperweight I had.

Enter my pal Warren, who had a used one he was willing to part with for a song. (A thousand thanks, Warren!) It’s a high-end model, somewhere in the $4,500 range, and it’s one of those pieces of equipment that’s so powerful and has so many features that it’s dizzying just looking at it. I took the plunge nonetheless, dropping it on the new network and poking around the management interface until I figured out how to route the right network traffic. Voila, I’m in business.

Amazingly, things went right on the first try– instead of the tenth, as is my usual wont. Now I’ve got a week or so to comfortably configure all of the right settings, and then move the rest of my servers.

Movin’ up in the world!