Category: Blogs

Old Picture of the Day is my new favorite blog to follow. This weeks mystery person contest threw me, because of the context. Presented in another context, I think just about everyone would get it. But the shotgun shouldn’t be too surprising. From the Wikipedia Article on the March King:

As a trapshooter, he ranks as one of the all-time greats, and he is enshrined in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame.^[15] He even organized the first national trapshooting organization, a forerunner to today’s Amateur Trapshooting Association. Sousa remained active in the fledgling ATA for some time after its formation. Some credit Sousa as the father of organized trapshooting in America. Sousa also wrote numerous articles about trapshooting.

Perhaps a quote from his Trapshooting Hall of Fame biography says it best: “Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’.”

Despite the fact that Sousa believed that “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country,” there are more than a few recordings of Sousa’s band that have survived. Here’s one of them, pressed on a Blue Amberol Cylinder and played on an Edison Fireside Model A. The model A was introduced in 1909.

If you don’t have Old Picture of the Day on your RSS feed, you should add it.

The upgrade to a new ext4 file system is complete. Hopefully this will help the blog performance significantly. I had some complications. Apparently none of the LiveCD distributions support JFS. Another good reason to get rid of it, but it made getting the final backup a little more difficult than I anticipated.

When I set up this blog four and a half years ago, the performance of some of the journaled filesystems that did not originate from Linux, like JFS and XFS, were better than the native filesystems, notably ext3, which was really a journaled version of ext2. So the blog, for a number of years, has run off JFS, which had its origins in IBM’s flavor of Unix, AIX.

But from most benchmarks I’ve been able to find, and my own testing, ext4 is better than either JFS or XFS in terms of performance. The blog is running on a very old filesystem, and it’s time to make the switch. The defrag we’ll get from the switch alone should boost performance, even absent the filesystem switch.

I estimate the blog should not be down more than an hour sometime either after 1AM Saturday morning or 1AM Sunday morning. One of the great things about being linked by Instapundit is it gives me a great opportunity to examine the server under a heavy load, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the filesystem we’re using is both badly fragmented, and using a slower journaled filesystem than we could be using.

Congratulations to SayUncle for turning 9. In people years, that’s like 100. Tam is turned six a few days ago. We’ll be five here at Snowflakes in Hell in January. I thought Tam was around long before I was, but I guess only a year and a few months. But again, in blog years that’s a long time.

Looks like it may have been something over at Weer’d Beard’s, which he explains here. So ultimately the explanation is they got played by MikeB? That’s pretty funny. MikeB is essentially a troll, and not something I’d even remotely take seriously. I find him to be a very entertaining troll, however, and whipping up a controversy out of something like this, I have to admit, takes talent, and a keen ability to recognize a sucker.

My previous post was rather polite, as I generally try to avoid drama these days. But that was before Tam pointed out that on Tuesday TTAG pilfered an entire post of hers, seen here. This wasn’t the first time, either, as was mentioned in Uncle’s post. I wasn’t too pleased with the reaction to Tam’s objection, when the first incident happened. But stealing a whole post? And then telling the world you don’t steal posts? If you want to know why no one links The Truth About Guns, this is why.

UPDATE: That’s better.

I’m not plugged into the gun blogger conspiracy, but I haven’t heard of any blacklist for other blogs, nor TTAG, either. I think I’ve linked a few of their stories. But I’m mostly in SayUncle’s boat, in that I’m not a regular reader. They do produce some quality material, but I have to sift through a lot of SEO fodder to get to the good stuff. It’s been a long time since I’ve added a blog to my regular reading list. Most of those that are on there have been in the RSS feed since before I was blogging, and even those I don’t always hit every day, if I’m busy. Others I hit occasionally, and, to be completely honest, a lot of them get “mark all items as read” if I don’t see anything in the first few posts.” It’s nothing personal, and I do that to some blogs that generate good content, but reading for link fodder isn’t the same as reading because you like blogs, and when you blog yourself, you’re generally looking for link worthy material, on some topic you feel you can add to the conversation. I only tend to read thoroughly when I have time, and that’s not often. Even in unemployment, I’ve been keeping busy bringing all my skills up a few notches, and revisiting some topics I haven’t touched in a while.

So I don’t think it’s any big conspiracy, or even an unspoken agreement, not to link to certain blogs. It’s tough to get links from me these days, because as traffic goes up, so does the noise. You get a lot more false link backs appearing in Google, and you get a lot of junk e-mail to the e-mail box. In addition to that, I get e-mailed every comment that comes through, because I like to stay on top of those. You take time to comment, I should take time to respond if I have something to say. The best way to get my attention these days, is if you add something to the conversation, paste a link in the comments. If the spam filter grabs it, let me know. I do read links people give me.

UPDATE: Kevin heralds the arrival of a beast the gun blogging community is all too familiar with. And PDB takes a considerably less kind take on the matter. I’ve tried to avoid the drama llama these days, so this is going to be all I have to say on the matter.

UPDATE: OK, maybe a little more. 3 Boxes of BS has more, as does SayUncle. Yeah, I wouldn’t say this community is that organized, or of a single mind either. But there are certain unwritten rules, and navigating them can be difficult. The trick to getting noticed in any community is to insert yourself into the conversation, even if you wantonly go about slaying sacred cows. I actually like it when someone links to me respectfully disagreeing with something I wrote, because it could start a back and forth that generates a lot of material without having to go digging. That kind of thing can often bring the drama llama, but it’s a sad fact that the drama llama is generally good for traffic.

Instapundit turns ten this week. I started reading Instapundit around the 2002 timeframe, so I’ve only been reading nine of those, but it seems like just yesterday these blogs were something new, and the establishment didn’t know quite what to make of them.

Instapundit is often called the Blogfather, for inspiring a lot of other people to take up the idea, including Eugene Volokh. While Instapundit was one of my first regular blogs, it was SayUncle and Bitter who were my impetus into this world.

Sorry about the light posting today. It’s been an up and down day, and being mentally drained from the roller coaster ride, I just didn’t have the energy to pour some more batter in the free ice cream machine.

I had one solid lead evaporate this morning (or perhaps a solid lead should more accurately sublimate?). I had another develop, then evaporate, then turn into a weak lead. Then I heard back from dream job number two, and they want a phone interview. I hadn’t heard from them so figured they weren’t interested. Guess not! I’ve managed to get some call backs from some very prestigious places, so I’m pleased with that, but until there’s cash on the table, I’m not going to relax.

The first two weeks of unemployment weren’t too bad. The last two have been difficult. Money is not an issue, as I’ve projected that my severance easily gets me into next year at my current burn rate, which still has me paying the mortgage, other bills, and eating better than soup and ramen. I do miss going out to eat, which we did at least once a week when until in May I found out the company was closing, but that sacrifice hasn’t been nearly as bad as I would have expected. We like to cook, and now we have time.  I’m more worried about the stigma of being out of work for a long time. I’m approaching the end of the fourth week since we shut down, and while I’ve had plenty of hits, and a few leads, it’s just taking a while to progress them.