Random Drivel » News

Bad News Day?

Eric — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:20:51 +0000

So I come into work today and check CNN.com looking for a surge of happiness and well-being to boost my day, only to find the first six headlines on the page:

• London police identify first blast victim | Watch
• Remains identified as Idaho boy | Watch
• Gunman, baby die in police shootout
• Tragedy strikes two air shows | Watch
• 1 dead, 3 missing after trains collide
• Body of missing SEAL recovered | Watch

Are you kidding me? The first six headlines all have at least one dead person in them? CNN.com, why do you gotta be such a downer? Why is that news? None of those things strike me as interesting articles to read, except for the air show article, and that was the only headline that didn’t explicitly state that someone died (although I strongly suspect someone did). This is the world today, where they survive on bringing us the news that no one wants to read. For some reason, these headlines sell, and keeps us going to CNN.com. Why can’t we get headlines like “Doctor in Topeka, Kansas cures cancer”, or “World peace reached without anyone dying”. Not that these are headlines that would be likely to occur between now and the next ten minutes, but they’d be a little better than death.

I checked the other sections of the website, just to be sure. Sure enough, each section had horrible news. The world section had more about the terrorists in London, the politics section had “Bush: Terrorists ‘cannot shake our will’”, the science section had “Study: Brush fires caused Australian extinctions”, the technology section had “Bombing horror captured on cell phones”, and possibly the worst headline of all, the entertainment section had “Pauly Shore ready for a comeback”. What is the world coming to? NOOOO!!!

New Server

Eric — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 02:24:30 +0000

For those of you interested, monhaut.com has been transferred to a new server. I gave the old guys the boot, and I’m going to see if I can get a refund on the rest of my year with them. Luckily I only bought one year instead of two, or else I’d be out a lot of money.

Downtime

Eric — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 21:42:39 +0000

So my hosting company decided that it would be funny to have their mySQL server crash. Third time’s the charm, Dynasyn.

If you go to Rose-Hulman or are technically inclined, read more below.

The last backup I made was from Feb 15th, which I made after all sites hosted on their servers got hacked (I was also pissed about that). Luckily, the SQL server came back up and I didn’t lose all my recent posts. Combined with the frequent downtimes, I’m not having very good service with these guys. I have another hosting package that I am considering moving monhaut.com to, and they are currently handling my e-mail. Well, it looks like the site is back online for now, and I have made backups of everything up to Friday evening. If I do move the site, that means 12-72 hours of downtime while the new DNS propogates, but at least I’ll be on a stable server.

Blog Upgrade

Eric — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 03:47:31 +0000

I upgraded the blog tonight to the latest stable release version. I need to work on my themes, so for now I’ve got the default theme installed. I’ll probably have my old theme working by the end of the night, and then I can work on getting something else that takes full advantage of new features. Other than that, I guess, carry on!

UPDATE: I got a new theme, I kinda like it, but we’ll see how long it lasts.

UPDATE: I’ve been working on the theme a little bit more, and added a picture to the top and the blog description to the header. I’ve also done some minor editing to the footer and the post layout… nothing major, but just little things. I really like the new system for the templates. Also, there is now an image authorization to post comments. Hopefully this cuts down on comment spam immensely, because I’ve been having a problem with it. If you hate it (or don’t really care), let me know.

Interview

Eric — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 00:24:53 +0000

I had an interview today with Lutron Electronics. They are in Pennsylvania, which means if I get it, I’ll get to live there this summer. I thought the interview went well, so we’ll see which direction they plan on going. Of all the companies at the career fair yesterday, they are the ones I wanted to talk to the most, so it was great to get offered the interview. I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks!

Career Fair

Eric — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:06:25 +0000

I got a job interview for tomorrow! Check back tomorrow for details.

Well, the results are in…

Eric — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:55:14 +0000

I’ll be the first to say I never expected the rush that came. I was watching the USC – OU Orange Bowl Tuesday night, particularly the halftime show, when I saw how badly Ashlee Simpson was singing. When she finished her song and smiled at the crowd, the crowd booed back at her. It was just my luck that I happened to be recording the game on my computer, so I quickly grabbed the file, ripped about 30 seconds from it, and compressed it to divx and posted the link to a forum I frequent.

After then making a blog post, I went back to watch the rest of the game. Later that night, I happened to be checking my server logs and noticing a large number of hits from places I didn’t recognize… the link had gotten out. This is what happened between 11 pm Tuesday the 4th and 3pm on Wednesday the 5th (Today is the 6th, so this number could only have grown):

Total times the video was accessed: 30,313
Total Gigabytes of bandwidth consumed: 28.80 GB
(7521 people didn’t download the entire video).
I don’t know for sure, but I estimate that another 26 GB was transferred from 3pm on 5 January to 11 am 6 January. Those total about 20,000 more requests.

(That makes over 50000 downloads!)

The video is downloaded on average 31 times a minute.

53.5% of visitors used Microsoft Internet Explorer. 27.7% use Mozilla Firefox.

Anyway, I think these are some interesting 16 hour statistics. I’m glad everyone enjoyed the video!

Job

Eric — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 18:38:07 +0000

I got a new “job” the other day. Its not a real job, but it will make me a spot of cash. I am a new editor at Gear Live, a Tech related website. I post news articles on their blog, and am a moderator for the ginormous forum with over 5000 users. Mosey on over there to read some of my posts.

Job Interview

Eric — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:17:08 +0000

I had a job interview with Cinergy today. They are looking for a summer/Co-op employee, and hopefully I have what it takes. The interview went well, it lasted an hour and we talked about what the job required and what I would hope to get out of it. They are interviewing six people for three positions, so hopefully I get hired.

grand opening

Eric — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 23:33:57 +0000

Today, I got the majority of the stylesheet (the basic layout that you see here) done. It is now extremely simple for me to change one line of code and have the entire blog look different depending on my mood, but I think I’ll keep this for a while. I might change the colors a bit, but for now its just fine.

I made this into a subdomain, as well. http://blog.monhaut.com is the address to use to get to the blog, however for the time being http://www.monhaut.com still works. All the links just point to the blog, so its not a big deal. This weekend is fall break, so I’ll have time to work on a portal for the front, and that way it looks different from the blog, which I really want to be seperate.

My plan is to have the main page be like a professional website, with my resume and other interesting information that absolutely none of you want to know but that people who might want to give me large sums of money (read: employers) would probably want.

All the posts from LJ have been imported over, and its much easier to search now. The calender is amazing, showing when I made posts and you can go all the way back to May, which are the first LJ posts that I still have. I added some links; if you would like yours added, let me know either by commenting or just emailing at eric@monhaut.com. If you would like yours removed, let me know, too. That’s kind of important. Ok, I gotta start doing some homework. I’ll mess with this some more in a few days.