Greg In The Desert

Santa Fe is the capital city of New Mexico but it’s not nearly as populated as Albuquerque and is known for being artsy and for electromagentic sensitive people.

A Santa Fe man who says he suffers from electromagnetic sensitivity is suing his next-door neighbor for refusing to turn off her cell phone and other electronic devices.

Arthur Firstenberg, who has actively opposed the proliferation of wireless systems in public buildings, claims he has been made homeless by Raphaela Monribot’s rejection of his requests.

New Mexico is the right place to live to get away from all electromagntic signals. The Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico is in a signal free zone. One does not have to go far into the desert to get away signals but living anywhere near or in a city is a bad idea.

• The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte – Wouldn't it be great if customers could determine how a much company's chief executive is paid? Well I can't speak for AT&T or Apple, but at TWiT that's exactly what we're going to do. Up to now I've been taking my pay from TWiT's general fund (along with all the other employees). Not any more. From now on you'll pay me directly with your contributions. I won't take a penny out of the operating funds.Think of your contributions as a tip jar. If you like what I'm doing with TWiT I hope you'll contribute $2 a month (or more or less depending on what TWiT is worth to you). If you are unhappy with our direction, you can cancel your contribution completely. Believe me, I'll notice. Your contributions will have a direct impact on how TWiT is run – because they'll have a direct impact on my personal bottom line.
• Southwest plane lands at DIA after in-flight birth – The Denver Post – A baby boy was born on a commercial airline flight this morning about 100 miles north of Denver. The sky-high delivery happened on Southwest Airlines Flight 441 at about 10:45 a.m., said Chris Mainz, an airlines spokesman.
• The Nasty Bits: Frankenstein’s Frog, Stir-Fried | Serious Eats : Recipes – Upon contact with the salt, the appendages began to move. I recoiled in shock. Was it normal, that even after the frogs had been stunned, skinned, and eviscerated, for their appendages to be quivering? After 20 seconds or so the quivering turned into a restless jig. The legs twitched violently, pumping up and down as if they were getting ready for one last hop. Then the forelegs began to pump too, with their spindly fingers grasping upwards towards me. The chests, which had been exhumed of their innards, heaved up and down as if gasping for air.
• Forcibly adopted American Indians torn between cultures – The Denver Post – Harness was among the 395 or so American Indian children forcibly adopted into white families as part of a national social experiment conducted from 1958 through 1967.
• JROTC, APS, and a Culture of Violence – Duke City Fix – For four years, I was the lone JROTC parent pulling up to drill meets in a vehicle plastered with peace and justice slogans. I was the mom with the trilingual peace button on my tote bag (salaam, peace, shalom), plus a few other buttons that were, shall we say, not exactly supportive of the decisions made by the administration in Washington. In 4 years, no one ever questioned me about my political views at a JROTC event, though I was ready with a well-honed First Amendment rebuttal. (Maybe they knew that.) After all, they do teach the Constitution in JROTC.
• Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence | Society | The Guardian – In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down.
• Big blasts create tiny, tough diamonds | KRQE News 13 – Scientists from the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC) at New Mexico Tech are using massive explosions to create diamonds in a remote piece of desert at Playas.
• Hikers rescued for free in Arizona – These cases and others like them may be sending the wrong message to hikers nationwide, but Arizona search-and-rescue teams have a more important message: They do not charge for rescues. Most states don't.
• ABQJournal.com: Disinterest and Denial – Readers criticize the site’s cluttered design and say they can never find what they seek. They say ABQJournal.com is difficult and confusing to navigate and complain that the search engine is not much help. They also hit ABQJournal.com for its lack of interactivity. Have any of you tried to post a comment on a story? Have you ever read one?

All I have to do is post that I have solved my Internal Sever Errors to have Wordpress to show me otherwise.

Greg In The Desert started to become unresponsive. Checking the control panel for the Dreamhost personal server there was a huge increase in memory and CPU usage.

I didn’t do anything to my settings that could have caused this but I assumed a plugin started doing something wrong. The Wordpress admin menu because unresponsive so I spent the day manually removing plugins via FTP. Nothing was working.

Finally I checked out the database restore options in the Dreamhost control panel. I restored to a database from three days ago. Boom, back to a functioning Wordpress install. I believe I said:

Assuming no more technical issues, posting should pick up.

Wordpress can sure be a bitch sometimes. If you visit the site directly you may have noticed it has been down about 20% of the time due to an “500 Internal Server Error”. I contacted Dreamhost support and they told me it was due to too much memory usage.

I’ve checked into why you’ve been receiving these internal server errors, and it seems your scripts have been getting automatically killed by our Process Watcher script due to your sites going over Memory limits on the shared server. To keep the site from overloading and crashing the server, certain functions on your site are “timing out”.

With my old host, I was cut off suddenly and without notice for excessive CPU usage on a shared host. I was forced to switch to DreamHost and I have to give them credit, at least they didn’t cut me off and tell me to get lost.

Conveniently, DreamHost was offering a discounted personal server plan which gives me control over memory usage. The great part of this service is DreamHost cranks up the memory capacity to 2300 MB for free so an average load calculation could me made. In my case it was calculated to 150 MB with a 300 MB burst capability.

Not only were these internal server errors making difficult for people to access the site, it was making it difficult to post to the site. Assuming no more technical issues, posting should pick up.

I have for the most part given up on Twitter. Too much noise and not enough signal. I’ve even gone as far as making my account private.

I’m in the minority and since Twitter is very popular and some people won’t even click on a link unless it’s on Twitter, I have set up an account just for Greg In the Desert on Twitter. The account will just show posts from Greg In The Desert rather than random things from me. I thought it was better to set up a new account rather than spam the followers I already have.

If your interested, I’m using the Twitter Tools plugin with the Twitter Friendly Links to generate my own short URLs.

twitter.com/greginthedesert

Greg In The Desert is now available on the Kindle Store as a paid subscription. It costs $1.99 to subscribe via the Kindle store.

As has been widely reported, Amazon sets the price of the subscriptions and gets 70%. If it were up to me I would make it free but I guess Amazon has bills to pay. You can still subscribe to my blog through the Kindle’s normal RSS feed reader.

Greg In The Desert experienced a massive spike in traffic this week when ehowa.com linked to the post title “Drive Through Fail“. I also received some traffic when it was posted on Reddit, Twitter and a few other sites but nothing like this.

There were a few snarky comments left but I decided to keep them.

Greg In The Desert is moving to a new web hosting provider (thus the recent down time). I will probably be down for a few more days.

In the mean time, please visit www.roofuspennymore.net

Red Sweater Software has released MarsEdit 2.3 as a public beta which now enables Tumblr support.

MarsEdit is the primary software I use to create new posts on Greg In The Desert. MarsEdit is compatible with a number of blogging software platforms including Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox.

Daniel Jalkut (developer of MarsEdit) and Manton Reece have a podcast called Core Intuition (available on itunes ) where they discuss developing software on the Mac and iPhone. In episode 14 Daniel discussed the development of Marsedit 2.3 and adding Tumblr support.

The links I post daily are surprisingly popular, and have become even more popular since I started adding small summaries to them.

I use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us (del.icio.us/gregjsmith) to gather all my links. I post them throughout the day then had Delicious post them to my blog. I didn’t really like letting Delicious have control of the posting and recently found the Wordpress plugin postalicious. Postalicious pulls the links from Delicious (it also works with ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, Yahoo Pipes and Jumptags) allowing me control over how the post looks and when they are posted. I could post every hour if I wanted, thought I think that would be too much.

I didn’t like the way the link posts looked on the front page, so I disabled the Delicious category from appearing on the front page (using the Simply Exclude plugin) but they will still post on the RSS feed. If you get updates to Greg In The Desert by visiting the site, I suggest you subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe by email or visit the category.