In my visit to St. Marteen on Friday, I got a chance to take a taxi to the infamous Maho Beach located at the end of the runway for Princess Juliana International Airport. In the 45 minutes we were there, we saw US Air, Air France, and American Airlines fly overhead as well as a bunch of smaller planes. Yes, the pictures are real. Yes, the planes are that close.
If you ever visit St. Marteen, take the time to visit Maho Beach. Its an experience not to miss!
Ryan Personal airplane, beach, St. Marteen
Last week I tweeted a few times because it kept raining day after day. Today, when a heavy line of storms moved through the area, we didn’t get a drop. I watched the radar loop and as the storm moved East/South-East, a line opened up parallel to the direction of movement. It was like a “dry channel” of air that sat over top of us. The storm just “split” before it got to us and then merged once it was past.
Its not the first time this has happened. Its happened plenty of times before during summer thunderstorms. I’m not sure if there’s some geographical formation that’s causing storms to “split” around us or what. Maybe its just my close proximity to Three Mile Island…
Ryan Personal weather
I’m looking to organize a Wordpress Meetup of sorts for all users in Central PA. I don’t care if you’re a developer, designer, or just a user… please, come on out and join the fun. It will be a great resource for everybody to learn and network. If you’re just a user and have a need, somebody should be there that can fill it for you.
As far as location, I was thinking the Abbey Bar at Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg. For a time, lets say the 2nd Wednesday of the month at 7PM?
If anybody has other preferences for time and venue, please let me know and we can adjust as necessary.
With that being said… I’ll see you at the first Wordpress Harrisburg Meetup on Wednesday June 10th, at 7PM at the Abbey Bar at ABC.
P.S. As an added bonus, I’ll pick up the drink tab for the first meetup.
Ryan Wordpress abbey bar, abc, harrisburg, meetup, Wordpress
So lately I’ve been caught up with some other projects. I’ve been trying to develop a new site which should be launching in the near future. I have a domain name and twitter account, which will be released in the near future. I’ll also release some other details as time gets close.
Besides that, it’s just been my normal workload keeping up with my garden outdoors. Speaking of which, I need to go weed it tomorrow.
The only other thing I have which has been keeping me away from what I’d rather be doing is maintaining a friend’s yard while he’s selling his house. It’s about 3/4 of an acre that needs to be cut one to two times a week until the growth slows down. I spent a few hours on that today when I would have rather been working on my new site. Oh well, he sweetened the deal with the $1000 he has invested in a commercial grade mower, blower, and trimmer. I get to keep all of those in return for mowing his grass for a few months.
Ryan Personal life
I made it down to WordCamp Mid-Atlantic in Baltimore, MD yesterday to meet some old friends (Mark Jaquith and Aaron Brazell) as well as make a bunch of new contacts. As some of you already know, or learned yesterday, I was pretty involved in Wordpress back in the day. I had stepped out for a bit due to personal reasons and am now trying to get re-involved in the community as well play catch-up with all the changes.
Fact Check: I was having a rough time yesterday trying to remember exactly which version I started with. According to the earliest ryanduff.net page on archive.org dated Feb 4, 2005, I had posts in September 2004. Cross referencing with Wordpress Versions, that would mean I started with Wordpress version 1.2 since 1.2.1 was not released until October 6, 2004. Now that that’s out of the way…
Overall, there was a TON of energy and the turnout was excellent. The presentations, despite a lack of much choice were also good. And like any unconference, if you didn’t like what somebody was presenting, you can walk out and go to another session or start your own. There was even a genius bar for anybody with questions. I stopped for a while to mingle with some of the more technical people there like @sivel @onefinejay and @ericskiff. We got to reminisce over old times as well as talk about the general direction of Wordpress.
I’m still waiting for my MingleStick email to come through so I can access the contact info for the people I met. I like to keep on top of that before I start to forget things.
Don’t forget, if you’re looking for things on the net, make sure to search for the #wordcampmidatl hashtag. We have @technosailor to thank for that one! 
Ryan Wordpress Mid-Atlantic, unConference, WordCamp, wordcampmidatl, Wordpress
Microsoft COO Kevin Turner proclaimed
Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today.
Sounds like a bunch of marketing hype. I’ll believe it when an indepent study or two verifies that information.
Ryan Technology Leopard, linux, Microsoft, OS, OS X, Security, Vista
I went to Lowes tonight to pick up a few things. After pricing things at the garden center, then walking to the far end of the store to pick up some rebar, I headed back to the garden center. I got everything I needed there, well, almost everything.
I needed a few landscape timbers, but the ones there were moldy. They weren’t just growing mold spots, they were growing mold worse than a loaf of stale bread. I found two associates standing around talking and asked if they could bring down one of the packs of new landscape timbers that looked really nice and was promptly told no and there were more by the contractor desk… at the other end of the store. The one associate was even sitting on a forklift and could have gotten them down in about 2 minutes. As I walked away, I heard the one associate on the forklift tell the other associate that they had to sell through them and they weren’t going to put any more out until they did. Frankly, they looked like last year’s stock and had been sitting out all winter.
The other associate walked back over to me and told me that before I walk to the other end of the store, that the ones in the new bundles were moldy too. I asked him to show me where, because all the ones I was looking at weren’t moldy. Besides, its treated lumber… it shouldn’t be growing mold.
Rather annoyed, I walked the cart to the front of the garden section and left it there as I walked across the front of the store to the contractor desk. There were no landscape timbers there. After walking back through lumber and finding another associate, he pointed me to what I was looking for… in the back corner of the store. The timbers there looked half decent, and weren’t growing anything. I walked back to my cart, completing my second lap around the store. At this point, after the way I was treated, I was in no mood to grab my cart and make a third lap since my car was parked in front of the garden center and I would have had to walk back there to check out anyway.
I guess I’ll be stopping at Home Depot some other day after work this week. This is not the typical service I receive at Lowes and was quite shocked at how the associate had no desire to even help a customer out. I was half tempted to leave my cart and just walk out of the store.
Ryan Personal customer service, Lowes
Spring is back and in full swing. Sorry for a lack of updates the past two weeks. I’ve been busy outside getting my garden prepped every chance I get. If its decent after work, I’m often out until it gets dark. I took this week off to try and get some more stuff done but the weather didn’t cooperate much.
So far I’ve been able to get two rows of each of my cold weather crops started, last Thursday and yesterday. I’ve also tested the soil and added some fertilizer as well as sulfur to adjust the pH back down to a normal level. Tests showed alkaline around 8.0 and my target is 6.5-7. Hopefully the sulfur I put down today will get washed in with the rain tonight and bring the soil back in line. I’ll have to test again in a few more weeks.
I also got my cold frames outside and moved my seedlings into them. I had started my seedlings inside almost 2 weeks ago and they’re starting to get big. I’ll be trimming them down to one plant in each pot soon. I’m hoping the sunlight will help them grow. Unfortunately, I still need to cover the cold frames with blankets one or two more times according to the latest 10 day forecast.
As usual, its now Friday of my week off and I havent’ accomplished much around the house. I have a few projects to do this weekend and hopefully I’ll be able to cross off one or two major things on my to-do list before I return to work next Monday.
Ryan Personal garden
Over the past week or so I’ve been busy prepping our vegetable garden. I’m using the area on the south side of my house which meant I needed to transplant some shrubs first. After I got the shrubs transplanted, I tilled the previous side garden bed and some of the yard. I ended up with a plot about 30 feet by 12 feet.
I was able to get out Tuesday this week and get some of the weeds raked out that were left over after tilling. I spread 20 bags of topsoil and tilled that under before it rained Thursday night. We got a good soaking rain last night and some more tonight hopefully. I do want to test the soil in another few days once the ground begins to dry up a bit.
Since its still too early for most plants, I have some peat pots inside to get things started in. In a few weeks I should be able to get things moved outside to my cold frames for another few weeks before its warm enough to transplant. I’m still in the planning stages of what’s going to go where and I need to finish soon since there are a few cold weather crops that I can get planted soon.
I also built a compost bin out of some old scrap wood. I’ll post more on that later as well as some photos of the garden.
Ryan Gardening diy, garden, vegetables
I heard about WebHostingTalk’s security breach recently and after reading the comments on Slashdot, I became a bit concerned people were missing the issue. People discussed offsite backups and offline backups, but while that might have mitigated the issue, its not what’s at fault.
What’s at fault is the fact that their database servers could be connected to from their backup servers. Backup servers should only be able to be connected to from the boxes they’re backing up data from. You should send your data there, not download your your data to the backup server.
My sss/rsync scripts run from the box I’m backing up and that box has no way to connect back to the box I’m backing up from. If that’s the way WebHostingTalk’s servers were set up, there would be no hack. Yes, they might have been able to delete the backups, but not be able to connect to the database servers and wipe the tables on them.
Ryan Networking backup, database, hack, server, webhostingtalk
