SirSpanky.com - The Secret Diary of James Pearce Aged 20-Something

The site has been (semi) offline for a couple of days now. I took the database server that drives the site down because I’m virtualizing a lot of my infrastructure. Because it took longer than I thought it would to get everything back online, only cached pages were being served. The cache eventually times out and requires regeneration from the database, which it couldn’t do, and returned error 500 pages! Anyway, the new (virtualized) database server is up, so the site is back online

As I look at the summary results of hits on this site from last month, there are some interesting points. Firstly, there are more Mac (pseudo-BSD users looking at this site than Windows. W00t!

Secondly, there are quite a number of genuine BSD users looking at this. 20% of the hits from BSD users. That’s a lot! I still remember running sites where it was 95% Windows, 4% Mac and 1% Linux. BSD wasn’t even in the mix. I like this new trend

On Wednesday morning I woke up early (for me anyway - 8am to get some work done. I was sitting at the table on the boat doing my thing for about half an hour, and I look up for a minute and there’s a beautiful rainbow there. It doesn’t get much better than that It was a bit of a dreary day, but the next day (and next, and the whole weekend) are sunny It was only a couple of days ago that I was complaining about the rain

One thing with taking photos of rainbows is that they are so dependent on the viewing angle because they are caused by the refraction of light. So, moving around to get a better angle for the photo may result in changing what the rainbow looks like. This particular photo was taken directly out the window, and I have done any post-processing on it. I took some photos from the top deck, but I couldn’t get as bright of an image. I tried post processing the ones from the top deck too, but it seems *really* hard to bring out the rainbow. Dropping the brightness seems to be the best, but making the photo too dark just makes the whole image look bad. Making just the rainbow really dark makes it look too fake. I have to confess, I didn’t bother Googling for information on how to do this, but I found it interesting how difficult it was

I Googlged this and I came up empty, but I can’t be the only person to have noticed it. Maybe other people just aren’t calling it crazy links
Here’s an example of the URL for an HP product that I was looking at:

https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-15-119^1211_4000_100__

Uh, have you guys looked at your own URL’s??? I get that internally, the CMS you’re using might make them like this, but it’s compltely unfriendly! Even if you’re Mr I-See-Code-In-My-Dreams Software Engineer and ignore feeble humans who don’t remember 64 bit integers off the top of their head, you should realise that it’s terrible for SEO. Or maybe HP just don’t care about SEO because they are already a trusted site in Google. Mind you, I can’t say the same thing for their internal web search engine; every time I search on their website using their own search I come back with a lot of irrelevent results. Go Google Go! I also don’t get why it’s HTTP’s…are HP worried about man-in-the-middle attacks on their public information? “Oh look boss, if we buy this product it says our company will automatically become cool and guarentees to double our stock prices” (oops, SNAP!).

Seriously though, it’s an absolute pain when you have to share the link with someone else. “Oh, look at this from HP…oh it’s 404′ing for you? Sorry, copy and paste didn’t copy the whole URL because it has funky characters in it, let me manually select this crazy long monolithic URL that spans multiple adress field screens for you….oh never mind, lets just use IBM!”

I came out to the boat on Monday afternoon and I’ll be here for most of the week. I could have sword when I checked the weather forecast on Saturday that it said the whole week was going to be fine. I couldn’t have been much more wrong. It rained all day today. I feel like I’m in England. I mean, it literally rained the whole day (just not very hard). Very depressing: it fogs up the view out of my window

It’s 2am on a Saturday morning and I’ve just finished watching Redline. It’s a 90 minute movie, and it took me over 2 hours to watch. Why? I got bored and paused it a lot. This movie is the biggest tart-toting B-grade-actor weak-plotted movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s almost unwatchable, and the plot is so weak that I’m not surprised that no brand-name actors particpated. So what made me finish watching it? The cars are fantastic. I do love shiney Ferrari’s The race scenes are quite nicely filmed, not as good as The Fast And The Furious (any of them), but they are longer and still good.

The movie starts off with a group of rich people making bets on street racers. Then one of the main characters has his brother arrive back from Iraq, and it turns out he is some sort of ninja who specialises in blowing peoples houses up and picking fights. Oh, the main female lead, who’s occupation is a mechanic garage owner and part time singer, also turns out to be some sort of kung fu guru, but she’s not so handy with the C4. This probably doesn’t make much sense, and neither does the movie - the plot is just too fragmented and the actors are not good enough to pull it off. The slogan on the cover is about right, but that’s all that is any good in the movie.

Kelly Calrson is Kimber on Nip / Tuck - haha, Kimber dolls, that plot line cracked me up…oh sorry back to the post!

Anyway yeah she’s hot yadda yadda, anyone who’s watched the show knows that. So I watched this movie called Made Of Honor earlier in the week and she’s in it. Actually shes kind of just a side character…she’s only in it for a wedding…as the bride. My gosh the dress she’s wearing is hot though. That movie was released last year, and Nip / Tuck has been going for 4 years I think, and Kelly Carlson is still hot. That’s a pretty good effort I think. So anyway I was thinking as well, she’s the only girl / model / actress that I think looks hot with short hair. I mean that in the broadest possible way, completely outside of hollywood stars I’ll never meet…I can’t ever remember meeting a girl with hair above the shoulder and thinking ‘oh wow, she’s just gorgeous, I wish I had a girl like that in my life’.

Now, when I was searching for some pictures for the post, I came across the photos from the Stuff magazine shoot that she did a couple of years back (can’t miss ‘em when you search for her on Google Images). And there’s a couple of nice ones with short hair…and there’s a couple of her with long hair huh? Is her hair just put up? It doesn’t look put up to me, it looks short. Ah well I don’t know. I don’t even know what those pink lace ribbon things coming out of the teddy she is wearing are for

Now it was really hard to find any pics of her looking at hot as she does in Nip / Tuck or even in the Medal Of Honor movie (I don’t think I’ll marry a girl who wears that kind of wedding dress…but it sure looks good on her!!). So I took the best I could find for Medal Of Honor - pinched from justjared.com (with a little editing), and two from the Stuff magazine shoot (well, a very air brushed collection of it!) - the one I like best with her having her hair short (up??), and the one with the pink ribbon things that I don’t know what they are for