When I heard of the Arowhead 135, I thought "that sounds like a lot of fun!" and when I found out registration was open, I knew I wouldn't be accepted but I thought it would be good experience to go through the process. So I tackled that application with all the gusto of a medeocre white man.

Then I received the acceptance email...

Oh my, what have I done?

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"The OnePlus 5 features the highest resolution dual camera on the planet,” says the marketing copy. After a few months of using the phone's camera, it’s easy to see that resolution has been squandered by software. In the early days of adding cameras to phones, it was expected that the quality of the camera would suffer greatly, but after a few years, they began to surpass many low-end point-and-shoot cameras. We’ve come to expect the camera in our pocket to be fast, clear, and have more features than most others, with dual lenses, depth detection and effects, and great HDR rendition. The 5 squarely hits many of these marks with fast focus, face detection, and a second camera to mimic shallow depth of field, but in low light or using HDR, the images show a distinct watercolor-like quality to them.

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I tried out AWS's EFS (Elastic File System), which is basically a drop-in replacement for NFS. It made sense at the time as a way to allow scaling of my small (1 server) cluster of machines. Unfortunately, it took Wordpress's time-to-first-byte from 1 second to 6 seconds, which was not reasonable. As a result, I switched back to EBS (Elastic Block Storage). At some point, I might try moving to a mountes S3 bucket, but I'm not sure the software exists for easily doing that on Amazon Linux.

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For the past 16 years, I've had servers in my home office running zvan.net, among other domains. After thousands of Watt-hours of power and multiple upgrades of hardware, it's finally time to shut them off and move everything to the cloud. Eventually, I'll have my one or two servers managed by Chef, but for the moment, I'm doing it the old fashioned way with Git and ssh.

Perhaps there will be a blog post in there somewhere, or perhaps there will only be this one that tests the functionality of my new AWS server.

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On June 7th and 8th 2014, I rode my bicycle 150 miles and raised $1035 of the $3,000,000 raised by the event for the National MS Society, Upper Midwest Chapter. Here are two videos, one for each day.

Day 1

Day 2

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I took some pictures of Thomas Dolby at The Cedar last night. Steph wrote a review.

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An excellent ad campaign. Check it out.

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While getting ready for work this morning, I read this on twitter:

Searching for an article with "atheists need to" Google responds with "shut up", "die", and "chill". The hate still catches me off guard.

Brianne Bilyeu (@abiodork) August 9, 2012

So I thought I'd try some autocompletes. The results were interesting.

atheists need to
atheists need to shut up
atheists need to shut
atheists need to die
atheists need to chill

christians need to
christians need to wake up
christians need to die
christians need to stand up
christians need to grow up

muslims need to die
muslims need to be exterminated
muslims need to chill
muslims need to grow up

jews need to
jews need to die
jews need to get over the holocaust
jews need to be perfected
jews need to be exterminated

Nobody seems to know anything about mormons:
mormons need to
mormons need to work to increase favor
things you need to know about mormons
everything you need to know about mormons
what you need to know about mormons

I guess buddhists and agnostics don't need anything:
buddhists need to
agnostics need to

And taoists might as well be atheists:
taoists need to
atheists need to shut up
atheists need to shut
atheists need to die
atheists need to chill

So what about "atheists are?"

atheists are
atheists are
atheists are retarded
atheists are smarter
atheists are so stupid

christians are
christians are crazy
christians are ignorant
christians are hypocrites
christians are delusional

muslims are
muslims are exempt from obamacare (wait...what?)
muslims are animals
muslims are coming
muslims are crazy

jews are
jews are a race
jews are not white
jews are not a race
jews are white

mormons are
mormons are crazy
mormons are not christians
mormons are christians
mormons are a cult

buddhists are
buddhists are atheists
buddhists are killing muslims
buddhists are vegetarians
buddhists are hypocrites

taoists are
taoists think caves are
are taoists atheists
what are taoists beliefs
are taoists vegetarians

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So we made it to Mars again and geeks like me everywhere stayed up extra late to watch the live event. We were not dissappointed. To see the first photos come back seconds after langing, even though the dust cap was still on the camera was an amazing thing.

I stayed up. I was excited. I wasn't quite as excited as the people in the video, but I was excited.

Here's what really gets me though. When Curiosity touched down after the sky-crane manouver, I was struck by just how excited the people at JPL were about this. My first thought: "Holy crap! It's like the opening of a Microsoft store ... except they're all wearing the same color shirt."

It's been 50 years since we first put humans on the moon. In 50 years, airplanes went from a tentative unpowered glider in North Carolina to the supersonic Bell X-1; why haven't we done the same for space flight? I mean...should we be this excited by going to Mars? Shouldn't it be old hat by now?

Don't get me wrong. I'm excited. The science that's going to come out of this mission will enrich our lives for years to come and the new technology that went into creating the mission is probably just hitting our cellphones and clothing stores. I just think we're missing out on a lot of opportunty. Heck, we spent the entire budget of this mission in less than a month in Iraq...Just think what we could be doing with more balanced priorities.

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