Sing me to sleep

I’m starting to be tired earlier, and am getting back to a normal sleeping schedule.  Go me.  (And yes, it is 1am... anything before 2am is early for me.)

Thursday, apparently a hard disk died in the server that my site lives on, so my site was inaccessible for a while.  Actually it was 8 hours.  From ~3pm to ~11pm.  There is no way a hard disk failure should cause 8 hours of downtime.  With mirroring RAID-arrays, there are 2 independent copies of all data, and a dead disk can just be replaced and re-mirrored.  Depending on the RAID subsystem, the disk can even be hot-swapped.  I was under the impression that all hosts used such a setup, but I’d venture a guess that mine does not.  If their servers weren’t so fast, and they didn’t give me free SSH access, I’d be looking for a new host right now.

Friday I had someone from the treas.gov domain -- that’s the US Department of the Treasury -- on my site, downloading Submerge songs.  It’s pretty unusual for me to get hits from government computers; in all of last year there were only about 30 out of some 20,000 visitors.  You gotta expect that the government frowns upon use of public machines for downloading mp3s.

Also on Friday, the bassist from Freemartin IMed me.  He came across my site site by searching for info on a show that his band played.  Anyway Freemartin is an up-and-coming band that I stumbled upon about 6 months ago, and I really like them.  But they only have one CD, and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, so I just have mp3s.  Well this guy IMs me and tells me they have a new EP coming out, and he wants to send me a free copy, along with the old album, and a t-shirt!  All because I have his band listed on my music page, saying how much I like them.  See, it pays to have a cool website  : )  So the bass player (he has a name, it’s Shawn, why don’t I call him that from now on....), Shawn, was really nice and we chatted for a while.  If you’re into indie/punk/emo definitely check Freemartin out.

I just put up some photos of my room.  They’re fun.  Go see.

Let’s end with something ridiculous from Bob Whittaker’s site:

In this [comic], the guy who sends messages by throwing them into the ocean wrote:

"We have a new Department of Homeland Security to protect us.  I recommend it to you."

The reply said, "We don’t need it.  We just enforce our immigration laws."

Entirely true and entirely ridiculous.  Bob also points out how ridiculous it is that Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum is being called anti-gay for his recent comment on privacy laws.  He may well believe that homosexuality is wrong, but #1 there’s nothing wrong with believing that, and #2 that’s not what he said.  What he said was that if a "right to privacy" exists such that the law cannot interfere with people’s actions behind closed doors (in this case, sodomy), then such a right would by definition prohibit the same interference by the law in cases of any number of other things, like incest.  Which is, of course, undeniably true by simple logical implication; however liberals cannot be troubled by such things as "truth" when sacred Political Correctness is at stake.  Free speech is becoming such a joke in this country.  No one is allowed to say these things that everyone knows are true.

As Tool so hopefully put it, I have a suggestion to keep you all occupied: learn to swim.  If only.