Useless fact: Today was the first time since April 6th that my walk to work was below freezing.
Not useless fact: the Inner Drive Webcam was temporarily off-line overnight, as I'm making some infrastructure changes and the computer it's attached to is being decommissioned. (It's back up now.) Apparently people noticed:
I don't do business with you because I don't need to, however, I do look at your live camera every day to see the weather and get a look at Evanston, the town in which I was born and raised. My grandfather lived in the North Shore Hotel in the '50s and I visited there often. Your bottom line may not get any bigger if you continue with the camera but there may be people like myself that will miss getting a glimpse of a portion of the city. I hope that you will not let your new infrastructure cancel out the continuation of the camera.
—John in Craddockville, Va.
And:
Greetings:
I look out at Chicago Ave almost every morning that I am not home in Evanston—just to 'check in'. I think it is the only Webcam in the town. Please keep it up! I love it!
—Bernard, writing from Los Angeles
I had no idea.
The technical issue is simple. Right now the camera runs on an ancient (6-year-old) server running Windows 2000. It's essentially Inner Drive's backup server, sort of the Prince Charles of the office. All it does with its 200 watts is run the Webcam and wait for another server to die.
Here's a photo. The Webcam is hooked into the server on the bottom. (One wag called it "Paul McServer" and called the other one "Server Wonder," but in the office we call them McHenry and Bulle. Bulle is so old it reflects the obsolete naming scheme we haven't used in years.)
Well, server prices having fallen, and efficiencies having risen, and rack-mounting being generally preferable to floor-mounting, we're replacing it with a Dell 860. But the new server will have a Xeon processor, which means we'll be running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003, which means (finally) our Webcam software won't run on the new server.
When we get the new server running (probably the first week of December), I may take an old, decrepit laptop and hook that into the Webcam. In any event, given the outpouring of support for it, I'll do what I can to keep it running.
My dad moved recently. I feel sorry for him, with his sad history of living in these kinds of places:
It turns out, though, that he now lives less than 2 km from a Peet's. So it's not as bad as it seems from the photos.
Via my dad, the New York Times Frugal Traveler visited Chicago recently:
What was this city, then, if such as myself, on a low budget, could essentially see, do and eat whatever I wanted without straining my wallet? Were the skyscrapers merely a prairie mirage, a veil for the cheap, accessible delights hidden at their feet? If I asked John, he'd surely cite Descartes's deceiving demon, while Tiffany would, I bet, simply shrug the question away.
From this past weekend, in Lincoln Park, Chicago:
Incidentally, the building behind him is the Parker School.
My body doesn't know if I got up this morning at 7 or midnight. I can't decide whether or not I'm hungry. And because I neglected to check email for two days, I had 980 messages totalling over 600 MB (one of my friends sent me the same...photos...four...times), of which 650 were spam.
I will now collect my dog.
I'm traveling this week. Three guesses where:
So far it's been great. It only rained a bit on Thursday. Today I was on a train most of the day, as I will be tomorrow. Exhausting but fun.
More later.
Does it seem odd to anyone that a boat from land-locked Switzerland won this year's America's Cup last night?
Parker had just about the longest day of his life yesterday when we drove up to Devil's Lake State Park, near Baraboo, Wis., for a 9 km hike. That's a lot for a dog of any size, not even counting that it involved a 150 m climb at one point. Fortunately there were stairs, courtesy of the Civilian Conservation Corps circa 1938:
He had, I think, the best walk ever. He met other dogs:
Found enough to drink along the way:
And discovered a hollow tree:
Finally we reached the top of the ridge to rest. He initially seemed nervous about the height but, with a few scritches behind the ear, relaxed:
Also, I'm happy to report, he had a restful car ride in both directions:
The June Solstice happens in 15 minutes, at 1:06pm CDT. Happy Summer! (Or, you know, winter, for the one-third of the world who live in the Southern Hemisphere.)