MP3: Robert Parker Interview – (C) WKDZ Radio

WKDZ: Did you get out of the vehicle after this happened and look down there?

RP: Yes.

WKDZ: Did you yell at anyone on the boat? Did anyone yell at you?

RP: Nuh Uh, everybody was running back and forth.

WKDZ: Did any of them know you were up there?

RP: I don’t know that they did or not.

Everybody was running back and forth, I’ll bet they were!

BrakeBlog Oct 2011 – Jan 2012 (Godaddy)

BrakeBlog

Page loadtime High 1086ms – Average 639ms – Low 360ms

Christian Heights UMC (ditto)

CHUMC

High 1730ms – Average 1080ms – Low 379ms

The church website loads 440ms slower on average when it is running normally. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change since the BrakeBlog has transitioned to its new home.

Another thing which is much more surprising to me personally is the radical difference in traffic patterns between my personal blog and the church website. The BrakeBlog received 143 (non-unique) visits in December while transferring 709 megabytes of data during the same period. These numbers are reversed on the church though. CHUMC received only 64 (non-unique) visits while transferring 1,810 megabytes in December. 28 megabytes per CHUMC user versus only 5 megabytes per BrakeBlog user. I have to think that the sermons I post online are far more popular than I realized.

Thanks to Paul Lloyd

Doing this analysis I realize how large both websites are. The church website seems to hit a ceiling at 100 users. I have been disappointed that I haven’t been able to attract more than that. A CHUMC user, however, is much more involved and that counts as much or more than the simple visitor total. After I move both websites away from Godaddy those TX/RX lights on the server won’t be blinking quite as fast as they were.

To all my visitors on the BrakeBlog and Christian Heights, THANK YOU! Stay tuned for the follow-up post when we find out what were the results of this experiment.

Energynet Datacenter

I have been a GoDaddy customer since 2003. For the vast majority of that time the service from GoDaddy was acceptable though not excellent. I tolerated many of GoDaddy issues because none justified the time necessary to switch. The most recent example happened in September 2011. The website for Christian Heights began loading very slowly and throwing “500 Internal Server” errors. When I emailed Support about this, their best response was to paraphrase; “It’s not our fault! WordPress is slow, you need to optimize your database.”

Our administrators actively monitor the performance of our hosting and balance the load on the servers as needed. However, as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance. This can generally be caused by the application interfacing with the database or just to the amount of content the site contains. You can improve performance by optimizing the fields and tables of your database.

They are full of —— er, baloney. I know this primarily because the problem stopped immediately after I contacted them even though Support never admitted to doing anything. I have shopped for alternatives before but never bothered to make a serious move because Godaddy was always the cheapest among the mid-tier registrars. Being cheap always trumped whatever service problems I experienced.

It became a matter of principle when I read that Godaddy was supporting SOPA/PIPA. This time I am strongly motivated to leave Godaddy. I picked Hopkinsville Electric’s Energynet service to be my new web host. Energynet being local is very important. It is the primary reason why I am willing to pay more. I have taken the first step by transferring ericbrake.com to Hover. I expect to move christianheightsumc.org and ericbrake.ws also though not immediately. ericbrake.com will operate as a test site while I learn how to migrate both blogs to new installations of WordPress.

Paula Russell speaks at CHUMC

I hope this will be the closest I ever come to professional thievery. Paula Russell from Aaron McNeil House was discovered victimizing the organization she was hired to lead. In the initial report she was charged with stealing only from AMH.

The former executive director of the Aaron McNeil House in Hopkinsville is charged with using funds from the non-profit agency to pay more than $23,000 worth of bills.

Then the next day more details were released saying that Paula Russell has done this before.

It happened 8-years ago and law enforcement and court officials say she was going by the name Paula Nightingale. Russell, or Nightingale, pled guilty in December 2003 to three counts of false bookkeeping and one count of felony theft after being indicted on more than 47 various charges. She was ordered to pay nearly 84-thousand dollar in restitution directly to Pasminco Incorporated.

Christian Heights also had our interactions with Ms. Russell/Nightingale when we collected 1100 units of food for Aaron McNeil’s food pantry. On the day when Ms. Russell visited us to receive the donation. She gave the congregation a backhanded compliment saying that she felt welcomed into the church even though CHUMC is 100% white and she is black. It was rude and unnecessary for her to mention it. Her comments reveal what is first on her mind. Are you black or white? Are you the “oppressed” or the oppressor?

Old vs New

The old laptop on the left is an HP Pavilion dv4000 and the new one on the right is a Dell Inspiron N5010. The HP has been through the battle and it came out only slightly dinged. A piece of molding on the left side is broke off and there is a wear mark on the right side of the touch pad where my hand always rested. The Intel graphics are old enough that they are no longer supported by the 2.6.38 Linux kernel. Finally, the main reason why I replaced the HP is that the cd burner started throwing errors when I was burning sermons on disk for church.

broken molding on laptop

Those are all of the things wrong with the laptop but that wouldn’t prevent it from being useful in retirement. Once I have the Dell setup and I’m at home using it. I will give the old laptop to my mom for her to use. The HP is still a fast machine good for web surfing and email.

16 inches is equal to 406 milimeters.  More than 300 milimeters per month is very common in India during the wet monsoon season.

River in Hoptown - Credit to Lou Willis.

Thailand monsoon - Credit to Frederic Poirot

Close enough to monsoon weather for me!

Bowling Green attorney Mark Alcott, who represents the city, filed a response Thursday to Sherrell’s complaint, stating that Sherrell had not met procedural requirements set forth in Kentucky civil cases to seek an injunction.

Yes! Sherrell was the little guy in the room and he had no idea what he was doing. This is why criminals fire their lawyer and start submitting their arguments written in crayon. The defendant knows his goose cooked; the goal thereafter is to put on a three-ring circus in front of the judge.

Sherrell maintained that the ban prevented him from being able to make decisions about his business regarding smoking.

“I understand completely the city wanted to look out for the health of the public at large, but the public at large has the choice to go to my business or not,” Sherrell said. “I’m not the place you must go (for auto service).”

“My liberties are being impinged!” is a political argument not a legal one and I’ll prove it later.

“I knew that the city was going to try to beat me down with procedure, because I know that’s the weakest part of my case,” Sherrell said. [...]

“I’ve had a thousand people ask me why I haven’t hired an attorney, and it’s pretty obvious I cannot afford an attorney, and I don’t spend money I don’t have,” Sherrell said.

I guess it was worth paying the court fees just to say that he did it. David at least had a plan for success when he walked onto the battlefield against Goliath. A better way to stop bad laws is to elect conservative representatives and show up in force when these proposals come up for a vote.

Opponents of the ban agued [sic] that government should respect individual liberties and business freedoms. Ban opponents made up a strong majority of the approximately 140 people who sat and stood to participate in the proceedings – plus at least a dozen more who watched on television from the lobby of the county’s Newport administrative building.

That is how it’s done successfully. No lawyers required.

Put this in the Dog-Bites-Man category of desperate news reporting. WKDZ is reporting that a 2.4 magnitude earthquake occurred near Paducah on March 24th. The earthquake was felt by no one and no damage was caused by this non-quake earthquake. Somebody tell me where is the story on this?

39 quakes

During the last week there were 38 earthquakes in this region surrounding the Madrid fault that no one cared about. Where is the love for them if that one in Paducah was so important?

Only mildly related is the fact that Bing search copied the same feature. What pops up in Bing has little to no importance but it is still amusing.

If you type in “Christian Heights” one of the suggestions is Christian Heights United Methodist Church. I am the maintainer of the CHUMC website and I like the way Bing search is thinking.

Bing recommends CHUMC

14 inch icicle

Man-made Global Warming is a joke. Cue the fool himself, Al Gore. He explains to us how a warmer planet creates more severe snowstorms.

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

Ice-covered roads

Assuming that the pendulum is swinging back toward more severe winters over the next 10 years. What are school districts going to do if this is the new status quo? This could be the excuse for eliminating the long summer break; except when kids pass out because they were caught riding the bus in triple digit temperatures. There is no right answer when the district leadership has to consider the possibility of sue-happy parents looking to get their payday.

Snow days were nice when I was in school but I think Christian County calls off school way too often. Especially when main roads are clear and only secondary roads are slick. It doesn’t matter if twelve inches of snow fell this week I still have to drive in it. There were plenty of semi-trucks still driving today. If a truck driver can still haul his load then so can a school bus. The school buses should have a snow route and parents would meet the bus half way on a main road. My plan is not rocket science but it does require adults to act like adults.