Posted on April 22, 2011
Cross Posting For Fun and Profit
I’m sure you’ve noticed a derth of posts on chiplynch.com in the last, say, year. Well, that’s Ok. It’s not that nothing’s been going on in my life, actually it’s been quite insane (and sometimes in a good way). I’m just behind. But, I’m trying to catch up! There are scads of pictures in the gallery, but I’m probably missing a couple of thousand (sorry, Emily — I’ll get your wedding photos up soon, promise!).
In the mean time, I’m going to start cross-posting things from some of my other blogs.
What’s that, you say? I have other blogs? Well, yeah, apparently, although I haven’t kept up with them either. I’ve got a pitifully bad habit of not knowing what things to post where either, so they ALL get posted here, and then I split the rest of them up accordingly. Trust me, it’s going to all work out somehow. The great part for you, my devoted followers, is that this may actually give you something to read.
And it may not.
Happy hunting,
—Chip
Posted on April 22, 2011
Taco and Mia are Party Animals!
Note: This is a special guest post written by Chipmonkey
I made a few new friends last week! My human (Chip) has a friend Taco, who is spending a year traveling around the country with his Human (Mia); you can keep track of their adventures on Taco’s blog. They were going through Las Vegas, and since I have some friends out there too I decided to have Chip fly us out there to meet them and have a few nights on the town; Angela even came out for a whirlwind 36 hours — just the right way to do Vegas!
Chipmonkey and Taco
Viva Las Vegas!
Posted on July 14, 2010
Kenya
Well, I’ve been back from Kenya for a while now. For anyone that missed it (you weird non-facebook users), I went over with Hearts For Kenya, a Louisville, KY based volunteer organization that, well, here’s how they word it:
The mission of Hearts for Kenya is to empower the Oyugis community to address the critical needs of poverty, hunger and disease through education and training projects. The core venture is aimed primarily at increasing agricultural productivity with ancillary projects including building, nutrition, education, assistance to orphans and widows, health services, and a tree nursery. The intent of Hearts for Kenya is to enable the local citizens to carry on the projects autonomously.
The experience was nothing short of amazing. Which, of course, means it’s time to get the photos uploaded. 🙂 I’ve been sitting on this for a while, trying to find something to write, and taking time to organize at least a few of the photos. There are more than 2500 of them in the entire album, so it was a bit daunting. I pulled a lot of my favorites, though, in this folder here.
There were really two distinct parts of the trip. For about 10 days we stayed in Oyugis, Kenya, the focal point of the volunteer work we were doing. I could write volumes about the experience here, and I hope to someday, possibly on the Hearts4Kenya website, but for now, photos will have to do, mostly because I’m at work and I want to get this out. Pictures of the students, people, and area are in a little folder here:
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The last two days we spent on Safari, which was equally awesome but in a completely different way. Pictures from there are here:
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For the uber-lazy, here are a few of the best shots:
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For the uber-non-lazy, drop me a line, and we’ll figure out how to get you on the next trip somewhere around June, 2011.
Posted on June 6, 2010
Packing, Planning, and Catching Up
Well, it’s time again for that bi-annual post that you all have come to love and enjoy!
This particular weekend, I’m packing for a trip to Kenya… I’m leaving this coming weekend for a two week volunteer trip with Pete who I’ve known for-freakin’-ever (and a few other people that I’ve just recently met). They’re a part of Hearts4Kenya, a small nonprofit that John Willingham, who organizes the trip and probably does a million other very important things, operates.
If you’re interested, btw, you can donate money here. Also, a lot of pictures from one of the previous trips are on chiplynch.com, if you’re curious.
Er… it’s not that there aren’t a mazillion other things going on. I got new roommates (Hi Ana and Jes!); there are new family members (Yay Tonya, Autumn, April, and, you know, the non-new-mothers involved). Finally got to see the College crew again in Austin, TX (I’m so far behind on pics it’s just not worth talking about). Went to a few weddings lately — congrats Emily, Kate, Scott, Kristina, and ya know, whoever I missed.
And, geez, that’s just the last month or so. I have to go pack now, or I’d be more, ya know… verbose. My new house has beautiful vinyl sided sheds. I hired Sheds Unlimited, and they did a splendid job installing it for me! I can’t wait to move in. Well, I better get back to packing.
Posted on January 12, 2010
Virtualizing and Disaster Testing a Linux Server
Since the mercury has decided to go hiding completely in that tiny little ball it calls home apparently my small but dedicated webserver has decided to freak out and take a small hibernation period itself. I think the NIC is going bad — every few days it would take down my whole network. Pulling the network cable from the router brought everything ELSE back up, and the machine seemed to reboot and work fine once I put the keyboard and head back on, but then, a few days later, same problem.
So, I’ve decided to do away with the older desktop hardware that I keep replacing and re-purposing and move to a virtual machine on my media center PC, which is on all the time anyway, and a lot beefier. This gave me a chance to do a couple of things:
- Eliminate a whole PC (hopefuly saving some energy $$)
- Test my backup strategy (I got a passing grade, but just barely — read on)
- Play with VirtualBox and really dig into a virtual machine
- Clean up the dang webserver!!
Getting rid of a whole machine has obvious benefits. The existing webserver had a 200GB hard drive which had three partitions — a 40GB windows boot partition (that I NEVER use), a small linux swap space, and a 150GB root ext3 partition. I had a 500GB usb drive attached to it that I used as a backup (more on that soon). I took the 500GB drive and put it in the media center PC running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. I’m planning on downgrading that to 32-bit soon, because the 3D software I have won’t run 3D Frame Sequential movies out of 64-bit, although games and everything else work. Weird. Still, for now that’s where we’re at.
Before I get into the nitty gritty, I wanted to touch on that last point too — cleaning up the webserver. During the migration (or mock recovery, depending on what you want to call it), I realized that I’m hosting six websites on my poor little desktop and home network. That’s not counting the two that I still have files for which have moved off of my personal network. This site (chiplynch.com) has been running in some form or another for over a decade! So you can imagine what sort of junk files I’ve piled up on the website. Layers of manual backups during upgrades and site changes, temporary files and remnants of old site reorganizations. It’s kind of nostalgic to go back through the archives.
For anyone still reading, unless you have a specific problem that google brought you here to fix, or you’re a very geeky and close personal friend, I’m guessing that there’s really no benefit in reading any further. Consider yourself warned.
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