Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

This morning, we took a power hit in the house. Clocks reset, the lights flickered, the Tivo stayed up, but one computer horked up.
The media server wouldn’t reboot after the power hit. Ruh roh. The media server that I’ve been meaning to back up for months now, but never got around to…
After several computers attempting to boot it, the drive is unresponsive.

I’m afraid it’s dead. On it is our entire CD collection ripped to MP3.
Our entire 500+ album MP3 collection gone. Gone.
Maybe I can teach my daughters to rip CDs…

Life’s had me going in several directions at once recently. It’s a good thing. As my father says, “It’s better to wear out than to rust.” He doesn’t say there’s time for blogging…
Last week I was in San Francisco to talk about how we use social software at work. It seems that my talk was well recieved, well at least Jeff Jarvis liked it. The Web 2.0 Conference seemed like quite a big deal. The conference was at the Hotel Nikko, an upscale hotel in the heart of SF.
At these kinds of gatherings, I’m something of a cross between a tourist and an object for show & tell. I’m not in the internet business, I’m in the TV business, so I am not as concerned about the latest Google rumor as most of the Web 2.0 crowd. The discussion is interesting, but it’s not my lifeblood and I’m not in one of the many startups.
The was a definite vibe in the room. Money. The dotboom is over and the money is flowing back in. Like sharks circling the chum in the water, people are working the room like it’s 1999 (cue Prince music…). Discussions of VCs, funding rounds, and customers pervade every corner. The money is getting the greed levels up and people all want a piece.
I meet some cool new people, renewed aquaintences will others and stared at a billionaire. You can see me here, working hard with a bottle of beer in my hand. Click on the Brewster Kahle photo.

Across the street was the Hilton, whose workers were on strike. They were marching, banging drums, and chanting. It’s been 10 years since I lived in San Francisco, but it retains the same eclectic feel. The strikers were chanting in Chinese at some points. Only in the City by the Bay…
In other news, Katamari Damacy has taken hold of the household and all four of us are playing it. We finally beat the game and I was able to build a truly huge katamari.

516 meters is good, but I’m told some people can get it up to over 800 meters.
Michele has been busy as well, deciding that now is the time to clean the house of things. She’s arranged for a large dumpster to appear and I spent most of the day on Saturday filling it up to the brim. And we still haven’t put a dent in the mounds of crap we have.
She also went to Costco and picked up a little Gatorade. I should have known that there is no such thing as a little Gatorade when shopping at Costco.
Here’s the outside fridge.

I stopped counting the bottles when I got to 20 and there were plenty more. So if you’re thirsty, stop by…

After a long blogging hiatus, Being Daddy is back. With a vengeance…
Take a gander at “I Am Elmo.”
Classic stuff…

It’s official, the internet bust is over.
As of today, I’m cashing checks for doing nothing but making silly pages on a web site.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Google’s Adsense program appears to work. I have turned my site, an homage to a guy with too much free time on his hands, into a bonafide internet property.
Who would thunk?

Last week was geektacular. I was linked to on Slashdot about the GLAT and on Fark about the page on cleaning pennies. This has blown through any previous high number of visits to my site.
At last check, the cleaning pennies page has been hit so much I’ve burned up around 30 Gigs of data transfer. Yikes.
While it is nice to have lots of visitors and read nice comments about the page, the bandwidth management is an issue. Watching the spread of the link from page to page and from the US outward to the rest of the world is interesting.
In other news, the new Wired magazine arrived in the mail today. I was reading it in the bathroom while I watched the girls take a bath tonight. There were so many frickin’ ads it was hard to find the content.

I started ripping out the pages that were ads. I only ripped it out if it was an ad on both sides. I pulled out half the pages… Above you can see the pile of ads on the left and the remaining magazine on the right. Remember there are still a ton of ads inside that have content on one side.
How much would it cost to have an ad-free version of the the magazine?

A few days ago, Mr. P bought up a new blogging term. He wrote about it on his site.
The definition was:
“The condition where you have many items to blog about, yet lack the time or motivation to blog them.”
He wasn’t sure what term to use, blogjammed or backblogged.
It appears he chose to use blogjammed. What do you think?

When I was in high school back in the 80s, I worked at Taco Bell. Work was not really tough at Taco Bell, so I had lots of time to goof off. One of the things I discovered was that the hot sauce would clean pennies. I’ve showed the trick to people many times over the years, but never really understood why it works so well.

I finally took the time to find out, and now you can know why you can clean pennies with hot sauce.
Enjoy.

Howdy loyal Cruft readers, I’m back.
Thank you for the calls and emails of concern, the entire Cruft family is fine and this site has made it’s glorious return.
What happened was that on Sunday, a link to my entry about the Google Labs Aptitude Test got posted to the front page of Slashdot. Now for those that don’t know, Slashdot is one of the most popular geek sites on the internet. I read it daily and so do hundreds of thousands of other people.
On Sunday night, these people started clicking on the link and the demand on the server that Cruftbox lives on got huge. This is called the Slashdot Effect or simply, being Slashdotted. The web host that runs the server that this site lives on had to take action or all the other sites and servers that they run would be affected by the Slashdot hordes.
After trying a few things, they simply removed the cruftbox.com domain from the DNS server. A drastic step, but one that allowed all the other sites to be accessible. In laymen’s terms, imagine that a hundred thousand people all had your address for a party and started showing up at your house. The police decided so shut down the party, so they simply removed all the street signs that told people how to get to your house. People drove around looking for your house, but could never find it. That’s kinda what happened here. Cruftbox was here, but no one could find it.
The big problem, is that when the site was down, I could get no email and could not adminster the site. That was no fun.
Finally on Wednesday night, I got the web host to set things right and this morning, everything is in order.
In summary, being linked on Slashdot is great geek honor, but the consequences can be dramatic if you aren’t prepared for it.

The sports season is in full effect at the Pusateri household.
This morning was the the traditional start of the soccer season with the banner parade and the local speakers. It’s a big event and even our congressman, Adam Schiff, showed up to talk about playing soccer 25 years ago.
Michele made the banner for Mira’s team this year.

To get a feel for the chaos that goes on at 7:30AM, here’s a picture of part of the field. There are 100+ teams in the opening ceremonies.

Beside the soccer games on Saturday, it is also football season.
Yes, I am an NFL Widower. Once Sunday arrives, the TV goes on and the NFL is on-screen. Michele is a serious football fan and we have the DirecTV total package. Every single game.
Now I like football, but I rarely feel compelled to watch a half dozen games simultaneously. Michele on the other hand, it quite happy to do this and quilt at the same time.
The living room gets turned into football central with the TV at one end and Michele’s sewing & quilting station at the other. My job is bringing sodas and food to her while she sews. The girls are allowed in the room, if they are willing to watch football. If that want to watch something else, they are banished to our bedroom, where they can watch DVDs.
Sometimes I go up front and pretend to watch but actually take a nap. Michele is usually distracted and doesn’t notice and I get to avoid the usual “No napping” policy in place.