[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Jim Pick
Member since: 2000-05-17 23:03:26
Last Login: 2006-10-06 00:38:02
Homepage: http://jimpick.com/
Notes: Just enjoying life in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
You'll find all my new postings there. Thanks to Advogato for hosting my diary all these years!
(p.s. Hugin is a really cool tool for making Panoramas. I used it for the new banner on my website using some photos I took this morning down near Canada Place, and it worked great.)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpick/106785414/
http://www.rentyaletown.com/home/home.html
It looks like a great neighborhood - it's sort of like a mini-Soho. There are lots of cool coffee shops and bars, it's an easy walk to downtown, and it's close to the library, GM Place (home of the Canucks) and BC Place (home of the BC Lions). Everybody on the street seems pretty happy and friendly.
I'm just totally amazed to come back to downtown after ten years to see all the empty lots and warehouses torn down and replaced with all the new highrises.
Now I just have to arrange for movers and figure out what I need to do to import my car. Plus a million other small things.
Also, I decided to "kill two birds with one stone" on this trip. So I plunked down for a new dual dual-core Opteron (so it has 4 cores @ 1.8GHz) with 8GB of RAM and 1.6TB of disk in a hot-pluggable SATA RAID. When I drove up to Vancouver, I stopped in Seattle, and installed it at Forona in the Westin building downtown, near Westlake Center and the monorail. I don't know much about the Forona guys, but their prices seemed reasonable, and there aren't many colo places that cater to people with just one 1U box to install. They were very patient with me during the install and they seem to know their stuff. I'm still very happy with Simpli in San Jose, but I wanted to use a second colo just so I can have some redundancy (plus it's a bit closer to Vancouver).
I put Xen 3.0 on the server, but I haven't set much up on it yet.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpick/106781569/
So I now have two servers I can put commercial stuff on. I really needed a second server so I could provide some level of reliable services to (future) customers, while still being able to experiment with new stuff (like clustering and failover). When I finish my move to Vancouver, I'll have some time to put up some websites with some of the new things I'm playing with.
I've also decided to leave the Bay Area and move back to Vancouver. I really love that city - I think I'm finally ready to take the leap and become a full-fledged Vancouverite.
Of course, the tech industry isn't as big there as Silicon Valley, but the Vancouver lifestyle just can't be beat. I'll have to get used to all that liquid sunshine again though.
I think I'll take it easy for a few months, and then I'll try to find some contract work to support myself. In the meantime, I've got a lot of very cool projects that I'll finally have time to work on. :-)
If it hits Houston, it could be really bad.
A friend of mine, Rob Levin, lives with his family in a trailer in Houston. Trailers and hurricanes do not go together well. I just read on his blog that he's planning to evacuate.
Readers of my diary might know him as "lilo" on the FreeNode IRC network (which he runs). I used to work with him at Transvirtual, and I know a lot of people that used to work with him at Linuxcare.
He's already in a bit of a financial tough spot, and it sounds like he's going to have to evacuate. He's a really nice guy who's trying to live a somewhat unconventional lifestyle with a wife and a kid. He's caught some flack in the past for some of his attempts at raising money so he could work on the IRC network, but I know him and it's not like he's living an extravagant lifestyle. "Parenting" an IRC network can make you a lot of enemies. In person, he's really one of the nicest guys I know.
Anyways, I gave him a tiny little donation via PayPal. If anybody else wants to chip in, I'm sure he'd much appreciate it.
I started running again. I'm recording my runs using the Gmaps Pedometer, and I'm just bookmarking each run and saving them at http://del.icio.us/jpick/runlog. I'm going to try to do 3 runs a week, and I'm going to try to get up to around 5 miles per run.
The new maps.a9.com is pretty cool - it's a bit like Google maps, but with the addition of street level "block view" pictures (make sure you check the box). Here's my neighbourhood in Berkeley.
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