These days I feel that the things I post should be either original and creative (like my tabletop gaming posts), provide some value to the readers (like reviews or tutorials) or at the very least say something thought provoking. As it turns out it usually takes me a few thousand words and at least few hours of research to produce something I think is worth reading and interesting. The posts that I was really happy with, and even proud of were the ones that took me weeks to compile. For example I started working on the Fimir article was already in the making when I posted about the Duckbunny. These things take time, effort and attention… And when they don’t, when I just randomly throw something quick together over the weekend I’m usually not happy with it. I have a dozen posts in my drafts section right now, which were queued up for posting but never went live because I decided I hated them, and I would rather have nothing go up than post something rushed and unfinished.

On the other hand, I hate to leave the blog dormant for a while, because it’s disappointing for readers, bad for SEO, and it decreases my already mostly insignificant ad revenue. There is a conflict here. I do want to keep trying to raise the bar and keep pushing myself to write longer, more thoughtful essays. But I just can’t physically pump them out that fast and I’d much rather take time and make something good: either by being creative or by actually doing research on the topic. But at the same time I don’t want the site to seem abandoned while I work behind the scenes.

Which brings me to a question: what is a blog supposed to be anyway these days? What blogs do you read, and what is their format and post frequency?

Blogging has matured a lot ever since I started this site on a free Blogger account, long before it was acquired by Google. While the general format of a blog remains the same, blogs became many things to many people – from marketing to journalism and anything in between. It is quite interesting how this medium has evolved, and how it now has to share it’s niche with social media and collaborative experiments like Medium (where you partly cede ownership of content you produce exchange for exposure and curation). We did not have microbloging, tumbleblogs and curated colaborations back when it all started.

What should be the purpose of a modern blog then? Is it to inform or to analyze? Should posts be bite-sized and accessible, or exhaustive and deep? I guess you pick whatever works for you and you run with it… But that’s not much of an answer.

I know that personally I love reading thoughtful and well researched essays or long form reviews. At the same time I also do see value shorter posts that simply touch upon an interesting topic without going into much depth. These sort of things can be thought provoking in their own way, as they provide a launch-board for discussions, or can inspire you to write something of our own.

In the last few months I have posted a few shorter pieces and most of them went over well, even though each time I felt like I was cheating by not providing more thoughtful analysis. Perhaps I shouldn’t though. Perhaps I should just tag these sort of posts as what they are, “short musings”, and post more of these as I work on longer and more organized and researched essays. I think I can manage to write few hundred word blurb whenever I just don’t have a few thousand word essay in me. This may actually make it possible for me to squeeze out more than one post a week without feeling guilty about post quality.

Also, fellow Americans, have a happy 4th! I was planning to post a picture of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, like I do every year, but I’m kinda tired of that joke. Maybe next year.

What game are you playing right now?

As you know, I have been trying to get Kerbals to and back from the Mun lately. Before I got the space exploration bug, I was playing The Walking Dead: Season One which was actually really good. I’m planning to write a full review once I finish it.

If you have glanced at my Steam profile recently, you have probably noticed I just got the new Thief game. So fat I have put only about 3 hours into the game, half of which was spent trying to make the game run faster than like 10FPS on ultra low settings. Turns out the culprit was Fences which is a nifty little app that lets you organize crap on desktop, which also is extremely good at killing performance on certain games. I still had to turn down shadow quality quite a bit because every time my character had his back to a light source the game would literally choke for 3 seconds. Also I’m super annoyed that I can’t fucking jump. What kind of bullshit is that?

Speaking of jumping, I’ve been also playing Thomas Was Alone, but I only seem to be able to take this game in low doses. Turns out that I mostly enjoy jumping when I’m able to bunny-hop my way through FPS games like a crazy person, but not so much when platforms are involved. I kinda hate platforming.

What TV shows are you watching right now?

Currently I’m watching The Walking Dead which continues to shake things up, and kill, torment and torture beloved characters in very fucked up ways. I recently caught up with Sherlock and I’ve been sort of collecting notes on a lengthy rant about Steve Moffat’s writing on both the above-mentioned series as well as on Doctor Who. So that might happen at some point.

I’m working my way through Torchwood which is the offbeat Doctor Who spinoff set in Cardiff of all places. It is rather decent even if completely goofy at times. Also, in the first season the seem to be obsessed with doing these birds eye, panning shots of the Cardiff cityscape which are breathtakingly flat and unimpressive.

I’m also watching Parks and Rec which is pretty great as usual. That’s basically the first sitcom I have gotten into since Arrested Development. If you have never seen it, definitely check it out. It is very different type of humor than Arrested Development but the series has its own charm and unique style.

Oh, and I’m really excited for the upcoming season of Game of Thrones.

What book are you reading right now?

At the moment I’m reading Integral Trees by Larry Niven. It is a pretty cool setting, but so fare none of the characters are very likable. Hopefully it will get better/ I actually have like 3 book reviews queued up in various stages of completion. It’s kinda hard to write interesting reviews of books that are good, but not mind-blowing.

I also started reading Transmetropolitan which is a book of the comic variety.

What movies have you watched lately?

This is kinda surprising, but the only thing I’ve seen since Pacific Rim was David Cronenberg’s adaptation of The Naked Lunch which was… Well, it was quite an experience really. The impact of the movie was amplified by the fact that I have somehow never actually red William S. Burroughs’ novel it was based on. I’d recommend it, but it is weird, high brow and on the surface the plot makes no sense whatsoever so it is definitely not for everyone. If you do decide to take a plunge, this Brows Held High review will definitely help to contextualize some of the esoteric weirdness and nonsensical plot-twists.

And yes, I haven’t seen The Hobbit 2: Electric Smaugaloo, Gravity, or Her yet, though all these things are on my list.

What movies are you excited for?

Omg, this:

I haven’t been this excited for a movie since… Well, since The Avengers really. Guardians of Galaxy looks absolutely amazing. I love pretty much the entire cast, and the trailer seems to be jam-packed with all kinds of crazy Marvel lore. Movie Bob actually went through the entire thing frame by frame recently and after watching his analysis I’m more excited than ever.

I love the direction Marvel is taking the cinematic universe. Superhero stories are supposed to be fun, crazy, exciting and his movie is exactly that, with emphasis put on the fun part. As much as I loved the Dark Knight, I’m really sick and tired of the grimdark and somber themed comic book adaptations. Less Nolan and more Whedon please.

Also I really want to see Life After Beth because… Well, Aubrey Plaza plays a zombie.

What are you coding right now?

Eh, more or less nothing. Last few months I’ve been building and deploying Windows 7 images on desktops and laptops in a valiant push to eradicate Windows XP from production before Microsoft pulls the plug on it. It’s terribly uninteresting work, especially since it has to be done about finicky users who either demand new computers, or threaten to quit on the spot unless we give them a written and notarized oath that we will not put Windows 8 on their computer.

In my spare time I’ve been toying around with some ideas for a silly Rails based app. I haven’t used Rails for anything in years (I’ve been building all kinds of stuff using the Sinatra framework which is great) so I figured I might as well do something with a full stack framework for a change.

Also I’ve been trying to convince myself to take a plunge and try building a native iOS app for Markdown Journal but every time I sit down to do it I realize just how ugly Objective C is.

How about you? Let me know in the comments?

What was the reason for the downtime? I’m still not sure. Around 2pm Chris shot me an email notifying me the site was unresponsive. Fortunately, today was my day off so I could devote my full attention to the issue. Unfortunately at that point I was out and about running some errands and away from a computer. Still, being crafty technocrat that I am, I logged into my Linode app and I rebooted the VM. Because, hey – golden rule of troubleshooting: turn it on and off again.

That could have actually been what did the site in. When it came back, I was treated to the dreaded Error establishing a database connection message. This is a typical, WordPress catch-all message that can be caused by a host of underlying issues. So I started going down the list and addressing all of them.

First, I made sure MySQL was running and restarted it. This did absolutely nothing.

Next, I opened my wp-config.php and added the following magic line to the end:

define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

This allows you to use the built-in repair routine by navigating to /wp-admin/maint/repair.php. For about a minute there it seemed like everything was going to be all right, until I got a lovely message claiming that wp_options table is marked as crashed and last repair failed. So built in repair was a dud.

I figured maybe the MySQL client will succeed where WordPress failed so I ran:

mysqlcheck --repair --all-databases

The results were about the same as above. The wp_options table was broken and beyond repair.

Unwilling to give up, I rolled out heavy artillery:

sudo myisamchk -r /var/lib/mysql/my_db/wp_options

If you have to run it with sudo you know it’s serious business. Unfortunately, this too has failed. This time I got even more meaningful error message: something like Error: not enough memory for blob at..

I kinda got preoccupied with the memory message and spent some time trying to go around it. I found out that you can increase the size of buffers that myisamchk uses for repair functions using command line switches like –sort_buffer_size so I tried things like:

myisamchk -o -f  /var/lib/mysql/my_db/wp_options –sort_buffer_size=4G

Eventually it occurred to me that wp_options should not have any blobs in it, and whatever data these tools are trying to load is not actual WordPress data but random binary garbage. On other words, chances were that the table was fucked beyond repair.

So after many hours of troubleshooting I gave up and restored my site from backup. As you may know my host is Linode, and they offer a really neat backup program. For like $5 per month they offer to take nightly snapshots of your VM. About a year ago I wisely added that feature because I was to lazy to set up backups on my own. I can now say with full confidence that it was worth every penny. I literally clicked one button, and my site was rolled back to last backup, which coincidentally was mere 7 hours ago. The restore took about 10 minutes, and as you can see the site is back in business.

Some data was lost in the process. While my latest blog post is up, the comments on it were lost, for which I apologize. Still, losing only 7 hours of data is actually nothing to scoff at. Actually, it’s only like 3-4 hours of real data, because there were no comments posted while the site was down, since noon. So all in all I think I made out ok.

Moral of the story: BACKUPS ARE GOOD! Seriously. Without backups I would still be down, and probably curled up in a fetal position under my desk, crying.

Also WordPress is a piece of shit. Oh, don’t get me wrong – it’s amazing when it works. In a way love it, I’m used to it, and I don’t want another platform. But I am always shocked and amazed how easy it is to completely wreck it by doing absolutely nothing. A silly DB error, and the entire site is out of business. If you use WordPress, backups are doubly important because of issues like this one.

Initially I thought it was a traffic spike so I just kept rebooting the server. Initially this would temporarily solve the problem. The blog would come back, only to crash and burn few minutes later. Eventually rebooting stopped working. Intriguing thing was that Apache seemed to keep on chugging. When you visited the front page it would display the familiar WordPress error: “Could not establish database connection”. This usually does not happen when I get DDOS‘ed due to Reddit or Hacker News link.

Whenever I get a huge traffic spike, Apache is usually the first thing to go. It’s actually a condition that is rather easy to spot: as soon as you ssh to the server you get a scrolling list of error notifications about processes being killed because your system is out of memory. This time however there was no such thing happening. I ran top and was surprised how few processes were actually running. I’m used to seeing at least a dozen lines for Apache sub-processes but there was only like one or two present.

I did some more poking around and ascertained that the culprit was definitely MySQL. I tried manually restart the server but it wouldn’t stay up. I tried running it in a non-deamon mode with the –debug parameter but it would silently close right away without displaying any error messages. The MySQL error log was empty giving me nothing to go on.

In an act of desperation, I decided to reinstall MySQL. I figured out that maybe a recent update screwed something up (especially after I rebooted the machine so many times). Typically aptitude does not delete the contents of /var/lib/mysql (ie. where your physical database files live) but I was not going to take any chances. So I attempted to make a backup copy of all of the files in my home directory…

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, considering the circumstances) this failed. Initially I figured out it was a permission thing (wonky sudoers file maybe), so I tried this again as root with the same result. The machine simply refused to copy files. I think it might have mentioned something about being out of storage space but I initially ignored it. I mean, how could that machine be out of space seeing how it only hosts this blog which is not very large at all. Last time I checked it there was only about 2GB of used space on the root partition. This included both the OS, software and the site itself including all the auxiliary files.

After few minutes of muddling I ran df -h to make sure I was not out of space. I was wrong. The Used% value was at 100%. Somehow I managed to fill up my entire 20GB disk to the brim. My first thought? “HACKERS!”

I’m actually quite embarrassed at this and I blame Hollywood for infecting me with this memmetic garbage. I guess it is easier to externalize personal failures and throw blame at imaginary boogeymen than take responsibility. So I slapped myself, and decided to act like an adult. If your first reaction to a computer issue is “HACKERS” then you are either a child, my grandmother, a schizophrenic suffering from delusions of grandeur or a pointy haired middle-management individual who failed upwards into a position of power. Chances were that whatever happened there was my own fuck-up and not the work of some elusive and mysterious hax0r.

How do we track down where the disk space is going? It’s actually not that difficult, especially considering I wrote an extensive article on this very subject not so long ago. To make a long story short, the magic command is:

du -sBG /* | sort -nr | head

This gave me a list of the first ten top level folders in / ordered by size of their contents. Guess what was the #1 spot on that list? It was the /srv folder where my site lives. Or, as I found out after drilling down a bit it was the /srv/www/terminally-incoherent.com/logs directory. There were only two files in that folder: error.log which was 47MB and access.log which was over 17GB.

How did this happen? Why were these logs not rotated? Well, because I fucked up. When I moved the site to a new host back in June of 2011 I decided to put the logs in this directory rather than in the default /var/log/apache2. I guess the reason for this was that I was setting it up using Apache Virtual Hosts feature allowing me to run more than one site from this server. So if I ever decided to set up another domain, I didn’t want separate logging for both.

What I forgot to do back then was to set up a logrotate rule for that directory. By default, Apache automatically rotates it’s logs on a weekly basis keeping approximately a year’s worth of archival logs for reference. But whenever you set up custom Virtual Hosts and specify new log locations for them, said rule does not apply.

To set up log rotation for my site I simply copied over and tweaked the default Apache rules, creating a new file in /etc/logrotate.d with the following contents

/srv/www/terminally-incoherent.com/logs/*.log {
        weekly
        missingok
        rotate 12
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty
        create 640 root adm
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
                if [ -f "`. /etc/apache2/envvars ; echo ${APACHE_PID_FILE:-/var/run/apache2.pid}`" ]; then
                        /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
                fi
        endscript
}

I figured that 12 weeks ought to be enough backlog for now, considering that I haven’t really looked at the access.log file at all since 2011.

To be honest, I really did not expect this to ever be a problem. These log files are just pure text, and they only grow when someone views the site. Granted, I probably get multiple log entries per hit because of all the little bits and pieces, images and scripts that have to load for each page. Still, 17GB in a little under two years is quite a respectable amount of traffic.

Thanks for reading my ramblings all these years guys!

The thing is, I never disabled anything. I love the comments, why would I shut them off?

So I hit the site and… Yep, no comments. They are just gone. Vanished! What the actual fuck!

Let’s Talk PHP

When you are running PHP, by default it likes to vomit error messages into it’s standard output channel, which is your webpage. What usually happens is that you get half of the page, then a stack trace, and then the execution just stop. This looks kinda unprofessional, plus it gives potential attackers way too much information about your sever. So when you are running in a production environment you squelch these errors and they are written to an error log somewhere. The side effect is that PHP will still stop executing at the point where it encountered a fatal error. If this happens at the begging of your script before anything was output then you just get a blank page. If it happens somewhere towards the bottom, and your page is a usual tag soup (PHP mixed with raw HTML) then you will usually get everything up until the error and the rest of the page remains blank.

This was exactly what was happening with the comments.

Related Posts

For years now I have been using a Related Posts plugin by Jure Ham. It is a nifty little addition to the blog, that does some fuzzy logic matching and displays links to potentially similar topics at the bottom of each post. I like it because it enables the sort of aimless wandering – you finish reading a post and you go – “oh, this looks interesting too” so you click over and keep on reading. Sometime last week Jure released an update – a first one in quite a while, and a good one at that. Lots of new functionality, a lot of improvements… And also apparently some backwards compatibility breakage which I didn’t notice.

I applied the update without thinking much about it, as you do, because it is usually a painless process. Very rarely will a plugin actually cause trouble after an update, and 99% of the time it happens right away and you fix it or ditch the plugin. This time the issue remained hidden because it was only evident on individual post pages, and only if you scrolled all the way down to see the comments. Ooops!

The new update actually made the plugin simpler – it now injects itself into the pages on its own. Before you had to explicitly call it with a PHP hook from your template. That’s where it failed for me. Apparently the function call to the plugin I had right above my comment section got deprecated and was throwing some sort of an exception. Hence comments would not load.

Oh, and Steam…

Btw, I should probably mention this – I never turn of my desktop and it usually runs Steam in the background. So while it may appear like I’m idling on steam all the time, the fact is that I’m actually rarely there. The only time you can probably reliably catch me on there when it’s green and says “in game”. Otherwise I might not be at my desk at all. I say this, because every once in a while I will come home, and see a Steam chat window open with a message that was sent 8 hours ago, and then a long stream of “so and so just signed off, now he signed on, now he signed off again”. So it’s not that I’m avoiding or ignoring you. I’m just probably not there, and I suck at turning off chat thingies.

TL;DR

I broke the comments, but they are back now. Sorry! Also, as a consolation, related posts section now has mini-screenshots.

It is not a burnout, because I don’t really believe in digital burnouts. I’m way to lazy to burn myself out. I haven’t gotten bored, or decided to live a life of analog recluse. It’s just the important stuff in life taking precedence over my online distractions and entertainment.

I shall be back in about a week or so with new content and commentary. So don’t unsubscribe, unfriend of unfillow me just yet.

Whenever I sit down and try to Photoshop something from scratch it ends up looking like an equivalent of uncoordinated drawing your kid made at school and now wants you to put it on the fridge. And you don’t have a heart to tell the kid that his carefully crafted art looks like someone just had an epileptic attack with the shit-brown crayon all over the page. I’m really good at producing shops of that type of quality. It’s actually quite amazing – I can spend six hours fucking around with layers, gradients, shadows, masks and the like, but when all is said and done, you could swear it was done in MS Paint.

Case in point: I wanted to design a logo for Terminally Incoherent. Logos are cool. They make you look more professional. They personalize your site, they make for nice icons you can use in other places. For example you can make yourself a coffee mug with your logo, and make it a conversation piece. Or put it on your business card. Not that I really need mugs or business cards – but it’s a nice to have that option.

Actually, I would want the logo for the following purpose:

1. Unify all the different things I’m doing under Terminally Incoherent banner – like the forums, my Tumblr, the Facebook page, the Steam group and etc.. A logo would go a long way to visually tie these things together
2. Replace the favicon – the Ti icon you see above in your address bar/tab bar is pretty much a representation of my design skills. An unimpressive square with lettering. It is simple and it works, but it is not much of a “logo” really.
3. Replace the banana icons I hand out to long time Teminalists. These always need to be explained.

I was sort of inspired by the neat Markdown Logo designed by Dustin Curtis. All he did was to put a letter M in a rectangle, but note how his design is miles ahead of my crappy favicon. It has nice rounded edges, well thought out proportions, carefully chosen font face and etc.. That’s the sort of attention to detail I would like. That said, I’m not married to the Ti acronym – especially since that’s already kinda trademarked by Texas Instruments so I can’t really lay a claim to it. I really just want something clean, simple and functional that would be unique to this site and this community.

Here is a working list of my requirements:

1. Preferably two colors: white and orange
2. Minimalistic – as few strokes, shapes and symbols as possible
3. Reducible to 16×16 favicon size – you should still be able to recognize at that scale
4. Be at least somewhat representative of the topics we discuss here
5. Bonus points if you can make textual approximation (like [M↓] for markdown)

So far I don’t really have a clear vision, but I have been bouncing a few ideas around. I’m not really set on any of them yet.

Idea the first, was a planet swoosh. Kinda like the one SciFi channel used in their old logo before they decided to rebrand themselves as “the channel formerly known as SciFi which now hates nerd stuff and only airs wrasselin, and reality shows”. Kinda like this:

Old SciFi Channel Logo

I really like the Nike logo + half crescent design of the mini-saturn like planet. I would totally steal it, but then again that would be kinda pointless. I’d rather have something original, but along similar line of thought. Huge amount of the topics I cover here on this blog have something to do with science, science fiction or both so a planet with rings seems at least a bit relevant.

I actually attempted to create my own version of this logo in Photoshop and/or Inkscape. I won’t even show you what I ended up with, because it’s embarrassing. The magnitude of my failure was overwhelming, and I was quite ashamed of myself. Plus, I’m not sure if this is the right way to go.

Idea the second… You know what – let me just show you: [#_]

No, seriously. Check it out: the brackets are kinda like a terminal window. The hash mark is like a root prompt. The underscore is the cursor – which may or may not be blinking. In some fonts the underscore connects and blends in with the bracket making it look even more like a tiny window. Terminally Incoherent – terminal, terminal apps, etc.. Get it? It is fairly representative of the topic matter, and it’s mostly text. I would basically just need to find a good looking font to use in the graphics. Or just, you know – draw it.

Plus it’s searchable. Someone may not remember how to spell terminally or incoherent, and whether or not there is a dash in the middle of the domain name – but they could remember the logo, and then google it. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

What do you think? What are your suggestions for Terminally Incoherent logo? Do you have font suggestions? Any other considerations? Let me know in the comments.

In the past I have tried to establish a working message board adjacent to this blog but it was a compound failure. For one, the software was just bad. It was a WordPress plugin that required registration, and had a really, really shitty CAPTCHA that no one could ever read. Secondly, I failed to do anything interesting with it. I sort of put it up, and expected people to just contribute content. Few people did, but it never really went anywhere.

I guess one of the lessons I have learned over the years of watching online communities evolve is that the only strategy that can yield any kind of results is “seed it and lead it”. First you need to seed your forum/community/link board with interesting content. This is actually what reddit founders did in it’s heyday. But you can’t stop there. You actually have to actively lead, moderate and initiate discussions in said forum. Active communities usually coalesce around very small groups of active and vocal users – often merely one or two.

So I figured, why not try this again. Especially if it will give me a chance to hack FoFou Forum software a bit. I actually wrote about this project before, but the other day I actually broke down and forked it. The code is remarkably simple and offers just the bare bones functionality – giving me a lot of space to expand and extend it to fit my particular needs.

So without further willy whacking, and dilly dallying around I introduce you to the new Terminally Incoherent Forums. And experiment in bringing 90’s social media paradigms into 2012 user space.

For the time being I will use it to post various short form topics hoping to spur discussion. You know – blog post stubs that might be interesting but don’t have the makings of a full fledged 800+ word potential. What I would really like is to see people other than me post original content and/or links there – but I’m not holding my breath. I’m sort of expecting this distraction to fail miserably due to lack of content and participation. Or, if by some fluke it catches on, it will likely get spammed into oblivion. We shall see.

But yeah, check it out. I already pre-seeded it with bunch of discussion hooks. See if any of them strikes a chord with you, and join in. For now I have four two (I decided to consolidate them) forums:

1. /fun/ is for discussing TV, Movies, Games and etc..
2. /it/ is for IT horror stories and rants
3. /future/ for futuristic musings and singularity/transhumanism stuff
4. /code/ for software development and etc..

I will probably add one or two more, as soon as I come up with some logical categories and seed topics.

FoFou is very, very basic – bare bones and no frills. But I’ve been hacking and bug fixing the code and I am planning to add some tiny frills here and there. Especially if I notice people use the damn thing.

You don’t have to register to comment or post new topics. Contributing is as easy as posting comments on this blog. Just plug in a name and an email that looks valid (though it does not have to be your real email) in the box, and hit submit.

Let me know what you think.

Also – quick question: do you think breaking it up into 4 topic areas was a good idea? Or would it be easier to keep track of the forum if it was all on one page? I’m starting to think this might be the way to go.

On Saturday the lovely state of New Jersey got hit by a snowstorm of epic proportions. Granted, the Garden State is no stranger to winter blizzards, but this was a blizzaster of the kind that we have not seen in decades. We have been caught by it completely unprepared, and with our pants down. The frozen sky water fell upon us like the Spanish inquisition – no one expected it to be so bad. Normally his kind of thing happens much later in the year. Our trees only begun shedding their summer leaves last Tuesday, and most of them still had lots of green foliage. As you can imagine heavy snow accumulation in the leafy tree crowns was a bit of a problem, and most of the load bearing branches were not prepared to carry the extra weight. So in addition to a sudden snowpocalypse we have been also experiencing a branch breaking bonanza.

Driving on Saturday was an exercise in dogging falling trees while trying to maintain minimal amount of friction between your tires, and the thick layer of ice that covered all the streets. Most highways looked as if the drivers suddenly decided to re-enact scenes from Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Salt truck and snow plows were nowhere to be seen – probably still slumbering in their subterranean lairs where they spend all summer. If mother nature wanted to give us all a fright on the weekend before all hallows eve, it certainly succeeded. That fateful night, the air was filled with snapping sounds of angry trees lashing their breaking snow covered branches against defenseless power lines. Regular humdrum of highway traffic was replaced by skidding sounds and metallic crunches as automobiles collided on ice. Instead of trick or treaters, the streets were full of snowpocalypse refugees, being frozen out of their own homes – cut off from the electric grid by the frozen claws of the local oaks.

On Sunday morning, most neighborhoods looked like Isengard after the Ents marched through it. Broken branches, overturned power lines, lifeless homes, and wrecked cars on the driveways. Among this destruction frolicked kids, unaware and unperturbed by last nights events. Spider Man, hand in hand with a woodland fairy and Batman whose cape was tucked in under thick winter jacket all hopped over the splayed cables, and threw snowballs at each other as I drove by.

Me? I have spent most of the weekend without power, and freezing my ass off. In fact, this very post was typed up with my frost bitten hands, on my laptop (thankfully fully charged the night before) which somehow managed to pick up an unprotected Wifi connection of some more fortunate, and electricity wealthy neighbor. For once in my life I am thankful for living near really stupid people. It is completely beyond me how you can exist in the year 2011 without ever realizing the folly of using an unencrypted wifi connection but, I am grateful for this sort of reckless idiocy. It comes in very handy in a pinch. Plus it feels great to be on the internet while the house is blacked out and without power. The only thing that does not feel great is typing in a sub-freezing temperature, as your hands slowly transform into numb and solid claws.

As you probably know, I do most of my writing on the weekends, but unfortunately this post was about as much I was able to get done under these circumstances. I will probably have some new content for Wednesday and Friday, but it may not be high quality stuff. For this, I apologize but I don’t have the power (as in electricity) to do more.

How was your Hallowweekend? Hopefully better than mine. Do you celebrate it where you live? I know it is a popular holiday in most English speaking countries, but when I lived in Poland we never really bothered with it. If you do celebrate it, did you dress up for a Halloween party this weekend? Are you dressing up today? And is your costume geeky or not?

I wish I could tell you that I had an awesome costume, but I didn’t. I was browsing reddit the other day and I was totally jealous of all the awesome video game/pop culture inspired costumes people were sharing. Sadly, these sort of things take effort and dedication to pull off and I am way to lazy and unmotivated to even consider it.

For now though, in lieu of a regular post, let me give you some other stuff to read. And no, I’m not going to send you to some random sites I found via reddit because you have already seen all of these. I’ll give you some original content you may not have seen.

Firstly, you have probably read that SEO for Non Dicks article that was making rounds the other day. I was contemplating writing something about this, because people do ask me about this sort of thing every once in a while. But then my friend Jenn wrote everything I would have said and more on this topic. In fact, her post is probably better than mine would be, because mine would likely mutate in some sort of a short story with a subplot. Go subscribe to her blog because she is awesome. You can also watch her torment me on twitter if you are following me (and if you are not, then why aren’t you? @LukeMaciak – go follow now, damn it.)

The second link of the day is a real story from my buddy Milos, who recounts how he tracked down a thief and recovered a stolen iPhone. The story is from few months ago, but it totally deserves a link because it is full of win. I am fairly sure I probably would not have the balls to approach a phone thief and initiate negotiations.

Here is another quick link, to our very own Crhis – you have probably seen his comments on a lot of posts here (if you read the comments – and you should since they are often more interesting than my nonsensical droning). He sort of blew my mind by re-hosting his blog to github pages. Granted, it was a blosxom blog (so mostly static pages) but still – quite impressive example of how this github feature can be used to host very complex websites.

Finally, Ara wrote short and sweet blog about importance of reading. I wholeheartedly sign under this with both hands. I am quite often astonished how many of my fellow techies, programmers and geeks never read any fiction. A lot of people tell me they just don’t have time, but I am fairly sure this is not true. Everyone has some alone downtime – it is jut a matter how you choose to use it. Seriously, instead of watching that episode of Jersey Shore or playing Angry Birds while you poop, you could be reading a book. It is all about expanding your horizons, gaining new perspectives and experiencing things outside your realm of expertise. A good book is always more engaging, and more rewarding than even the best TV show or movie.

So yeah, sorry about that grue thing. It won’t happen again.

Here is a question for you: do you have a blog? If you do, do I know about it? Do you put the URL in the box when you comment? Give me your blogs so I can put them in my RSS reader. In the past I used to have a “Blog Buddies” section in my Google Reader – I would habitually subscribe to the blogs of all my commentators and check up on them from time to time. Slowly but surely, most of these blogs dried up. It’s almost as if people were blogging less these days. Have you noticed that too? Are there blogs in your RSS reader that haven’t updated in years, but you would loathe to unsubscribe least they one day have a relapse? If you do have a blog, and you do comment often let me know – maybe I can send some google juice your way.

If you don’t have a blog, do you read other ones except mine? Things that have content/topics similar to mine? If you do, I want to know about these!