Bubbles in the Bathtub

One of the all time classic web sites. I discovered it a long time ago but just came across it again...

http://www.twinkiesproject.com/

Posted by Michael Coyne at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been requesting quotes for the last couple of days from local service providers that can colocate seaturtle.org's new server.

It's amazing how much prices have come down since I set-up with the current service provider. We are currently paying $250 a month for colocation, and at the time we signed up it was the cheapest we could find. Certainly there was nothing that cheap in the Washington DC area.

Since I've started looking this time around everything I've found has ranged from $50 - $200, and that's just locally. Last time I was looking nationally (internationally if you count Canada where the server ended up initially). A variety of options are included in the prices and there are set-up fees as well, so figuring out which service to go with is kind of tough. Is it worth paying $50 more a month for 20GB more bandwidth? How easy is it to get access to your server? Is the company even reputable (a serious question when talking about internet based companies theses days)? That sort of thing.

One company that initially quoted $100 a month and a $100 set-up fee came back, apparently after looking at seaturtle.org, and offered to reduce the rate to $50 a month with no set-up fee. The guy that wrote back to me said it looked like a good cause and he wanted to help. You gotta love that kind of attitude. Customer service is key. Hopefully you don't ever need it, but when you do you want it to be good!

Only one other company has provided a quote as low as $50 (not a special deal, that's just their price), but they have a $325 set-up fee. And they are about half the distance from me that the other company is. Is 15 minutes of driving time in an emergency worth an extra $325? The person I've corresponded with there also gave me great vibes. Very friendly and found some good references to them on the web.

What to do? What to do?

Anyway, that's where we stand so far...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hey everybody, Angela started blogging! Welcome aboard.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photo Gallery

I'm mean come on!! How can you pass up on a photo with a title like "Butt Probe" or all of the high-quality L. kempii shots. You don't see those everyday.

Matthew has been teasing me for a couple of weeks now that he is closing in one me in the total number of views, and he just passed me. Help me out here, go look at my pictures! At least I have the second most popular pic of all time. Can't beat that beautiful pic that Erich Frederico Betz put up, but Matthew isn't even in the top ten :)

But wait! I seem to have caught up in views again...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Finding a bit of humor in the paper on this holiday morning...

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/5883113.htm

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Lil' Gator

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Been a busy boy. Lots of stuff going on and I can't decide what to do next. SEATURTLE.ORG is taking over financial responsibility for the MTN so I've been under the gun to get a new subscription database set-up. Did that. MTSG has two new co-chairs (but it's super secret so I can't say who they are) and have been tweaking that member database and user interface to hopefully prepare for the coming membership overhaul. Also trying to track down e-mail addresses for a slew of members that don't have one in the membership database. Some of them probably don't even have an e-mail address, may not even know what the heck the internet is. Hard for me to imagine. How the heck do they communicate?

So now what? Think I'll go work on my "other" hobby for a bit (which anyone has yet to figure out).

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A slew of new turtle news has rolled in the last few days. Not sure when Kelly last updated the site, but you should check back frequently if she hasn't. Lots of good stuff. The problem with the fund drive on the home page is that you don't see the latest news updates as easily. Come on people! Let's get the fund up to $6000 so we can go back to normal :)

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I haven't talked about this topic here yet, not sure why. Maybe I didn't want to jinx the effort.

Let me just say that I am absolutely thrilled by the response. The support from the sea turtle community has been absolutely fantastic. As I am writing this we are not quite two weeks in and we have over 69% of the target of $6000.

If you are wondering about the details of the need and what the plans are here's some of it. SEATURTLE.ORG currently runs on a Dell 4200. Dell calls/called it a departmental server. It is a workhorse, but it is 6 going on 7 years old. In it's time it was a top of the line machine. Dual processors with 4x9GB hard drives with hardware raid. Unfortunately the processors are 333MHz, which is slow by todays standards. A comparable machine today would come with dual 1 to 2GHz processors. There haven't been any hardware problems yet, but at this point it is just a matter of time, and seaturtle.org is to the point where we can't afford for it to go down unexpectedly and for an indefinite period of time. So, time for a new server.

I was initially planning on getting the new server later in the year, but my hand was forced early. The server is parked at a facility in Seattle (that was the place with the cheapest colocation fees I could find at the time the server was bought). For those that don't know, colocation is a service offered by ISPs whereby you give them your server which they place in their facility for a fee. You get a broadband connection and pay them a lot of money every month, and they worry about keeping the internet connection and power up. The colocation fees are seaturtle.org's single largest expense. In any case, part of the problem with this scenario is that I live in Washington DC. I was able to park the server in Seattle because I have a friend that lives out there who could physically intervene if anything ever went wrong with the server. Most everything can be don't remotely, over the internet, but if something broke or we needed to upgrade the operating system then someone has to go in to physically work with the machine. For example we installed a new OS last fall when you may have noticed the server was down for a day or two. I do software updates pretty regularly, about every couple of weeks or so, heck I upgraded the kernel just last night which is a big deal that probably doesn't mean much to most of you, but some things you just have to sit in front of the machine for.

I digress. So my friend told me about three weeks ago that he was leaving Seattle in the next month or so. Suddenly we have an emergency. SEATURTLE.ORG didn't have the funds on hand to purchase a server yet. Not the end of the world because the server wasn't breaking yet, but if and when it did I wouldn't be in a position to do anything about it. I should mention that another part of "the plan" has been to move the server closer to me so that I could babysit it if needed. After early June it would become difficult to retrieve the server because I don't know anybody else in Seattle. I should also mention that the server is a behemoth, about the size of two desktop towers side by side and 60-70lbs (100lbs when it's all crated up). A an electronics shipping nightmare if it's not something you do all the time.

So, I go over the issues with the board and everyone on the board agrees that a fund drive is a good idea and that the sea turtle community will come through. AND THEY DO! We're not quite there yet, but I have faith. SEATURTLE.ORG will continue without a hitch, maybe a couple of days of downtime while all of the content is transferred from one machine to the other and everything is configured for a new ISP here in the DC area. Best of all we will be on a new machine, and as colocation fees have come down slightly over the years I might even be able to get a better deal. I am hoping for a new dual processor server, this time in the 1GHz+ range. This should really help speed up processor intensive tasks, Maptool operations in particular, and provide extra power for new tools that I would like to add. Also something like dual 60GB harddrives. That will almost double the amount of storage available and provide a redundant drive (using mirrored raid) in case one drive ever goes down. So a lot more space will be available and the data that is stored on seaturtle.org will be better protected. In theory the old server will be shipped to me after the new one is set up and I can set it up somewhere else as a backup in case there is some kind of catastrophic failure.

Hopefully that will never happen though. Keep your fingers crossed.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here a new secret tip that know one will know about unless they read this blog...

Matthew sent me his collection of PDFs and it seems a shame to just have them sitting around without people being able to take advantage of them. So I loaded them up and let my search engine index them. Any search of seaturtle.org (not the blogs, that's a separate search) will search the PDFs in addition to all of the web content. The PDFs kind of get lost in the web content, so if you go to the advanced search page you can select just to search the PDFs.

I think I have a few PDFs sitting around that aren't in the bunch that Matthew sent that I'll add as soon as I can dig them up.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison

Dipping into the Shallow End of the Gene Pool

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just checking to see if anyone but Matthew is listening...

Hello... hello... hello

Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone at home?
Come on... come on now
I hear you're feeling down
Well I can ease the pain
And get you on your feet again
Relax... relax... relax
I'll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Now can you show me where it hurts

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb

I have become comfortably numb

Okay... okay... okay
Just a little pinprick
There'll be no more aaaaaaaah!
But you may feel a little sick
Now can you stand up... stand up... stand up?
I do believe it's working, good
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on it's time to go

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
And I have become
Comfortably numb

WOW! I can't believe you read the whole thing!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.--Theodore Roosevelt

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My last post got me thinking about how I became interested in sea turtles specifically.

I always remember having a fascination with marine animals. I don't recall that sea turtles stuck out in particular. But, in general, I always felt that studying marine animals was a lofty goal that very few people reached. The stuff of Animal Kingdom (remember that old 70's show) or the Discovery Channel.

When I started college I was intent on becoming an aerospace engineer. Then came Linear Algebra. I don't know for sure if it was the instructor (he was pretty bad) or me, but that pretty much did in any interest I had in engineering. I was a sophomore at Drexel University in Philadelpia at the time and started scouting out new majors. All I really knew was that I wanted to stay in the sciences. I decided to try biology and happened to enroll in an ecology class taught by Dr. James Spotila the very next semester. I believe Dr. Spotila was relatively new to Drexel at the time. In any case, he was an excellent instructor which I think did a lot to foster my continued interest in biology. He also used lots of sea turtle examples in class, thermodynamics and thermoregulation and such. For some reason those examples made me realize that studying marine animals was not some distant dream, but something that anybody could do with interest and persistence.

I didn't stay at Drexel for long after that, for unrelated reasons (safety being number one). I transferred to the University of Florida to complete my undergraduate degree in the Zoology Department. As graduation closed I went looking for graduate programs where I could study sea turtles and ended up at Texas A&M University. A true story of persistence for another time.

The take home message. Anybody can do it. No subject or career is off-limits to you. With enough interest and persistence anything is possible.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I just returned from a visit to the boonies of northeastern Alabama, in the southern US. I was taking my kids down to visit their great-grandmother, it was the first time she has had a chance to see my son.

My grandmother lives on about 20 acres of land in the middle of nowhere. Half of the land is wooded with a bluff and a creek running through the woods. The creek runs over the bluff creating a small waterfall. An extremely idyllic setting and one that I have been visiting since I was a teenager.

We spent a couple of days down at the bluff, building small damns, stomping around in the water, looking under rocks, and finding all kinds of critters. I took great pride in the interest my three-year old daughter had in all of the herps we found - salamanders, frogs, sometimes snakes and turtles, but not this time. It brought back memories of my own youth in those very same woods, tromping around and finding the same critters. And it made me realize that I've had an interest in herps my whole life without being acutely aware of it. Not a major life changing moment, but not something I had thought about before.

And to be perfectly fair to all the other animals out there, my daughter was equally fascinated with the cows and chickens at the farm on the other side of the road... :)

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, this is not strictly sea turtle related, except that this issue causes a huge burden to the seaturtle.org server and every other server in the world. Namely the propagation of micro$oft based viruses and worms. There must be millions of infected PC users out there that don't even have a clue that they are infected. And their machines are happily spewing infected messages to the rest of the internet. I clean several hundred infected messages out of my filter logs every couple of weeks, and another 20 or so a day get through to my inbox (and probably the inbox of all the other seaturtle.org users). Not to mention the literally thousands of probes logged each day by infected windozes machines looking for weaknesses in other computers on the internet.

Bah!

Unload all of your microsoft products now! Don't wait. At the very least, DO NOT use Micro$oft Outlook. If there was ever a spawn of the devil (or incompetent programmer) Outlook is it.

Here's the latest in a long series of worms run amok on windoze systems. It's called fizzer and it's a beauty:

http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/fizzer.shtml

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)