Moved!
Wow, since last time both my blog and my home have moved. Since I'm
a geek, I'll talk more about the former.
My hosting was previously on a large, beastly dual-CPU athlon box
that I built in 2001 and used through college. When I finished my
degree, I gave it to drheld and he put it in his colo in
Brampton. Then he got out of the hosting business and it was being
hosted by PairoWoodies
(a somewhat, ahem, unfortunate name, if you ask me). Eventually they
told me they didn't want to host it any more, since it sucked too
much power.
Honestly, it came as somewhat of a relief. I was never quite sure when
that machine would die and, since it was running an old install of Gentoo, it was a pain to keep up-to-date.
The machine has been donated to a local charity in the Brampton
area. I hope they're getting some use out of it somehow.
After accepting the loss of my beast (which, I might add, served me
for a good 10 years!), I went ahead and got a virtual linux host with
Rackspace. It was easy to set up
in a matter of minutes, and despite it being a virtual machine it's
still way faster than my old dual-CPU athlon box, which is kind of
expected but also still kind of amazes me. And it turns out migrating
all my stuff over, including a hideously old version of Tavi and
NitLog wasn't that hard after all.
Anyway, after this experience, I can see why so many people do web
startups. You can literally get going for like $50. Probably less if
you really slum it.
Brussels
In completely unrelated news, Christine and I recently went to
Brussels. Our main objectives were gastronomic: chocolate, waffles
and beer. And we gave mussels a try too (breaking veggie), because,
you know, had to see what the fuss is all about.
We definitely found good chocolate. In plentiful quantity and variety.
Similarly for beer. We found good waffles too, but they stood out less.
I've had waffles just as good in other places. And the mussels we
tried were ok, but nothing really amazing.
Anyway, we largely succeeded in our mission. But what I really want
to talk about that annoyed me were the public bikes in Brussels,
called Villo. Being a cycling
enthusiast, I had checked whether Brussels had a public cycle system
before going, and was eagerly anticipating cruising around the city
from bar to bar slurping delicious beers along the way. I was bitterly
disappointed. The first issue was that most of the cycle stations are
not "pay" stations; you can only use them if you're a subscriber, which
only makes sense for locals or long-term visitors as subscriptions
are on a monthly basis and require receiving a pass in the mail. Once
you do find a "pay" station, and get past the brutally horrible UI,
you'll find (of course) that it won't accept any American plastic. And
there's no other way to use it; you can't buy a pass anywhere else or
pay with cash.
So, no biking for us :( We did get to do some biking in the
Netherlands when we visited my aunt. So at least there's that.
The other payment annoyance was the trains. The train ticket machines
don't take cash and they only take a local-to-Belgium kind
of bank card. Not even the standard European ones, only the
Belgian one. So, since we arrived late at night, and there was no
person at the ticket counter, we had no way to buy tickets. We just
got on the train and when the conductor came, he understood and
just asked us to pay the regular price. So it was ok. But still,
if you have an international airport, and a train from there into
town, wouldn't it make sense to have a ticket machine that can take
a couple different kinds of cards? This was oddly contrasted by the
metro, whose machines did take all kinds of cards, including
my American credit card, without complaint. Kinda got the wrong
priorities there, folks. And of course at the main station, because
nobody can buy tickets with the machines, there's constantly a huge
line at the ticket counter. I guess it "creates jobs"?
Chip cards
This is actually all part of a larger problem, though, that's
become increasingly frustrating for Americans. Europe, Canada
and many other parts of the world have started using "chip"
cards, and many of the readers in these areas no longer
accept "stripe" cards. If you live in the US, you have no
way to get a "chip" card, except through extremely expensive chip
traveller's cheque type things.
On one hand, I wish American banks would get their acts together
and offer chip cards already. On the other hand, I've heard that if
you have a chip card, you're liable for any fraud committed on your
account, whereas the bank is liable if it's a stripe card. On that
basis, I'm somewhat glad the Yanks haven't switched to chip cards.
Next time I'm in Europe maybe I'll just suck it up and pay the
horrendous exchange rate for the chip card traveller's cheque
thingy. Sigh.
