twothirds

Wow. 10 years agi!
Interesting racap of 1997 elite 8 run of the Providence College Friars. The only thing missing was the mention of the “riot” on Eaton street after the Tennessee victory. It was Easter break weekend so all of ~100 people were left on campus. A few kegs and revelers led to a police presence with pepper spray. Someone did start a fire, but it was a small one. Fun! (Yes. I was there.)

My thyme plant kicked the bucket today. Well, it has actually been a slow death over the past few months as the pot was way to small, but it officially got whacked today. A replacement plant at Home Depot was a whopping $1.75 (including tax). At the grocery store today, I noticed thyme was $2.00!!! After once use, my new plant will be pure profit.

Update: So, I already have a lot of pot smokers hitting my blog due to my “smoking pot” post .  Now people are gonna show up here thinking they can learn how to make a profit off of pot!

From my 103bees search results. (Note the search for yours truly)

Who the hell is searching for me? Every-so-often I will see my name pop up in search results, yet I never get an email from a long lost girlfriend, classmate, co-worker or swim buddy. If you are going to search for me, at least have the decency of saying “Hey”. I could understand random searches if my name were “John Smith”, but trust me, no one is looking for “Jed Michnowicz” unless they are looking for, well me. So, if you happen to enter “Jed Michnowicz” into a search engine, please do me a favor and drop me an email and let me know what the hell you are looking for.

This pretty much sums up my lemon flavored macbook experience.

Fantasygoat is a great picture blog (plog?), by the way. Checkout some of the older posts for a good laugh.

Since my webhost is still craptastic, I have added a real-time status. If the load on the box is over “4″, a sidebar block will bring shame and dishonor to dreamhost.

We are a few weeks past the DST change, yet things are still in flux as shown by my inbox. (Note the time on the clock versus the email timestamps.) The scary things is, I’m not sure if it’s my issue or theirs.

With a switch to a dynamic website, I quickly remember how bad shared hosting is:

[monster]$ uptime
08:00:29 up 2 days, 16:41, 16 users, load average: 29.10, 16.32, 10.75

Since I assume they are not running a t2000 with 32 theoretical threads, this is a classic sign of an overtaxed box. Dreamhost might get fired soon if they keep this crap up.

Blogger.  You are fired.  For better or worse, I have switched to wordpress.  Sorry about any 404’s.  I have 301′d the more popular pages, but links will break.

I just played a game of Donkey Kong on my MacBook in a browser window that was emulating [Free] DOS through a JVM. Hu? Give it a try yourself.

I also enjoyed the FAQ section. There has been a myth for sometime now that Java is slow. Well, from the authors (Emphasis added by me.):

How fast is JPC?
…Moreover, we have seen that in some circumstances a HotSpot JVM can outperform gcc-compiled C, so we believe a lot more is possible.

Why Java?
Basically, Java turns out to be ideal for this kind of project: it’s robust, it works across many platforms, it’s built with security in mind and, with HotSpot, it can run about as efficiently as natively compiled code…

Take that C and C++!

In the early 2000’s, I was a triathlete. I few in love with the sport right away. It allowed me to stay competitive after my swimming years and I wasn’t half bad. Being a tech-geek, I registered a domain name and started a quasi-blog/slashclone related to triathlon. And in November of 2000, 3athlete was born.

As the injuries added up and I fell out of love with the sport in late November of 2002, I killed 3athlete with prejudice. I simply turned it off one day and walked away. It was no longer fun.

A few months later, as spring made an appearance, I wanted to keep track of triathlon news. Since very few sites had an RSS feed, I had to create my own. With some perl scripts to parse html, a mysql database to store all the strings, and a php front end, I accidentally launched the next version of 3athlete with a few hours of coding.

3athlete grew over the years into a 50k hit/hour site. Many of these hits were to my RSS feeds (every page on 3athlete had an RSS feed) or from spiders, but it was sill interesting scaling a large volume website. The 3athlete volume was laughable compared to my day job, but for “shared” hosting, performance was top notch.

All was rosy, but as web 2.0 blossomed, my interest in the project dwindled and more triathlon sites had native RSS feeds, 3athlete started to become irrelevant. While I had a core dedicated following, there was limited growth and I had no desire to integrate social features into 3athlete to improve its relevance. Due to these factors, 3athlete essentially turned into a link farm.

So, with little fanfare, I killed 3athlete yet again. It is possible I will launch something again in the future, but for now, I should really concentrate on the half-baked, yet useful, *.racechecklist sites.