The Broadway Bomb 2009, the annual longboard race from 116th street down to wall street, took place yesterday. More fun than a barrel full of monkeys, though quite similar in many other respects. Some photos here.

I gave a talk entitled ``Building Better Tools'' at NYCBug. This talk is an extended version of a presentation I gave at work in March, on how system engineers and administrators, the people who maintain the infrastructure of the internet and who write a lot of code without (usually) having any training in software engineering practices, can improve their tools.

Slides are here.

Audio of the talk is here.

Reminiscent of my previous nightmare with DSL, the reason why I'm ditching Speakeasy DSL service after 9 years can be found summarized in this ticket.

Having outsourced my hosting to Panix, I'm ready to become a consumer.

Apparently some time today, relays.ordb.org was changed to return positive results for any and all queries. This caused my mail server to reject all incoming mail.

I understand that it's an efficient way to make people not use relays.ordb.org anymore, but willingly and intentionally cause people to lose mail is really not very nice.

See also: http://www.nabble.com/relays.ordb.org-r ... 86049.html

Date: 2008-01-19
Where: Pacifica/Linda Mar
Time: 13:30 - 15:00
Weather: Sunny
Wind: None.
Crowds: Emptyish (for Pacifica)
Tide: Low, low tide.
Waves: 3-4', mostly. Some 5. Fairly clean, but few.

First time surfing in 2008. Very, very out of shape. Good thing it was mellow. Warmer than anticipated.