Burningbird

Thanks to a little quick action, I was able to snag one of the extremely rare Nikon Coolpix P900.

I have a couple of Nikon DSLRs, but I was attracted to the concept of one camera for all purposes. Changing lens in the field gets tedious, and I've missed photos because I have the wrong lens on my camera.

I'll have a more detailed review later, but I wanted to post my own set of "zoom" photos. These are from my backyard.

When I zoomed in, I was in for a surprise:

Last year I wrote about a Wyoming family and the big, bad EPA huffing and puffing at their door. Seemingly, the Andy Johnson family was being threatened with outrageous fines, just for putting in a simple stock pond. A little digging, though, showed that the story was far more nuanced. For one, the family had basically blown off any previous attempts at communication from both the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA. It wasn't until the EPA sent a notice of violation did they respond to the communications—by contacting the press and their congressional representatives.

Moving to a new VPN (Virtual Private Network) was as simple as signing up for a second Linode instance, and then building it to my specs. Eliminating half the cruft I had on my old system saved about 40GB of space. Now I have room for all new cruft.

I decided to stay with Drupal for this site. Frankly, I just don't want to muck with content systems anymore. I have a couple of new sites on Wordpress, this on Drupal, and that gives me a foot in two worlds. I was reading that the Drupal 8 upgrade should be button-press easy, especially if you haven't customized your site. Sure sounds simpler than fighting to get it into Wordpress.

Linode's new billing system made the move a whole lot easier, and cheaper. I was only charged for the double VPN until I dropped the original once the move was finished. I think I'll take this approach the next time there's a major Ubuntu upgrade. Not only can I cleanly upgrade, this approach gives me a chance to clean my system.

Second update

House just can't wait to pass this bill. It goes to the Floor on Thursday. Note: there is no comparable bill in the Senate.

Update

In the ultimate of ironies, the Senate passed an amendment to their appropriation bill, that would require genetically modified salmon be given a GMO label. How to explain the inconsistencies?

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska)...downplayed concerns that salmon labeling would set a precedent for labeling biotech crops saying, “Corn doesn’t swim from one field to another and propagate with corn in another state. Fish move. Fish escape,” she said.

I have attempted to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 from 12.04.5 three times, failing each time. The points of failure are complex and seemingly many. I can ignore the necessary upgrade until 12.04.5 hits end of life in 2017, but whatever cruft is preventing a clean upgrade may be allowing all sorts of bad things. I also use my server as testing environment for all of my books, which means I'm constantly installing and uninstalling a host of software. When I ran ubuntu-support-status

I was surprised at how many packages I have installed that are no longer supported.

No matter how much I want to avoid it, It's time to clean up my system.