I won’t bother talking too much about the Rally itself, as I’m sure if you care you’ve watched it online, but it was a lot of fun and I met plenty of other Redditors (thanks to the QR Code game the Reddit admins cooked up) and even met one of Reddit’s cofounders at the Reddit afterparty (I even got a shirt signed).

Estimates for the event put it at around 215,000 people, and I can believe it. The mall was packed, and from satellite photos, there were people a couple blocks out in either direction. I wish we’d had another day or so to explore the city, but we all had something to get back to on Monday, so after another ~12 hours in the car, we were back in Louisville (made much less monotonous thanks to decent 3G coverage along the interstate).

I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64, which I picked up from my university a few weeks ago, and I’m currently reinstalling all of my Steam games, many of which I picked up during the recent Steam holiday sales, but haven’t gotten a chance to play properly.

Currently, I’m going through my dual 1 TB hard drives, cleaning up files and deleting things I don’t need anymore. I’ll get to actually playing some games soon, I hope…

The biggest news from me is likely my new car, which you can (depending on when you’re reading this) probably still see in the Flickr stream to the right. It’s a silver 2007 Civic EX Coupe (5 speed). My old car, the 94 Saturn, is now being used by my younger brother. The Civic has a center console that I think would nicely house a carputer if I ever get around to building one. The cars been getting a few miles on it with a few back-and-forths to Lexington and the trip to Asheville and seems to be working fine. It even has a particularly nerdy startup message (again, see Flickr).

Also, I’ve moved this site back to my personal server and WordPress 2.9. Squarespace was a great service, but I just can’t afford to pay for hosting at the moment. The SS page still exists, but only for another day or so, I’ll be doing everything here now.

This year consisted of two internships at VMware and one Summer semester of classes. It saw the purchase of my latest overpowered desktop (Dragon, which is now in need of a Motherboard RMA due to a faulty temperature sensor) and my shiny 13″ MacBook Pro (Whelp, whose sensors seem to be working quite nicely). This was also the year I purchased a “proper” smartphone, the Palm Pre, which despite it’s problems is still a nice phone. I had my house robbed, which I’ve since more or less recovered from, lost two roommates, and gained another.

Overall, it’s been a good year. On the plate for 2010 is wrapping up this B.S. at school (and my degree, while I’m at it) and then deciding if I want to deal with another year of it for a Master’s degree.

I looked into getting a netbook and installing OS X on it. The Dell Mini 10v, in particular, was known to work very well with OS X, at least with Leopard (Snow Leopard has since been known to work as well). I also looked into grabbing a Mini 9 (now known as the Vostro A90) and upgrading it to a 32GB SSD and 2GB of RAM. It would have come up to around $500. I decided to sleep on it and make the decision in the morning.

I wound up going out and walking around the Marina later. Guess what neighborhood it turns out has an Apple Store?

I wandered in and started to play with a 13″ Macbook Pro. Two hours later…

Oops.

Unfortunately, I’m basically hosed with respect to what they did take. I had never bothered to get renter’s insurance to cover my electronics, nor did I have the serial numbers to my consoles backed up anywhere to give to the police. Obviously, this will all change for me, but you can avoid having to learn this the hard way, and for relatively cheap.

If you rent a house or apartment, look into renter’s insurance. It’s relatively cheap (probably around $10/month) and will cover your belongings if they are stolen.

Secondly, keep a record of your electronics’ serial numbers. I’ve started using Evernote for this, as any information in Evernote is synced to their servers.  Without a serial number, your chances of recovering stolen property can drop dramatically.

Finally, back up your data off-site. I was lucky enough to not have my desktop computer taken, but if it had been, that would have been several hundred gigabytes of media gone. There are a couple of easy ways to protect yourself against that. The easiest is to use a service like Carbonite, which gives you unlimited off-site backup of your data for around $50 a year. If you’d rather not pay someone to host your data for you, you can buy a couple of external hard drives and back your data up to them, but you need to be sure to store that backup in a different location that your computers, whether that’s leaving it at a friend’s place, or storing it at your office at work.

As it stands now, I’m stuck paying around $1200 if I want to replace what I lost, but if I had bothered to insure my possessions, I could be paying a $250 deductible instead.

I figured I might be able to take a look at the source, but no such luck. The code is obfuscated to all hell. This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if the original developer wasn’t completely unreachable. I’ve tried the email on his contact page a few times: nothing.

So, it looks like I might just have to create my own implementation of this. And yes, it will be open source so that other people won’t have to deal with an (apparently) dead project. Or Flash.

My new Twitter widget was made using twitterjs (Google Code Link) and the Flickr photos below it were done by tweaking the code in Flickr’s own embedding tool. The Javascript slideshow that replaced the Flash one in an earlier post was creates with Flickrshow.

There are just two things I need to port over. First, the Last.fm charts: I could just use their image charts, but I want something a little more functional than that. Second, the embedded document system that I use to host my résumé (Scribd). This is a little tougher, as I’m having trouble figuring what to do aside from just posting the link to the PDF, which I want to avoid, as I’d rather have the content be embedded in the site and not require a download.

Both of those are projects for tomorrow, however. I need to actually get some sleep tonight as I start back at VMware in the morning.

This site will remain in read-only mode (no new posts or comments) for the time being, and eventually the posts will be archived somewhere on the new domain.

Thanks for reading,

Zach