“But Drew! Why don’t you take I-64?!”

Simple. If you go slower, you save gas. For example, when I drive to Henderson as I do rather frequently, if I take US 60 I’ll average 26 MPG. If I take the Audubon Parkway, I’ll average 19-20. Consequently, I usually go via US 60.

Maybe I’ll post some multimedia goodness from the gathering. Knowing me, I probably won’t. I’m lazy.

I keed. However, I’m managing to stay busy. Check this out:

During last year’s ice storm, Nathan and I started a little Twitter account we called TriStateAlerts. We mainly just used it to share information about shelters, emergency services, and the availability of generators. We covered a few other things, like a chemical leak and also handled severe weather alerts when we could devote some time to watching a Google Earth display for new polygons and manually typing the information into TweetDeck. Naturally, this got old rather quickly.

For the 2010 severe weather season, Nathan and I committed to having the feed automated, and I accomplished this feat on April 7. I would have had it done earlier, but a strange thing is that one has to test in a live environment when doing something like this. You can’t just make it happen. This new system was by no means perfect, it was just a shell script that ran a PHP script every 20 (and later, 10) seconds to check for new warnings, put them in a database, and tweet them. Pretty simple, right?

Our main problem with this system was that its data source was something the National Weather Service still deems experimental — the Common Alerting Protocol. It’s super awesome, though. It’s based on Atom/XML, which makes CAP a dream to work with. I seriously got working code after hacking at it for seven hours. All praise aside, CAP is still experimental. On the night of April 7, the feeds didn’t update for at least 30 minutes. After a chat with the science operations officer at the Paducah, Kentucky NWS office on the subject, I realized that I should really not be using CAP at this point. In fact, during the big April 24 severe outbreak, the CAP feeds never worked. Not once.

By that time, I had started work on the next step in the evolution of our fledgling service. I’ve been playing with a nice little piece of software called PerlEMWIN on and off for about four years now. This mainly consisted of installing it on a server, letting it run while trashing the filesystem all the while. (That writeFile plugin is nasty sometimes.) EMWIN, or the Emergency Managers Weather Information Network, is a tried-and-true method of dispersing weather information. It’s a continuous stream, priority-driven (meaning a warning will interrupt the transmission of something like a radar image), and it’s an automated push technology. This sounded like what I needed! However, I didn’t know a lick of Perl, and how the hell was I going to integrate this whole thing?

Around this time, I had been introduced to the directors of the local emergency management agency, who, from what I gathered, were desperately in need of a solution to disseminate emergency information via the internet, mainly through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. After my first meeting with the deputy director, he was thrilled that we had built something with such a following and told me we had essentially done his work for him. Oh, and please PLEASE sign them up for whatever we’re offering. (More on that later.)

More meetings further developed my plans, and an entirely new platform materialized in my mind. This wasn’t going to be just a service I run out of my bedroom with Nathan somewhere off to the side furiously researching information. My EMWIN integration had just gotten a lot easier, now that I had a perspective of what the whole thing would do.

I spent the better part of a week, mostly late at night, sitting at my kitchen table hacking away at a plugin for PerlEMWIN that would do what I needed. I had absolutely no experience with Perl, and didn’t have a clue where to start. I’ve been doing PHP for over six years, so you’d think that would help. Not with me. I started reading.

One of my biggest obstacles to learning Perl before I just dove into it with this project was that I just, for some reason, could not find out or just couldn’t understand what @_ was. Seriously. That was it. Maybe I’m just older and wiser now, or maybe all those years of doing PHP taught me a little something about programming in general, but when I found the answer to this simple question I couldn’t help but feel pretty stupid. (For the record, @_ is an array that holds the arguments you pass to a function. It’s a lot more flexible than PHP or probably most any other related language, but it’s really confusing.)

After finally learning just what the hell @_ was, and looking at other plugins bundled with PerlEMWIN, I got to work. Line by line, my plugin materialized. When I didn’t understand something or just straight up didn’t know how to do something in Perl, I resisted the urge to just give up and go back to PHP, and pressed on. Over the course of a week, I picked up enough Perl to finish this plugin and even have it drop data into the same MySQL database my old PHP script pointed to. This left out one thing– the social networking side.

I decided to run back to PHP for this one, for two big reasons. First of all, the design of the overall platform had to include a way to post some stuff to some places. For example, if a local emergency management agency subscribed to our platform, we obviously wouldn’t want to have tornado warnings for three counties away posting to their Twitter feed. This mechanism had to be separated from the data ingestion module. Secondly, I had just written the backends for a Twitter app and Facebook app in PHP, and I wasn’t about to learn a completely new client library to do something I had already written code for. I could just as easily have the PerlEMWIN plugin notify the message center that something new had come, and it could do the rest. That’s exactly what I did.

We also needed some dedicated hardware to run this on, with all the plans we had, the ragtag way things were going would just not cut it for a reputable emergency information service like we wanted. I called an old boss of mine and asked if he still had some servers sitting around for sale. I bought a Sun Microsystems SunFire V40z with four processors and 8GB of RAM to run everything on, and worked out hosting with him. It’s always good to not burn bridges– you never know when you’ll get the hook up.

The platform had its first real test during the severe weather event of April 24. I had barely touched our new server haardware, things were working fine the way they were and with a rare high risk area issued for western Kentucky, that was no time for something to go wrong. Nathan and I were working at the emergency operations center that day, fresh from a meeting with a prospective media partner and ready to tweet. As the warnings started going up for the area, all four endpoints we were pushing data to remained silent. I had finished the PerlEMWIN module (sans Twitter/Facebook support) that morning and wanted to make sure it caught all the warnings, and deposited the right information into the database in the correct format before using it. I hadn’t touched the old code since the last severe weather event, so the only logical explanation for the failure was that the CAP feeds weren’t updating at all. Great first impression, guys!

While we were in a controlled panic over our Twitter feed, I started scrambling to get the EMWIN module linked up and running. This was complicated by what could be generously described as an intermittent internet connection at the courthouse. After sticking my SIM card from my phone (which remained disassembled on the table) in my computer, I whipped up a quick script that posted to our sandbox account to test things, and I ran it manually to make sure it would pull the relevant information from the database and post it. It worked! I pointed the script at the right channels and made one final edit to the PerlEMWIN plugin.

More warnings came in, and still the Twitter and Facebook pages were silent. The logfiles showed all the information coming in just fine, and there were numerous warnings in the database. The Perl plugin wasn’t launching this PHP script I had just written. The panic continued. Nathan resorted to posting warnings manually while I worked, slowly but furiously, on the problem at hand. I found the problem (current working directory confusion) and fixed it in time to post the last two severe thunderstorm warnings of the outbreak.

Since then, we’ve moved everything onto our new server and it’s currently colocated in Evansville. The outbreak this past weekend has a few great moments for us; but those warrant another blog entry sometime in the future.

Of course, that’s not to say that work in the accounting world isn’t a completely different ballgame anyway. We’re slammed to the max from January to mid-April, stress runs high and you tend to spend some late nights in the office.

I, thus far, have been spared this death sentence. In fact, today is quite a slow one in my department, which is a shame given that I’m essentially a one-man department. Few people pick up their tax returns on days they don’t get paid, and I’m a good enough tech that the network hasn’t been acting up. I could probably get away with not being in the office, but the bills wouldn’t get paid so here I am.

I’ve always learned a lot by the work I’ve done. When building a web site for a wheel and tire store, I learned more about rims than anyone probably could care. When building a dealer portal for a distributor of cabinetry, I learned a lot about cabinets. This time around, as a staff member at an accounting firm, I can finally learn about something that affects everyone and that everyone generally thinks about a lot – accounting and taxation. Not that I aspire to be the next big-shot tax and accounting master or anything (I am just fine behind the scenes where I am), but it helps to know a little something about everything you handle on a daily basis. I am fortunate to work with seven CPAs who are knowledgeable and can help me help them. Sometimes, I’m the only communication link between them and the software vendors.

I ramble a lot…

When all you have in your medicine cabinet is a bottle of Lonelyt (spell it backwards) PM, and you have the choice of taking it and sleeping for a few more hours or just dealing with the headache, you will take the Lonelyt and sleep if the headache is bad enough.

I’m up doing laundry now. Folding clothes still does wonders at clearing your mind. Maybe I’ll clean the house next.

This stumped me for months and I eventually arrived at the point where I just didn’t care anymore. I blamed it on my computer’s NIC, and then just left it at bad signal levels from the cable company when I found that all the other computers on my network were almost as slow. A couple of nights ago, in a fit of disgust I decided to go downstairs and plug my netbook directly into the cable modem. The speeds were fast as lightning, as things should be. What device on my network could have caused such a bottleneck?

The culprit was an old Intel 16-port switch I had thrown into the mix when I mounted a small contingent of servers and networking equipment in the basement. Back then I didn’t have enough ports on my Netgear wireless router to support everything, so I had everything going to that switch. Over time things kept getting slower and slower. Now that I use one of my servers as the router, I can take the old switch out without impacting the network.

Lesson learned. I’m getting acceptable speeds now.

So much has happened this week and I am surprised I made it out alive. Check it out.

Monday
I was working on billing stuff with Boss #2 in Henderson when his wife left to take one of the kids to grandma’s and grab food at Arby’s, if I remember correctly. She backs out of the driveway and B2 and I hear a horrible grinding noise. “That didn’t sound good,” I said. We emerge from the back yard and she’s back in the driveway. My car also has a nice little bit of damage done to it. My driver side door will open only once more after this happens, more on that later. We notify the police and get an accident report, and I drive home with a disabled vehicle, entering through the passenger door. On my way home from Henderson, a Subway bag in my car decided to empty itself of its contents and begin flying around the car. This startles and distracts me enough that I run off the road and have one hell of a ride trying to get back on the road (successful) while staying in my own lane (not successful) traveling at 60mph. I left the highway and had to sit off on a side road for about 20 minutes to gather myself, then decided to make the rest of the way home.

Wednesday
Wednesday was my 21st birthday. I know I promised last year on this blog that I’d have a party but needless to say that never happened. I actually had to work that day, for the second year in a row. B2′s insurance company gave me a check that day for the damage to my car from his wife backing into it. I still have not visited the other former customer I planned on visiting that day. How exciting, huh?

Friday
Friday, I planned on renewing my license to get the cool sideways version that all the people 21 and over get. I was still climbing in and out of my car through the passenger door, so I mapped out what the routine would be before leaving. I would go to the bank to deposit my paycheck, then walk over to the judicial center to get my license renewed, then head home. Apparently, I was concentrating too much on this planned routine because on my way to the bank, I zoned out, went through a red light and struck the side of a Ford F-250 going through that same intersection. My car did little damage to the truck but was pretty banged up itself, as seen in the picture at the top of this entry. The car was a complete loss and my insurance will not pay for it. Thankfully, the check I received from B2′s insurance company will just about pay off the car so I can sell it for parts or something to make up the difference. Not to be brought completely down by the day’s events, I went out with friends to celebrate my birthday. I had a few drinks; I figured that the way this week was going, I would be lucky if I didn’t die at Holiday World on…

Saturday
Yes, I went to Holiday World on Saturday with the OSMA/Twitterites. We planned this event at Texas Roadhouse during the big ice storm back in January, and I think that was the key to its overwhelming success. We had 21 attendees. I finally got to meet some really cool people (and catch up with others!), all the while being burned to a crisp by the sun. I did not die at Holiday World, so I can consider this week a partial success.

Can I sleep for about a week now?

Hey, check out that date.

• Linux system administrator and engineer. I have not been using Linux in some form or another for the past five-plus years for nothing. I have learned quite a bit; it’s gotten to the point where I’ve mounted two servers running it in my house and I’m planning on adding a third soon. I know Red Hat Enterprise/Fedora/CentOS quite well, a good-sized chunk of Gentoo and a bit of Debian. I would love to be a systems guru for a medium-sized outfit and eventually get my RHCE (as someone told me yesterday regarding people’s obsession with MCSE and MCSE only, “do you work on computers, or just Windows?”) This opportunity may be presenting itself to me now and if things work out, I will be a happy boy.
• Voiceover artist. I’ve been told by many that I would be a good fit for such a job; I would believe it if I had any post-production skills. (And attracted the ladies just by opening my mouth, but that’s a completely unintentional side effect/not what I’m pursuing.) Just about the only things I’ve done in this sort of specialty are this internet radio station ID and… oh yeah, I recorded a rap song for my own business when I was running it. (Kudos to Nathan Seaton for writing the lyrics.)
• Anything in broadcasting. Actually, I may prefer radio more. I find I do better behind a mic… or a camera (never in front).

There you have it. Not only do I suck at ending these blog entries, I suck at tagging them therefore I will forgo it this time around.

To see a globe in your dream, suggests that you need to step back and look at the wider perspective. It also indicates that you are in complete control of your life.

To see a spinning globe in your dream, signifies that your life is going out of control.

Okay, I saw several globes, none of which were spinning. This must be a good thing because my life is not spinning out of control, and I must REALLY be in absolutely complete control of every aspect of my life. That’s good right?

This dream also featured a journalist  like the last one I blogged about, but I will not disclose this plot because from what I hear he really is a nice guy, and he wasn’t a very nice person in my dream.

You will quickly see where I’m going with the post title. My site (as well as a couple of others) are now at DreamHost. I have a feeling this will be the last move for a long, long time. If you decide to sign up, enter me as a referral and show these people how awesome I am at recruiting. (If you click the link in this paragraph and sign up in the same session, you don’t have to do a thing. Trust me. They know where you came from.)

And now for what I came here to say. Yes, I have had another totally messed up dream. Recently, Dariush took a vacation for a week to Hawaii. I had this dream last night where I and some faceless Twitterites went with him. (Really, the others didn’t have faces.) Anyway, I was being stalked through a high school in Hawaii on their graduation night by a student I didn’t know. It was a she, she looked like a freshman, it creeped me out. I found my way to the hotel room we were all sharing and strangely there was a large tree growing from the floor. We had the TV on and I remember wondering out loud how we were getting the channels. Another interesting event was when Dariush was sitting on the bed (the room only had one for some reason) listening to a song on his phone. While this was going on a couple of Secret Service-looking guys walk through the hotel room, give him a weird look and conferred for a few seconds in the bathroom. They come out, tell us all they’re agents with the RIAA and arrest Dariush on suspicion that he downloaded the song he was listening to illegally. As they were taking him away, I woke up.

Ta-da!