Category: Meta

Old Ironsides’ Cannons

The USS Constitution is the nation’s oldest commissioned warship that’s still afloat.
While admittedly a bit of a tourist magnet, the ship is soaked in history (and whatever else happens to be floating around).
One of those bits of history is that the ship fires a cannon at 8am and at sunset.
Now, some of the nearby neighbors are complaining, and want to either have the firing stopped or the charges reduced. While I can see their point (( My apartment complex has gardeners come by with gas-powered leaf blowers every weekend at 7am and they love to sit outside my window with the motors running. )), the ship has been there for longer than they have, and while they can ask that the ship accommodate their wishes (free speech and all), they have no real standing; the ship was there first.
As a commenter on Fark said, “Perhaps they should stop firing blanks.”

Busy

Sorry folks, writing’s been light recently. Swamped with homework, graduate school applications, and tests.
Stay tuned.
Update: Did pretty well on the general. Next up, the physics exam.

We Apologize for the Inconvenience

Sorry for being so quiet as of late.
Class has started back up and, in addition to having a rather busy workload, money’s short so I haven’t been shooting that much.
When it comes to the blogosphere, I’m more in “receive” mode than “send” as of late. My apologies.

Potential Downtime

My webhost has informed me of a security issue with their systems. Evidently a member was able to gain sufficient privileges to change their account balance (( Service with the host is pre-paid, so members must maintain a balance with the host. )), which is obviously bad. Fortunately, they have logs that detail the intrusion, understand how it occurred, and are working on a fix.
They report that the security problem appears to be limited to their administrative systems, not customer sites, but that they may need to do rolling reboots over the next day or so to push out the fix. Any downtime for the next day or two is likely related to that.
This reminds me (and should serve as a reminder to you) that one should keep regular, off-site backups that can be restored to a different host if the need arises. In addition to this blog, I also maintain several other sites with this one host, so extended downtime (which I’ve fortunately never experienced — the host is routinely excellent) would be problematic.
Whee.

Twitter

After seeing the benefits of Twitter use at the NRA Annual meeting, as well as observing the Fun Happy Times in Iran right now, I figured it’d be a good idea to at least investigate the service and see if it might be useful.
If you’re interested, I’ve put the RSS feed of my Twitter in the right column. You can also directly subscribe if you wish. Consider it a “beta” as I’m still poking around with it.

New Theme

After a while with the old theme, I figured it was time for a change.
Things appear to be working well with the new theme. If you have any issues, please let me know.

FeedBurner Problems

FeedBurner’s been giving me some trouble over the last day or two, so I’ve switched back to self-hosting the feed here.
Please ensure that your RSS feed reader is subscribed to http://www.arizonarifleman.com/feed/ and not http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheArizonaRifleman or http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheArizonaRifleman. In the event that I switch back to FeedBurner in the future, your feed reader will be redirected automatically.
I apologize for any trouble this might cause.
Thanks for subscribing. 🙂

Notice

This blog originally started with the URL http://azrifleman.heypete.com/
After a few weeks, I bought a domain for it, and it now resides at http://www.arizonarifleman.com/
I’ve kept the old URL around for historical reasons, but I’m going to be discontinuing the old URL on Sunday, January 25th 2008 at noon Mountain Standard Time (GMT -0700). If you link to the old site (thanks for linking!) or have the URL bookmarked in your browser, please update your records to reflect the current URL.
Thank you!