Recent News

August 14, 2008

Bandwidth more than doubles

Recently I took advantage of a free upgrade from Verizon, and am now at 20Mbps down, 5Mbps up. There is still no legitimate reason to have that much download bandwidth, but more than doubling the upload speed will improve website response immensely.

December 20, 2007

Have converted the internet connection to fiber-optic. I'm testing 3 to 4 times the upload performance of my DSL connection for approximately the same price. You probably won't notice pages loading much quicker, but video is actually usable now. If you have a fast connection to the internet, you will notice that video now downloads to your PC as fast as it plays.

I've been holding back on introducing new video files until I could substantially improve the user experience. Look for a lot of new additions in the months ahead.

November 6, 2007

Cleaned up the "links" section, fixed some broken links, added a few new ones.

October 1, 2007

I've posted some recently discovered early parenting stories in the family section.

August 25, 2007

Shannon won honorable mention at the Oregon State Fair, photography division, ages 13 through 18. She's already making plans for next year to submit entries in both photo and art.

May 23, 2007

We've arrived in Sacramento for the 2007 Jazz Festival. Photos will be up soon.

April 9, 2007

Recent performance measurements have made me very happy. I'm measuring twice the network bandwidth of the best I ever got from my previous ISP, which is almost three times the bandwidth I was getting just before the transition. I hope this keeps up.

April 6, 2007

A new ISP!

I've fired my previous ISP (Infinity Internet) and moved to Speakeasy, which has provided me with twice the download and twice the upload speed for a little more than what Infinity was charging me. A performance problem with Infinity, and their inability to handle a simple service request, is what finally decided me.

February 8, 2007

The networking changes are done. Technical support for the modem/router said I could configure it in bridge mode without assigning it an IP address (which matches my understanding of how bridges work) but the menu wouldn't let me do it that way. So one of my static IPs is currently in use by the bridge. I may experiment later and see if I can recover that address.

There is a new article in the Harley-Davidson section.

January 24, 2007

The website will be unavailable off and on this week as I convert us from a NAT environment to a bridged environment.

I have switched all the domains to a service that provides good DNS support, and have switched all websites to Apache virtual hosts. But the servers are still natted and the desktop and laptop units go through two nats. Now that I have the domains and apache config cleaned up, I can work on the router configuration and get the web servers on their own IP addresses.

Don't worry if you have no idea what that means. The upshot is that the web servers will come and go for the next few days until I get the last of the changes in place. After that, things will be simpler and there should be some performance improvement.

January 20, 2007

In the gallery under "Events" are photos from Christmas 2006 (the Christmas party at my work, and opening presents at our house and Tammy's mom's house), and photos from Stars on Ice at the Rose Garden in January 2007.

January 12, 2007

I'm in the process of migrating all my domains to a new domain service. The last to transfer will be this one, Shannon's blog, and my blog. There may be a short outage in the next couple of days until the transfer completes.

January 2, 2007

Happy New Year. The site has been down the last couple days due to a misconfiguration on my part. My apologies. Things should be working again.

December 4, 2006

Upgrade to Geeklog and Gallery for all sites finished over the weekend. Mail me if anything appears broken. Next step is some security-related changes, and then another try at migrating to Core 5.

What started as a gimmick to combat boredom during car trips turns into a fairly sophisticated game.

FedEx and Federal Express are trademarks of the FedEx Corporation.

Rules to the FedEx game are exclusive copyright of Shannon E. Christian.

Written 8/28/1997

Personally, I'm raising my child to be abnormal.

But only in that I'm helping her to learn whatever she wants to learn, be it astronomy or stick fighting.

I rediscovered this article in October 2007. Apparnelty I wrote this in October 1997, soon after Shannon had acquired her first rat.

There's a fine line between funny and annoying.

I break down and buy actual clothing from the Boutique...

The problem: Divx-encoded videos play within the web browser in Internet Explorer but not Firefox.

The cause: Incomplete support of Firefox by the Windows Media Player web plugin.

The solution: Use something else.

Like any other aspect of martial arts, fighting with open hands is a skill learned over time. This article describes some techniques one can use to reduce the likelyhood of damaging one's hands when sparring open-handed.

This article needs photos.

This isn't badminton....

As the martial artist's proficiency increases, effective blocks tend to take less and less energy.

(A work in progress)