http://www.vincestross.com Chronicles of a Web Master Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:19:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [caption id="attachment_116" align="alignright" width="200" caption="The Thirds: Sleeping, Working, and You!"][/caption] I've come to think about life in terms of "The Thirds." Culturally we're told that 8 hours of sleep constitutes a good night sleep, and businesses generally operate within an 8 hour work day, which leaves 8 hours for the rest ... http://www.vincestross.com/2009/08/my-thirds/ I tend to read a lot of non-fiction. Whether it be a technical tome, some over-worked physicists newest theory, or books related to the crises of our time (food, water, and shelter). That being said, whenever I catch myself avoiding a daily read it's normally because I've been reading too much ... http://www.vincestross.com/2009/07/a-novel-idea/ [caption id="attachment_49" align="alignright" width="226" caption="(Shakespeare photo courtesy of Wikipedia)"][/caption] Boy do I love a blank canvas! That's what NetCrafters has been for me over the past year. I came from a budding 8-year career working with closed systems that were purposely isolated from the Internet for security reasons. I worked on servers ... http://www.vincestross.com/2009/06/to-code-or-re-code-that-is-the-faq/ In this guide I'll walk through converting a VHS tape to Apple TV (H.264 @ 720 x 480). I purchased the Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus Digital TV Recorder from an Apple Store for about $200. I've had a great experience with this device. I'm sure there are far superior solutions out ... http://www.vincestross.com/2009/04/convert-vhs-to-apple-tv/ I've been using the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) for running our web servers at NetCrafters for almost a year now. It's been an amazing experience and I've kept a detailed account of many of the lessons learned. The most recent challenge came when our servers just started locking-up for ... http://www.vincestross.com/2009/04/upgrade-an-ec2-instance/