Month: September 2008

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Video Wrap-up

All of these videos happened here around Cacak.  It took me a few days to get them off the camera and upload them to google.  On to the show……

It hasn’t rained–really rained–in quite some time.  It did sprinkle one day.  I was waiting on language classes (I had been around town and didn’t want to get wet so I went to the school early).  As it was raining, I noticed that the water was evaporating just about as fast as it was falling.  I took a video to try to show everyone.  Once it was uploaded, it doesn’t look nearly as good as it did live.  I decided to put up two versions of it….one from google video and the other the original file.  You’ll have to wait for the second one to fully load (sorry, I don’t have streaming):

First from google video:

{google}-84879674356588718{/google} 

The second local:

http://media.maxsons.org/20080903_RainInCacakEvaporating.mp4
download the file from here

A few days ago, one of the other Americans in town had a son who had a birthday.  There is a go-cart track in town that we went to.  It cost 450 dinars (about 9 dollars) to ride for 10 minutes.  But, these weren’t the detuned US putsy go-carts.  These things were fast.  If there had been enough room, you probabaly could have fone a donut.  And we didn’t have to wear a seat belt or helmet.  And no one got hurt.  Take that nanny goverment!  Anyway, here is the video:

{google}-7268409312191533782{/google} 

 This last one is of a random fireworks display.  I was sitting at my desk last night working on the computer when I heard fireworks.  That is something fairly standard here and random (people will just shoot them off.  I wish I knew where they bought them from….I would have for the 4th!) so I didn’t think anything about it.  However, when they kept going and going, I got up.  I happened to grab my cell phone and took a movie of the last half of the show.  It was amazing.  I’ll ask one of my friends today if they knew what was going on.

{google}5231905742113392597{/google} 

By the way, these videos are licensed under the same creative commons license this website is.

[Update 09-07-2008 09:00:00] I took the local video off.  It took way to long to load.  I left the download link up though.

[Update 09-07-2008 12:29:31]  I found out that one of the daughters (or daugher) of one of the richest guys in town got married.  The fireworks were at the wedding.  WOW!

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Lydia

Cyndi was uploading pictures this weekend (sorry for the delay).  Here is a neat picture of Lydia I wanted to share with everyone.

DSC06446

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Kill Dr. Lucky

DSC06356
 

Well, this took forever to post.  About 2 months ago, there was a group of college kids in Serbia to visit.  We had them over one night (two or three times actually).  This night, we played a game of Kill Dr. Lucky.  Kelly won (finally).  We thought a picture was in order.  The yellow Carcassonne Meple was Dr. Lucky this time.

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Picture to Share

About a month ago (we got way behind uploading pictures), we had an awesome sunset in town.  Here are some pictures that I wanted to share with everyone.

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ARG

This morning I was going to post about some really neat stuff at Thinkgeek (I thought of my dad, Wallace, Woody, Kevin, and Brian when I saw the stuff.  I’ll give you 2 gueses what it relates to.  🙂  ) so I came to the website to login.  What did I see?  Not my normal screen….nope, I saw this:

20080905_MaxsonsOrgError

 Arg! What’s the matter?!  I was worried something really happened to the site (no, I don’t have a backup I do now).  I had been logged into my hosting providers admin panel a few days ago and noticed I was over my db limit.  I wondered if they did any sort of checking, but everything had been working fine so I decided to leave it be.  Well, I guess they do check it because I had been denied write access to my database.  Here is what I saw in the usage stats:

20080905_MaxsonsOrgDBUsage

 Arg.  I was over and needed to fix it.  I figured it was the bsq_sitestats module I had installed because I had a bazillion stats stored.  But, I couldn’t just use the module to clean out the stuff because I couldn’t login.  Well, I’m offered phpmyadmin access to my database so I logged in there.  Sure enough, the stats module was eating up all of my space (plus some):

20080905_MaxsonsOrgTableUsage

Sure enough, the bsu_hit table was taking up my quota + some.  And another table was taking up another 24MB!  Wow!  How to get rid of the data?  My first thought was to just clean out stats for things like the googlebot, etc….  Well, I tried that, but couldn’t remember the syntax for the delete command.  I know, I could have looked it up, but…..

I wasn’t sure what would happen and how unreliable my stats would be if I just did that.  So, I decided to start from scratch.  I truncated the tables.  Truncate, for those who don’t know, is kinda like a delete…but kinda not.  It gets rid of the data only it is very fast (on Oracle, if I remember right you cannot rollback a truncate command…that is part of the reason.  On mysql, I’m not so sure).

So i truncate everything, go back to the admin page. Refresh it.  No change in the space I’m using.  ARG.  Try to refresh the website.  ARG.  Same error:

20080905_MaxsonsOrgError_2

ARG.  I call my hosting company and talk to a guy.  he has an American name, but he isn’t an American.  Probabaly Indian…but speaks english very well.  I explain the problem, he goes off and checks.  Tells me I need to wait 15-30 min for their systems to refresh.  But he’s more than happy to walk me through getting rid of data as the admin tool says I still have -50MB free.  Arg.  I try to explain the situation to him…he’s just following the script.  In the end, I tell him that I can’t delete anything more and I’ll wait.  So, I’m chekaming (чекам means I wait in Serbian.  This is my Englishized version of that word).  I finally check back and everything works.  YAY!

But take a look at the space usage after:

20080905_MaxsonsOrgTableUsageAfter

I went from using > 150 MB to < 10.  Gee wizz.  The bsq_sitestats plugin sure is nice…but it uses space.  To be fair, I’ve never done any optimization or scrubbing of my stats (I’ll do that now) so I don’t want to misrepresent the app.  The stats are nice, but it eats up the space.

So, now you know the story of the error.  I’m sorry for everyone who had issues overnight.  You won’t get a seperate post about the thinkgeek stuff.  Follow the links on top.

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TV

In this post, I talk about some of the bad things that are on TV here.  But, I wanted to point out that there are some not so bad things on TV too.  Just some times those things are not in the language you expect.  here is a clip from Sponge Bob that has been dubbed into Serbian.

{google}-4725421724646444576{/google} 

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Walk

I went for a walk a few days ago.  I walked over the dam and up a footpath towards Ovcar and Kablar (Овчар или Овћар…незнам шта је тачно…и Каблар).  I walked a little ways and found this other footpath that veered off to the left towards the river.  I walked out it and kept walking…that is where I came across this table someone had made.  Here are two pictures.  First the table and second a panorama:

01092008(019)

Morova

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4×4 Car

03092008(002)

These cars are all over the place here.  They are 4 wheel drive (at least they have a sticker on the car that says so).  They look like they could climb a tree just sitting there.  I’d like one.  They have about 1.5-2 feet of ground clearance too!

[Update 09-20-2008 08:19:28] These cars are brand name LADA and come from the former Soviet Union/Russia.  Here is the wikipedia article.  Here is a link to a lada club in Serbia.

[Update 09-20-2008 08:37:20] Here is a new article about Ladas with some neat videos in it.

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Overseas Life

I haven’t written too awfuly (how do you spell that….awful + ly…awfuly…who knows.  If you know, leave me a comment) much about life overseas recently, so I decided today that I would write about something that is very prevalent…at least here in Serbia.  That is the dress (or lack there of).

I don’t really know how to explain this to people in the states.  People here wear clothes (no, we aren’t in the bush in Africa).  They wear clothes very similar to what people wear in the US.  It’s just different.  I can’t explain it.  Here are a few examples:

If you want some more examples, you can go here.  No, it isn’t like everyone runs around in their clubbin’ clothes all the time.  And it isn’t that they don’t wear clothes.  They are just…well…different (for some more on that, check out this article on close but not exactly).  No, I can’t really explain it.  Just know that it is different.  By the way, the girl on the bottom is wearing traditional Serbian Dress.  I haven’t seen anyone walking around in that.  I’d say it is kinda like German Leaderhosen.

Also porn is readily available.  Either in the many shops (that are on every street corner) has it just laid out with the other “normal” magazines, or the video store has it, or it is even on the TV after midnight.  It is simply amazing.  Not to mention the internet (which as we all know is a huge problem anywhere you are).

So, if you are living overseas (or thinking about it) something you may want to think about is how will you react when different  things are presented.  How will you react? As a Christian, how will you set yourself apart?

As someone living in the US, how can you support those living overseas?  How can you pray for them?

Oh, one of the easy steps you can take on your computer is to sign up for OpenDNS.  it is very easy to use and rather fool-proof.  it also works with multiple computers.  And it is free.  If you want some more information, drop me a line and I’ll let you know what I know.