The Maxson Homepage on the WWW
Last week one of Cyndi’s friends sent us a care package. Part of what was in there were some vienna weenies for Lydia. Over the weekend she had her first can. As always, she loved them (and so did I. I snuck one in. With some ritz-like crackers, it was awesome).
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!
I found this picture while looking on flickr today. It is either of or from a mountain near our city (here is a picture of the mountain I took from our apartment ). I like the snow. We can only hope for several meters of the white stuff come winter!
Volio bih mngo pada sneg!!!!!
picture from tequieroserbia .
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.
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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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:
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:
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):
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:
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:
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.
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}
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:
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.
