Today is our friend JoAnn’s birthday. Click the pick to hassle her.

Well, not literal crooks, but these folks, who were amused by this entry from last October enough to link directly to OUR local copy of the ten megabyte video.

The good news is that our server didn’t blink at all about serving out all the extra traffic, and blithely served out 700 copies overnight.

The even better news is that our Colo people noticed the wildly out of pattern bandwidth usage (70GB overnight vs. about 30 for all of September) and contacted us this morning, first thing. It didn’t take long to figure out what the problem was, especially since the first thing we did was take down Apache to see if the pain stopped, and lo and behold it did (thanks, by the way, to all those folks who emailed us about the apparent Heathen outage; even though it was under control, it’s good to know folks are paying attention).

The file’s been removed, but the original copy is still available. I’m told that the nice folks at C&L will be hosting a copy themselves soon, so if you’re here looking for Cheney being more vulgar than usual, wander over there. (They really are nice; they offered to cover our bandwidth overages, which we’d certainly have if we hadn’t moved last month.)

We now have a marriage license.

Bag limit is, apparently, one.

We will not be serving any of these.

Mike points out that a naive Google search for our wedding site produces first a link to a certain almost certainly awful romance novel, blurbed thusly by a quasi-literate Amazon reviewer (all punctuation original):

In [Jacqueline Diamond’s] latest release The Stolen Bride Erin Marshall, the heroine has had an accident and can’t remember one particular day. The day she accepted a proposal from Chet…her fiance.

Update: Links fixed.

It appears the Bachelorette Shindig thrown by chromosomally-appropriate IBP types included “strippers,” and was, er, documented.

Longtime Heathen Danno turned thirty fucking five yesterday, which means it’s been five years since this happened. If you’re in the Louisville/southern Indiana area, drop me a line and I’ll tell you where he lives.

(Yes, we know that there have been significant personnel changes in Team Danno and Team Heathen since these photographs. That doesn’t make them less funny, though.)

In case you’re curious, this is the band playing at our reception.

I have resisted, to at least a couple of approximations, talking about Mississippi in the wake of Katrina. What my friend Steve has just sent me, though, has me weeping in a hotel room in Kentucky.

My home state’s coastal fringe is destroyed. It is a place I’ve been more times than I can count. I played my first putt-putt games with my long-dead father in the shadow of the Broadwater, with the sound of the waves in the background. That putt-putt is gone, and so is most of the Broadwater. But fuck the putt-putt; whole towns on the coast are gone. So is much of the work of Walter Anderson, and in all liklihood the homes of most of the people I knew who lived in that precarious wonderful place.

My brother’s best friend has hosted his in-laws for weeks, as they have no home anymore. This is not a rare story. Christ, it’s commonplace. This is good, but it’s terrible that it’s needed.

My own mother, nearly 90 miles inland, had trees aplenty fall on her home. She watched an aged pine — with a 15+ foot taproot — become uprooted in Katrina’s winds even that far north. She’s fine, and so is my stepdad, but he — at 70+ — spend days with his chainsaw clearing other peoples’ yards and driveways. These were days his own home had neither power nor water. John is like that.

I grew up in hurricane country. They’re a fact of life. A formative memory is dozing, fitfully, through Frederick in 1979. Ol’ Fred was a Cat 4, and was quite neutered by the time he hit Hattiesburg, but the damage was still astounding. The vast oak my mother watched sway during Camille in ’69 finaly fell during that storm, but somehow didn’t destroy the home it shadowed. Even so, the next day we all saw that tree as the fate we avoided.

Now, this past weekend, Erin and I spend a sleepless night watching a puny pecan swing over our own townhouse. We remembered our parents and our friends closer to the storm, and the stories they’d given us from before we were born — or from earlier that month — and we were far too cavalier.

Just now my friend Steve sent me this site. I think these photos say what I cannot.

So much will never be the same.

TMFTML has the best snark on the meth-driven life development.

On September 26, 1983, the USSR’s new early-warning-system falsely reported a US nuclear launch, i.e. an unprovoked first strike. Stanislav Petrov, then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel, made the judgement call that kept us from nuking each other back to the stone age. (Via MeFi.)

Aloysius got an email begging him to vote for the gay marriage ban come November. He have the sender both barrels. Rock on.

So it blew and blew and blew — and in fact is still blowing — but the most dramatic event was a drunk driver hitting the power pole down the street about 11 last night. We — obviously — have power, and still have running water, so we seem to have gotten by just fine. The TV talking heads, though, seem somewhat disappointed they couldn’t do their typical storm-coverage bullshit.

BoingBoing points us to this rant about high-end home audio and the troubles DRM introduces, which triggered this response from John Gilmore, wherein he quite correctly points out that audiophiles who buy into DRM schemes are suckers:

It’s really simple. It’s because DRM is designed to break compatibility. The whole point of DRM is restrictions. The point of all previous audio formats was compatability. CDs play on any CD player. Cassettes play or record on any cassette player. Neither one cares what you do with the audio that comes out. By contrast, DRM is designed to prevent the audio from coming out in any way that the oligopoly objects to. […] Rather than calling for everybody to implement DRM, which would be uniformly terrible for most musicians, most equipment makers, and all consumers, you should be calling for nobody to buy DRM. We can’t stop them from building it — there’s no law against companies selling painful products. The only cure is education — of their customers. Make it an expensive mistake for anyone to sell a DRM product. Because, as you have discovered with your iTunes music, it IS an expensive mistake to BUY a DRM product.

Vote with your dollars, people.

Heathen Agent Triple-FFF reports that his dinner at some Chicago joint included the apotheosis of desserts: Cantelope sorbet. Sprinkled with black pepper. And bacon.

Awesome.

“The sky […] was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

CNN reports Rita is down to a fun-loving 125MPH Category 3 storm, and is projected to hit ground between Galveston and the TX-LA border. Not quite champagne-popping goodness yet, but definitely more relief.

Heathen has been uncharacteristically quiet about the approach of Rita; we apologize. Yes, it got scary looking for a bit, and we’re not totally out of the woods, but we’re still staying put. Most of my time has been taken doing disaster prep for my company’s servers; we realized last week that the “NOC” we’d been paying $100 per U per month to host in has no redundant power, no real disaster plan, and was planning on SHUTTING DOWN COMPLETELY for Rita.

Um, no. We’re pretty sure that makes you a “server closet” and not a “network operations center,” especially considering that another server I manage (which also hosts this site) is colocated up at a real, no-shit five-nines facility owned by Level3 Communications, sublet to local provider iLand, for which we pay only a little bit more than that. And they have a fer-crying-out-loud GENERATOR on hand. So corporate backups are in place on that machine (which is actually part of an ongoing reciprocal backup agreement between Spacetaker and Adaptive RFID), and our backup server is actually on my dining room table. The main corporate box is still online, but I’ll probably have to power it down before dinner time due to the lack of any real disaster prep at the HTC NOC.

Now: gotta go write documentation and put batteries in things. It’s starting to get windy outside, and Mrs Heathen To Be is getting antsy.

More to come, certainly.