Social media and the news

A couple of years ago, we dropped cable TV and setup our XBox to watch live streaming Netflix. After awhile, I put together a computer running Boxee, and we started watching Hulu and other shows that way. Now we’ve got a PS3 along with the XBox, and Hulu Plus is available on both. I’ve also got PlayOn, and can watch Hulu, Netflix, etc. on my modded Nook Color. Basically, our family gets all of our video entertainment through the Internet and only the Internet. So when a tornado sweeped through my home town of Joplin, there was no breaking in, no important news updates, but we knew about it almost as instantly as it happened.
Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we found out through friends and family that our hometown was under a tornado watch. Then the rumors started pouring in that St. John’s Hospital in Joplin was hit by a tornado and suffered severe damage. A quick Google search later and I’m reading live updated over twitter from various sources describing the damage, and linking to a live video feed on the Weather Channel’s website. Then the personal reports from friends and family started pouring in.
One friend reported early that her father’s house in Duquesne ( a suburb on the East side of Joplin) was destroyed. Once I realized that St. John’s and Duquesne were damaged, I realized that my sister’s house was in between those two points. I sent her a quick text, and got a call back from my brother-in-law letting me know that both my sisters and their husbands were safe, though one of my sisters’ house of damaged. A little while later we got a call from my wife’s sister. She told us that she was in her vehicle with her family at the corner of 20th and Rangeline (which we already knew suffered sever damage). My brother-in-law got some nasty cuts on his back because he was shielding the rest of his family, but he’s OK. Their car is totaled, but they’re OK.
For hours, my wife and I kept watching Facebook updates and twitter feeds, and saw pictures and videos of various spots around Joplin that we know well and the after effects of the tornado.
At some point during the chaos I had to sit back and was just a little amazed at the wealth of up-to-date information that was readily available to me, and that I was able to connect with so many family and friends and find out who was safe, who lost their house, and who was in ICU within hours of the tornado hitting thanks to both Facebook and Twitter. If we had cable, we would have been glued to the Weather Channel or CNN or some other station and would never have learned as much about the things that we cared the most about. Even the live feed on the Weather Channel’s website only focused on one small section on the far West end of Joplin, away from the center of commerce.
Anyway, whenever a disaster strikes, somebody always comments on how social media has changed the way we connect to the world, so I’m just saying it again. And in this case, it has changed for the better. Without Facebook and Twitter there would be people that I still don’t know if they’re alive or not, but thanks to these media outlets I know that my friends and family are safe.

Doing my small part to help Joplin relief effort

Got a chance to help the Joplin relief effort out a bit yesterday. I only played a small part, but every bit counts. I can’t get there to help physically, but I plan to do what I can.
In case you didn’t know, Joplin is my hometown, but I moved to Houston this past December. Many of my friends and family still live in Joplin and all were effected in some way by the tornado last week. My sister’s house was hit and suffered some damage, but it is still standing. Several friends weren’t as lucky and completely lost their homes. One person I know is in ICU, but as far as I can tell, everyone else I know is alive and without serious injury.
Anyway, my former employer, is now the city’s main distribution center. So I got an email from their new tech guy yesterday. They were needing to setup additional phone lines to help deal with the volume of calls they are receiving, but he hasn’t learned the new phone system that well yet. So i spent my lunch break yesterday on the phone with their new tech guy and walked him through the process of programming additional extensions to be members of the Operator Group, and programming the various functions of the new extensions on a Samsung Prostar DCS. I know it’s not much, but it was something that helps the effort and that I was in a unique position to be the one available with the knowledge to help. It felt good to be part of things for a few minutes, but I really wish I could be there.

My son was looking at some of the pictures with me and he said, “It reminds me of Fallout.” I mentioned this to my friend Poorchoices and he said that’s exactly what it looks like.

I miss my hometown now more than ever and spend every night checking on friends on Facebook, and looking up more information on the damage, as well as the latest death toll. It just all seems so surreal. If we hadn’t moved, I’d be there in the middle of it right now, sorting donated goods, digging through rubbage, or who knows what else, and life just goes on here in Houston like nothing happened.

Anyway, if you want to help out, CHCC has regularly updated information available at http://www.chcchurch.org/the-storm regarding various ways you can help. They have a list of things they currently need as well as a place you can go to make donations.

Oops… Did I do that? And basic Cpanel restore guide.

Um.. I hate to admit it, but I just made a (l)User mistake.  I just deleted my blog.  Not sure exactly how, must have clicked on the wrong thing or something, or else things weren’t setup the way I thought they were.  Basically, I was trying to clean up my hosting account with the wonderful hosting company Hostgator.  My wife has had several blogs through the years and I was trying to remove one that she hasn’t used in a few(4-5) years.  I had installed it using Fantastico Deluxe, so I went to remove it from Fantastico, but instead it deleted bamed.org!!!

Well, unlike many users I run across, I had a backup.  it was about a week old, but I only lost one blog post, so not really a huge deal.

So, as any IT guy will tell you, BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!

FYI, Cpanel makes this pretty easy and HostGator has an easy to follow tutorial at http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/how-to-generatedownload-a-full-backup.  Restoring is actually pretty simple too.  If you have root on the server it’s real easy (I don’t from home), but if you are a HostGator customer and you have a full backup all you need to do is upload it to your account and fill out the form at https://secure.hostgator.com/restore.php and be sure to specify the location of the backup that you generated and a friendly HostGator admin (maybe even me) will restore the backup for you at no charge.

If you don’t have root, and you only need to restore a few files, or a database or two, you can also do it manually.  The CPanel generated backup is just a zipped up tarball that includes all of your account information in a few directories, a tarball of your home directory, and some SQL dumps of your MySQL databases.  So, I untarred my backup from SSH on the suer as my user:

~: tar -xvzf ????backup-4.5.2011_18-38-58_bamed.tar.gz

?This puts the content of the backup in ~/backup-4.5.2011_18-38-58_bamed.  Then all of my home directory is in a tarball named homdir.tar, so I untar it with:

~: tar -xvf backup-4.5.2011_18-38-58_bamed/homedir.tar

I ran this from my home directory, so the contents of homedir.tar extract directly into my home directory all the files going into the right places.  Once that was done, then I re-created my WordPress database in MySQL by following the instructions at http://www.hostgator.com/tutorials/cpanel/hgx3/creating-a-mysql-database.htm.  Not that I needed to actually follow the tutorial, I just low HG video tutorials.  Save me a lot of time trying to explain step-by-step instructions.  Anyway, I created the same DB name, unsername, and password that I had used before accidentally deleting everything.  If you don’t have this information saved, after you restore your homedir you can pull it from your wp-config.php file.

Anyway, after recreating the DB, I was able to restore it from the backup in ~/backup-4.5.2011_18-38-58_bamed/mysql.  The actual name of the backup file is the same as the name of the database you are restoring.  Just go to PHPMyAdmin from Cpanel and restore the database using the instructions at http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/how-to-import-your-mysql-database.  (Again, love those HG tutorials)

Then my site was back exactly as it had been on 4-5-2011 at 18:38:58(CDT).  Pretty exciting ehh?

So, that’s a quick rundown of doing a manual restore.  If I actually needed to restore some domain names, or email addresses, or anything else it would be a little more complicated, but I was only worried about a few files and one database so it was pretty easy and only took a few minutes.  I could have let my peers at HG do it, but why waste their time when I can do it myself.  Let them spend their time helping our customers.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get back and blog some more stuff later.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” (Douglas Adams)

The only thing constant in life is change.  And as such bamed and family are on the cusp of a most significant change.  Seven years ago this month I began a new adventure as the ‘IT guy’ for College Heights Christian Church in Joplin, MO.  “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” (Douglas Adams) Later this month we will be leaving Missouri and heading South to the great state of Texas.

“Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.” (Douglas Adams)

At the end of this month I will be beginning a new adventure as a Linux sysadmin for HostGator.com in Houston.  Anyone who knows me at all will know that I have always been a rather large fan of Linux and have made it the focus of not a few blog posts through the years.  As such, I am looking forward to spending my days at a command line exercising my CLI-fu.  I’m also rather excited about moving to the great town of Houston where things such as Linux Users Groups, 2600 meetings, and hacker spaces are more than something you read about on the internets.

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” (Douglas Adams)

We should be all moved and begin settling in by Christmas.  To all those we’re leaving behind, know that you will be missed, that you are welcome to stop by whenever you’re in the area, and that if you have any Linux experience HostGator is still hiring!  So… until we meet again, “So long, and thanks for all the fish!” (Douglas Adams)

Something Different: They Know!

So, I haven’t been around here for awhile.  But here I am, and I have something different for you.  From time to time I try my hand at writing some fiction, typically science ficiton.  Recently, I attempted something completely different and wrote a horror story for a competition at http://www.writing.com.  The sub-genre, mood, and a prompt to start the story were provided and there was a 666 word limit.  Well, I won!  So, here it is for you to enjoy as well:

Read more ›

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08

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Predictable Endings

I was reading This Day all Gods Die by Stephen Donaldson last night and a somewhat disappointing thought occurred to me.  The Gap series has been great.  I’ve really enjoyed it and it has kept me on the edge of me seat through at least the last four books.  The first one pretty much told us how it would end in the first chapter, but the rest have just gone from one major crisis to the next.  I’ll let you read the book yourself if you want details, but the main thing is that all of humanity is at risk.  Of course, the main characters have been at risk for quite sometime.

What disappointed me, is that even though I don’t yet know how the conflict will be resolved, I know it will be resolved.  I expect that mankind will be saved and the “good guys” will win the day.  They may not all survive, but in one way or another they will win.  Similarly, in the previous books, I knew that the current conflict would be resolved.  And since I also knew there were more books in the serious, I knew they would end up in trouble again.  They had to; otherwise, what would the rest of the books be about?

I suppose what’s disappointing, is that even though this series has continued to surprise me, even shock me at times, and though I don’t know exactly how everything will end up, who will survive, etc.,  I’m reading the book expecting the day to be saved, and just waiting to see how.  I don’t get to enjoy the shock and surprise that the good guys won because I already expect it.  I’ve come to expect it from books, movies, and TV shows.  I think more often, the good guys should lose.  Humanity should be lost.  Insurmountable odds should remain insurmountable.  Every now and then, I’d like to read or watch a story where the hero can’t do the impossible.  Actually, more often that that.  The hero should lose more often than he wins.  I want to see a hero driven to the brink of failure and then actually fail.  Not because I’m a pessimist.  Not even because I’m a realist.  But if I actually thought there was a good chance the hero would fail, I could enjoy the suspense more.  I would enjoy actually not knowing.  Yes, I know, there are a few stories like this, but not many.  When they come I am pleasantly surprised.  But I want to be surprised when the hero wins.  I want to be shocked when he/she/they are driven to the brink of failure and somehow come back.  But as it stands, I expect it.  And where’s the fun in that?

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

• The day I don't feel well and don't go to Church early, the network completely fails. So much for sick days. #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

• saving the world one crisis at a time: dont worry im keeping track, the bill is coming #

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