furiousBlog

...well, Serenity tonight!

After a long, long wait, Serenity, is in theaters. I am excited and will be seeing it tonight with Cyndi (my wife), a couple friends visiting from Norfolk, VA, Gary and Rrrob. We are making a whole geeky movie trip out of it. I'm wearing my Firefly shirt, but Cyndi has put the kabosh on my Jayne hat.

I have been avoiding everything Serenity related for months now. I haven't read any reviews or seen any previews (even in the theater). If a preview comes on the channel I'm watching, I've been changing the channel. I am Serenity-pure. I have read comments in various Slashdot stories, but nothing that talks about the movie itself, other than to say whether they liked it or not (there were a lot of screenings over the past few months of the movie in different states of completeness).

Obviously, I will post about how the movie is afterwards. I expect it will be great, and hope it will be hugely successful. As much as I love playing the "geek ranting about how great this one cancelled show is, and what a tragedy that it was cancelled, and I'm so elite compared to everyone whose never seen it, and boo-hoo, stupid fox, the world will pay for this injustice!" guy, I'd really like to see it do well. Possibly, I want this just for my own selfish reasons, since Universal (I think) has licensed it for up to 3 movies, and if it does well, it could mean a sequel or two.

So, go see it. I predict you won't be disappointed. I've heard that it is great on its own as a movie, and that you don't need to have watched the show to get it.

I read an interesting article about water that I thought others in my readership may be interested in:

Forty-one Anomalies of Water

From the intro paragraph:

As water is so common-place, it is often regarded as a ‘typical’ liquid. In reality water is most atypical as a liquid, with its properties at low temperatures quite different from its properties when hot. It has often been stated (e.g. [127]) that life depends on these anomalous properties of water.

It then has a list of the anomolies, most of which mean nothing to me, some of which mean less than nothing to me, and a few that mean a little to me:

1 Water has unusually high melting point.
2 Water has unusually high boiling point.
...
4 Water has unusually high surface tension and can bounce.
...
31 Hot water may freeze faster than cold water; the Mpemba effect.

Well, I thought it was interesting...

I've coined a new term. Coined is probably too strong a word for what I've done, since the term hasn't even been spoken out loud yet.

Ok, I'm back. In the interim between the last paragraph and this one, I've spoken the term.

At work, I'm working on a project to make our web servers and then our database server redundant through mirroring and load balancing. Typically, this is referred to as a 'server farm' or a 'high-availability cluster', but since it's only two servers behind the load balancer, I thought calling it a server farm was a little presumptuous.

So, I hereby coin the term 'server garden' to refer to a HA Cluster that's too small to be called a farm.

By my definition (and since I made up the term, the only defintion), a server garden is a HA cluster consisting of 2-3 load-balanced servers. No more, no less. One server is just a server, and four is right out. Err, four is a farm.

Note: I felt like it had been too long since my last graphic, so I tried to make an artist's rendering of what a server garden might look like (using this image as my starting point), but I failed. My apologies.

I was just searching through my RSS feeds, looking for the discussion about Serenity and conservative blogs that I mentioned in my previous entry, when I noticed something a little weird:

I am subscribed to four separate RSS feeds four different people named Ben (five if you include furiousBlog):

• Ben Hammersly's Dangerous Precedent
  
• Ben’s Thought Crimes (this one's especially weird since it uses the same blog template as me...
  
• Benjamen Walker's Theory Of Everything
  
• Ben's Bargains (this one's only sort-of a blog)
  

It's weird.

The 3 real blogs all have something to do with technology, at least in part. And Ben's Bargains is very tech-centric.

The implications are mind-boggling.

I read some discussion yesterday about how Serenity (the movie based on the best show ever: Firefly) was being marketed through conservative blogs. The person thought this was pretty weird since Joss Whedon (creator) is a pretty hardcore liberal. I didn't think much of it, but then today I saw this entry on Instapundit* which made me think about it again:

MORE SERENITY REVIEWS

It's weird.

On a side note, all blogs should have real titles for their entries. It's obnoxious to view an RSS feed for a blog with no titles, since you have to actually open each item to see what it's talking about. I typically do that, but with a few blogs, I just skim the titles usually (cue AG to rant about how RSS is causing me to read less information. Except, AG, those are blogs that without the RSS feed, I'd never have bothered to return to, so the occasional title that catches my attention and causes me to read the article is far more attention than they would've gotten from me otherwise.)

* I read several Republican and conservative blogs and sites to see more sides to a particular issue.