This day started out energized and focused but turned sour as I followed my misguided decision to race down to Union Square and then walk up to the 181 at Rockefeller Center. I did not really need to do either but the Union Square jaunt was with good intentions. The first of the Link devices went up near there today. Links are the blandly named devices that will one day replace all of NYC’s payphones. I am actually a bit melancholy about this development and the fact that it is finally happening. But of course the reality is that the quantity of payphones in the city greatly exceeds demand. This unspoken reality seems to mute the most obvious question about the Links project: Why? Why are they even doing this? But that discussion is for another place. As of yet the Link devices being installed do not work, and will be considered “Beta” products once they are activated.
The Link device I went to document was shrouded in a canvas bag by the time I got there. I suspect this is for some sort of dramatic unveiling flourish at a media event.
After that the walk from Union Square to Rockefeller Center went without incident until I realized the error of my ways in entering the belly of the holiday hell hole beast. That is possibly the most crowded I have ever seen the concourse and the upstairs area of 5th Avenue. It took 20 Minutes to get from 5th Avenue and 49th Street to Madison Avenue and 52nd Street. My irritability gave way to depression as the clouds took away the sun. I waited for a bus that never came, taking the train back and forgoing the free transfer to the bus in favor of getting the fuck out of midtown.
Now I am at a Starbucks filled with screaming infants, anticipating a long night of fiddling with a new web server. I am finally dumping OLM, the hosting company I’ve been with for over 20 years. It’s a major task for me but so far things have gone more smoothly than I anticipated. Even the big payphone site which I thought would be so pesky got transported to the new server painlessly. I got depressed rummaging through all that old code and content I forgot existed. I need to iron out the crontabs and figure out if Gallery2 is worth keeping around, among many other considerations. I’m moving the sites to Canada. OVH.com is one of the world’s biggest hosting companies, and the prices for what they offer are kind of ridiculous. For about $50 less than I p ay now I’ll get almost triple the hard drive space and 3 or 4 times the RAM, not to mention a RAID setup which has me feeling a little less like I am putting all eggs in one basket. Until now the important sites had been at Digital Ocean while the bulk of my development and personal sites were at OLM. Digitalocean was fine, I guess, except I could never get WordPress to run on it at any usable speed. I realize now I only bought 4gb of RAM. I would have bet cash money I ordered 8gb. OVH feels like I am going to the dark side, as I’ve been on the receiving end of limitless garbage and drone web traffic from their data centers. But I guess when you are as big as they are the occasional rogue accounts are inevitable. I was actually starting to get more of that kind of crap from Digital Ocean servers, too. Good for them, I guess, if that means they are growing their business.
Writing a poem in my head: There are things you know, complicated and developed concepts, but you have no idea why or how you know these things. Some of the background information for these matters goes back centuries, some of it goes forward decades. You hear sounds as they occupy the silence, you hear the silence envelop and cradle sound. Sound is the blood of a civilization and you recognize its diuretic purpose.
