A Fun Little Art Project

Via the always-interesting BOOOOOOOM! blog:

And here’s how that’s panning out on Flickr.

Painting Wooden Countertops, An Adventure

I had a nice finish-ply base for my countertops, which I installed with the help of my dad about two years ago, and over a recent rainy weekend, I had an idea for finishing it. Because the walls were crooked to begin with, which threw my countertops out of square, I didn’t think a finish with strong lines (like tile) would look good, because it would show the crookedness. Something with thickness, like concrete or granite, was too high-end for this application, plus it’d be way too thick when added to the 3/4″ ply. I considered formica, but I had never done that sort of work, the quote I got seemed too high and I didn’t want to risk learning on my own kitchen.

So, I looked into painting the wood countertops. Just regular plywood, more or less. After looking around, I settled on an unexpected solution: epoxy-based concrete floor paint. It was super thick, and it turns any surface it’s applied to into a non-porous, water-tight piece of continuous smoothness. Like one giant span of tile. It cost about $200 and took three days to do, mainly a few hours each day. I’d recommend it.

Anywho, click here to see the whole photo slideshow of the process!

Hostway Customers Have Accidentally Shared MySQL Databases

Wow, this is one for the books. For the past two months, one of our client’s databases kept disappearing, and I was seriously losing my mind, because I could not solve the issue. Hostway told me that “everything was working” and that the database was either “suffering from programming errors” or “being deleted by another party.”

They even went so far as to suggest that it was being hacked. A long shot, I thought, but what do I know, right? So I spent a good part of a day changing every password, checking every connection — even adding reCAPTCHA to every log-in area.

But the database still disappeared. So I logged in to the MySQL page and saw these two data cells:

WhyAreYouOnOurServer

WhoAreYou

Kind of freaky, I know. So I added two data cells:

IAmJustin

IThinkWeHaveAProblem–E-mailMe__justinc@yadayda.com

Since then, I’ve received not one e-mail, but TWO e-mails from people who are Hostway customers who appear to all accidentally and unexpectedly share the same MySQL database. I have no idea how something like that can happen. Probably a coding error way in the background at Hostway.

In the least, it’s good to know I’m not crazy. I’m assuming my disappearing databases were a result of other customers writing to “their” database, which overwrote my data. Anyway, crazy stuff.

Trip To Savannah

We went to Savannah for four days and had a great time. Stayed in a downtown bed and breakfast, which was awesome, walked all over, saw bunches of art, ate great food, rented a Vespa for a day and generally just took it super easy. Lots of glamor shots, mainly because we realized we don’t have many “us” shots. Anywho, enjoy!

Click here to launch the album.