During world revision twelve, we built a castle known as Winterspyre. Or, at least, we built part of it. The admins reset the map before we could finish…

Winterspyre, in terms of the progress we attained before the reset, is a large and detailed tower. We finished it, both exterior and interior, but it was intended to be only part one of a larger structure.

The plan was to build four walls (with interior hallways, of course) ending in four smaller towers, the walls being like wheel spokes coming from the center hub tower, known as The Spire. Then rounded walls would be built to connect the outer towers, forming a complex that would look something like the targeting symbol on a rifle scope if viewed from above.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time. But here’s what we managed to accomplish before the server reset, the product of many hours of mining, crafting and building.

Earlier, my brother alerted me to the fact that my MySQL daemon was AWOL, when he tried to visit one of the sites and got an error message. So I fired up a terminal and went to take a look. After trying to restart the mysqld process with no success, I eventually thought to check the disk space. Somehow, the 20GB volume was full. It didn’t make much sense, seeing as I wasn’t storing any large media files or anything…

Upon closer inspection, I found that there was one 12GB directory that was full of large Minecraft world backups. :)

I operate a private Minecraft server for my brothers and I, and I have a cron job that automatically backs it up on a daily basis. The backups get dumped to my web server for safekeeping, and are supposed to be deleted after a few days. There should never be more than a few days worth of world backups, but the backup script wasn’t deleting anything. So there ended up being months worth of large (well over 100MB apiece) archives. Oops.

For future reference, here’s a handy command worth remembering:

sudo du -hs /*

You can replace / with any path you want to get the size of its subdirectories.

I think I finally stuck the landing with this one.

Besides the lightweight design, one of the more interesting features I put into the new theme is support for Post Formats. I’m using the Link format to create link posts in the style of Daring Fireball, coupled with Alex King’s neat plugin to make a simple UI for them.

Now for the really exciting part. I finally managed to secure Harzewski.com after its previous owner (a distant relative I don’t know personally) let it expire. I picked it up with a little help from SnapNames and moved the blog to a shiny new subdomain at matt.harzewski.com. Good thing I ran that whois search on a whim, a mere week before the drop period…

Well, there you have it. A new URL, a fresh design, and hopefully a new beginning for this blog.

Neat, isn’t it? Tortilla chips, apparently, burn quite well if you put a match to them. If you take 2 to 3 of them and (taking the proper safety precautions) set them on fire, they will burn brilliantly for several minutes, giving you ample time to toast a marshmallow or two.

Corn chips (the Medallion brand available at Sams Club is what we used) contain a bit of oil, which you can see bubbling on the surface of the chip as the chip is consumed by the flames. Oil, as you surely know, is a great fuel source. When you set the chips alight, you’re creating a small grease fire, which will burn until the fuel source is used up, or until the fire is manually extinguished.

Safety note: If you attempt this, do not pour water on the fire in attempt to extinguish the flames. Grease fires can not be doused with water, and any attempts to do so will result in a very dangerous fireball. If the fire gets out of hand and needs to be put out, either pour baking soda on the flames, or use a fire extinguisher. Also, the fire pictured above was inside an aluminum tray resting in a stainless steel kitchen sink. It is recommended that you have a similar setup, as the flames can grow to a fairly large height.

Attempt this at your own risk. I assume no responsibility for your stupidity if you decide to play with grease fires. Unless you are a responsible adult (i.e. not Reddit/Digg users), or are operating under the supervision of a responsible adult, do not try this.

Microsoft Corporations:
Customer Service
Wrights Lane,
Kensington London W85SP,
England UNITED KINGDOM
FILE REF: HL/5564/06/07/MICS
BATCH: MC11/834/5PDH /EU

OFFICIAL WINNING NOTIFICATION.

It is obvious that this notification will come to you as a surprise
but please find time to read it carefully as we congratulate you over
your success in the following official publication of results of the
E-mail electronic online Sweepstakes organized by Microsoft, in
conjunction with the foundation for the promotion of software
products, (F.P.S.) held on 18th November 2008,in London UK.

Where in your email address emerged as one of the online Winning
emails in the 2nd category and therefore attracted a cash award of
Ј350.000.00 (Three Hundred and Fifty Thousand pounds sterling) Our
winners are arranged into four categories with different winning
prizes accordingly in each category. They are arranged in this format
below:

These are your identification numbers:MCS-26799/097

CATEGORY NO.OF WINNERS WINNING PRIZES
1st. 2 Ј 500,000.00 pounds each
2nd. 8 Ј 350.000.00 pounds each
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(4) The file reference numbers: HL/5574/41/07/MICS
{5} Serial Numbers: McST/006/NL46560

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CONTACT:
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*************************************
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************************************************************The Microsoft Internet E-mail lottery Awards is sponsored by our
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Once again on behalf of all our staff,

CONGRATULATIONS!

Yeah, right, and I’m Bill Gates…