• “Site Temporarily Unavailable” after you move a domain, whether you try to move the files or not. Scary! Editing the domain again and saving with the same settings usually works for me, but sometimes I have to do it a couple of times. This is apparently due to slow DNS propagation, so you can also just wait it out. Why DH can’t manage to still serve the site from the old PS is a mystery to me.
• Failure to move the files. This seems to happen when your domain has a lot of files – like a WordPress install – and the source PS is overloaded. To fix this I just use rsync to sync the files to my local machine, sync those to the new PS, then move the domain in the panel (unchecking the box to move the files). Upping the resources for the source PS would likely work too.
• Sometimes nothing works. This is when most people would wisely contact tech support. I’m too stubborn for that, so I move the domain back to the old PS and try again later. Oddly, trying again the next day has always worked.
• If you do use the panel to move a domain, the file ownership can be weird. Fix this by setting up an admin user for the new PS in the panel and using chown.
• When you change an nginx conf file for a domain you’ll need to restart nginx (sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart) using your admin user. I think it’s possible to reload the config without restarting using /etc/init.d/nginx reload instead.

It was just a couple of inches, mostly melted now. Last winter around now we had our first major storm, which left us with snow for at least a couple of weeks.

Mandi decided to drive an hour to get her hair done at Sprout in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago. She talked me into getting my hair cut too, but since man hair is tamed 3 times faster than lady hair I was left to wander around Hampden for an hour or so.

I’m not much of a shopper, but Hampden has a lot of antique shops and a couple are more like junk shops, which I think are awesome. Antique shops are boring, but a junk shop? You could find anything in one of those! Hampden Junque is easily the junkiest of the lot, a pretty small shop with shelves crammed with curiosities. In a dark corner I found a jumble of photographic equipment, including this Yashinon 35/2.8, bargain-priced at $10.

It looks pretty good overall: the aperture blades move well, the focus is smooth (a little tight though), there’s no sign of fungus inside, and both a rear cap and funky cross screen filter were included. There’s a little dent in the focus ring, but that doesn’t seem to be the cause of the stiffness – I think the grease inside is just a bit old. The big difference between it and my 35/3.5 Super-Takumar is the 2.8 minimum aperture, which provides more light for easier focusing. The Yashinon seems just as sharp, and I think I like the colors a little better. It’s not a must-have, but if you’re looking for a decent 35mm screw-mount lens this is a fine choice…especially if you can find one for $10!

Since we bought our car at a dealership in Annapolis, we felt compelled to take it back there for the first scheduled checkup. There are closer dealerships, but Annapolis isn’t very far and it’s a fun place to spend a couple of hours.

We had lunch at McGarvey’s Saloon, an Irish bar with pretty good food. I had their house ale and a bratwurst. After lunch we did a little shopping and wandering around. Mandi found an eye-bleeding bright red jacket and I found a sweet new shopping bag to replace this embarrassing one.

Not long ago a plow finally came by. I can’t tell whether it moved any snow, but maybe the salt/sand will get some melting done before the next snow storm starts tomorrow.

The storm ended a few hours ago, and I think we’ve got more than two feet of snow. We still had a couple of inches left over from the last storm in the back yard, so there might be 30 inches out there. Maybe tomorrow I’ll snowshoe out to find out.

We cleared a shovel-wide strip to the sidewalk and around one car. Hopefully a snow plow will clear our street tomorrow – we saw one go by a block away so there’s some hope. It’s supposed to be sunny so maybe that’ll help melt off the cars.

The most serious issue so far (besides stir-craziness) is that the cable and internet went down early this morning and haven’t come back. Hopefully Comcast is working on it, but since the road hasn’t been plowed yet I can’t really fault them. Fortunately, we’ve got power, iPhones, a couple of Netflix, and an expanded Tivo full of suggestions. We shouldn’t get bored enough to try to light anything on fire until at least Monday.

I knew I could import the PDF into Gimp (converting it into a bitmap) and edit it there, dropping in my signature and whatnot. Next I needed to turn the bitmap back into a PDF. Gimp doesn’t make PDFs, so I saved the bitmap as a high-res PNG and went looking for something to convert a PNG into a PDF.

ImageMagick should have immediately occurred to me, but I needed Google to connect the dots. Here’s the command I figured out after some trial-and-error:

convert -page Letter -density 28.3 input.png output.pdf

Note that the 28.3 part was specific to the resolution of my PNG. Using other values, when I checked the PDF’s properties the dimensions weren’t 8.5×11 – so I just tried numbers until I got close enough. I’d imagine there’s an automated way to do the calculation, but for just one PDF trial-and-error worked fine for me.