About

Hello

Welcome to my (new) blog. The older blog was primarily about geographic things. This one branches out a bit and will encompass topics I bump into as part of my job as Director of Technology at the MIT Museum.

Note that the material and views you see on this blog represent my personal views, not those of MIT.

About Me

I’m currently Director of Technology at the MIT Museum. This is a dream job if there ever was one. I get to build the back-office infrastructure to help a staff of about 25 people do their jobs, I get to work on new exhibits, and I get to work on projects like the MIT Museum Without Walls. (We put that project on the shelf due to lack of funding… but there’s plenty of other cool stuff we’re working on – I’ll be posting about it).

Along with that work, I also maintain my consulting company, International Interfaces, albeit at a very low level. Right now, I’m working as part of a NASA group that’s collecting standards relevant to Earth Science data systems.

I’ve been computing continuously since 1971 where I learned FORTRAN on computers at MATCOM. My first usenet posting was in 1981.

Site Info

I’m always interested in how other people construct their sites, so in that spirit, here’s how mine is set up.

I’m using WordPress on a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.6 with the standard Apache 2.x setup. The Mini is on a Verizon FiOS (business-grade with static IP addresses) connection that has been up for several years now with virtually no problems. In fact, right after I got it, they upgraded me for free to 20 Mbps down/5 Mbps up. (My numbers this morning from Speakeasy’s speedtest are 20595/4267). I keep the FiOS and the Mini on a UPS that can last about 2 hours and so far have not had any power failures longer than that.

I use joker.com as my domain registrar, and kind of waffle between joker.com and everydns.net for DNS.

My current WordPress theme is based on Oh So Very! but is getting modified pretty heavily as I learn more about WordPress.

Think – The Picture

I explained the picture on my first post on the old blog:

I was pretty pleased when I went digging through my collection of photos when I found this one.

I was trying to figure out what to call my blog and the picture provided the answer. In 2002 the whole family went to Yorkshire to see our good friend Kathleen O’Shea. She’s an indomitable walker and always takes us on great walks. This particular one was at Coniston Dib, where there were lots of hills and some old limestone kilns. As we walked along the edge of a ridge, we noticed our shadows below. First we spelled “Hi“, then we thought of tHink and moved on to Pink. Three words were about all we had the time or inclination for.

After about a year or so, I noticed that the tHink picture was getting a lot of hits. It turns out that over time it managed to climb all the way up to the 4th most popular image on a Google image search for “think”. Google has since changed how they rank things, and it’s so far back in the list that I can’t find it anymore. But other blogs have picked it up and it’s back in the running on the third page of image results.