The Littlest Things

June 20, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I've been having a problem lately sending some random emails. They simply wouldn't go out. qmail would tell me:

 deferral: Sorry,_I_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection.

Trying to telnet to port 25 on the receiving mail host would simply time out, unable to connect. From a different host it would work perfectly.

Finally today I got fed up, prepared to think this was something I just wasn't going to solve. I was almost ready to try routing my outgoing mail through a different host when I saw something a little funny. In my routing table I had an incorrect route that was sending 66.0/8 out via eth0 with no gateway. I ran some queries and sure enough, all the hosts I couldn't connect to were 66.x.x.x.

One simple:

sudo /sbin/route del -net 66.0.0.0/8

and everything was working.

Thinning Out the List

June 19, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Today I did something I've been meaning to do for a long time now: I deleted almost 100 entries from the address book on my phone. My phonebook went from 133 entries to only 35.

It was a simple thing to do, and only took about 15 minutes, but it was something I had managed to not get around to for years now. Over the past six years my phone's accumulated people I certainly have no need to call now, but their numbers stuck around.

Tonight I finally did it, syncing my phone over to the Apple Address Book and running through the list, copying the numbers I still wanted into a Phone grouping. After ending up with the final 35 I told iSync to only copy that group and proceeded to see an eerily small list on the phone.

I'd suspect I won't find myself fumbling for any of the other 98 numbers, but if I do they're all still sitting here on the computer.

Concentrated Shooter

June 11, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Dave took this shot of me last night while we were both shooting the Ozomatli show at Grand Performances.

Looking at this photo I wanted to point out a couple things: First, I was shooting with both eyes open. There was a lot happening on stage. Second, the crooked hat is because I had been shooting stuff portrait and I needed it to be that way.

On my camera is the old Minolta 70-210/f4. It performed great last night, even though I certainly would have loved to be using Dave's 70-200/f2.8. I shot mostly ISO 400 during the show, on manual at f5.6 with a shutter speed around 1/125.

All Sorts of Transportation

June 01, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I'm sitting in the San Jose airport right now, after having yesterday attended the Google Developer Day. It's a quick trip to Silicon Valley, flying up yesterday and back today.

For some reason I'm still amazed by getting around without a car. Over the course of this trip I think I've taken non-auto transport from six different providers. My trip has been:

• Metro Red Line (subway) from Pershing Square to North Hollywood
• Burbank Bus from North Hollywood to the Burbank Airport
• Southwest (plane) from Burbank to San Jose
• VTA shuttle bus from San Jose Airport to the Light Rail Station
• VTA Light Rail into Downtown San Jose
• Charter bus from San Jose to Mountain View (Google's transport of choice for getting people up to the evening at Google HQ)
• Walk from Google to Downtown Mountain View (2.5 miles or so on a very pleasant evening)
• Caltrain (commuter rail) from Mountain View to San Carlos
• Meet up with the friend I'm staying with in San Carlos, a few miles from his house
• This morning we got coffee in San Carlos, then I walked two blocks to the Caltrain station
• Caltrain from San Carlos to Santa Clara
• VTA shuttle bus to the airport

Now I'm sitting here in San Jose, and I'll likely backtrack my Burbank Bus to the Red Line legs to finish out the trip.

All of it's been super-convenient and easy. Much better than taking a cab or worrying about a car.