wormbin - Slashdot User

Comment When to Do It Yourself (Score 1) 554

by wormbin on Sunday August 07, 2011 @04:11PM (#37016566) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Self-Hosted Gmail Alternatives?

This is a pretty healthy conversation but I can still add my $0.02

I hosted my own email server (webserver etc.) from 1995 to 2005. It was very enlightening but eventually grew to be a big pain in the ass. The last straw was a power surge that fried the motherboard. (raid and backups can't help with that) and looking at the the time and effort of getting a new hardware (and getting more redundant hardware) I decided to go with a hosting service. Eventually I pointed my domains to gmail.

Every geek friend I know has at one time hosted his own email. I'd be hard pressed to find a techno-nerd worth his cred who hasn't tried this. I also don't know anyone who has continued to host their email after a number of years of feeding and caring for the server beast.

I think the big issue is figuring out where to separate you hobby from your job. If you have a classic car in your garage that you like to tinker with is fine. If you decide to do you daily 20 mile commute in your classic car you're signing yourself up for some headaches as there will be days that you will need to bumb a ride, take a bus or taxi, etc. Hosting your own email is like commuting to work in a car that only you are able to fix in an environment where there are no buses, taxis or other cars. You have to be prepared to drop everything at a moments notice to fix your email server.

You can have someone else host your hardware but then ask yourself, why not have someone else configure and maintain the software as well?

DIY is great but realize what your signing up for if you want to DIY a critical system.

Comment FIFO Queue (Score 2) 371

by wormbin on Sunday May 01, 2011 @12:52PM (#35991314) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do You File Paper Documents At Home?

Like any other data storage problem you have to ask yourself how you will access this data. For me there is a high probability that I will never look at an old phone bill or gas bill. In this case you want to optimize for insertion into the data store not selection from the data store. so I stick all of these statements into a big box. The more recent ones are on top so they are automatically sorted by date. When the box fills up I shred the bottom half of the box. This makes the most common case (insertion) really efficient; I just throw the paper in the box. In the rare case I need to find an old statement, I just hunt through the date sorted statements.

Woman Hires Stripper to Impersonate Her At Reunion 16

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday April 22, 2009 @01:57PM from the you-haven't-changed-a-bit dept.

Andrea Wachner, like many other people, was dreading her high school reunion, so she decided to have some fun and hire a stripper to impersonate her. Wachner, a freelance comedy writer, made a documentary about it called, "I Remember Andrea." Some of her classmates didn't think the prank/film was funny, and when she posted clips on YouTube from her 40-minute documentary, there was an outcry from '95 alums. "There's definitely a contingency of people who hate me because of this," she said, adding, "I can't think of one thing you could do there where you weren't competing against hundreds of other kids. I didn't really relate to a lot of what the others accepted as the norm, and I was OK with that — it just didn't make it great. Most of the girls I knew had eating disorders. A huge percentage. I'm not scarred by it. It wasn't torture. It was not a miserable experience. But I think high school in and of itself is kind of awful."

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