Safety Fork, the

It’s too bad my camera is at home; there are extremely pretty snowflakes falling outside right now.

I was going to put a caption on this, but honestly, I think it speaks for itself.

After a little more than a year and a half, I’ve given up on running my web presence from a server in my apartment. Last night I moved Safety Fork to a shared host. I’ll accept the loss of geek cred in exchange for better load times (my upload is pretty slow for serving images) and letting someone else handle all the administrative tasks that are required to responsibly run web and email services, et cetera—tasks I can do, but which are pretty low on my mental list of interesting ways to spend my evenings and weekends, now that I’ve done them all at least once.

I have to say, though, that shutting off a box with a couple of fast SCSI drives in it makes a satisfying movie-esque equipment-winding-down noise…and the silence left behind is awfully nice.

Some days at work I decide to go to the far end of the building to get a Coke. I like to take a walk through the manufacturing floor to see if anything interesting is being assembled. Also, the faraway Coke machine is cool. It’s internally arranged like a snack-vending machine, except that the bottles aren’t simply dumped into a tray at the bottom when dispensed. Instead, there is a conveyor platform that moves to the height of the selected row, catches the bottle, brings it to mid-level in the machine, and conveys it into a little hopper on the right side.

I enjoy watching the machine work, but I also like that the drink I want—Cherry Coke—is at position C-4. Every time I punch the keys, I imagine someone overhearing in an airport…

Some other guy: “Hey, where’d you get that?”

Me: “It’s C-4 in the vending machine.”

Happy new year, o hapless reader!

I had planned to drive across the city to spend this evening with friends. A little after four in the afternoon—a few hours after the morning’s rain had turned to snow—I decided to walk to the coffee shop around the block. I wanted to see how the roads looked (and, of course, to have a mint mocha). On my way there, I saw a taxi futilely trying to drive uphill; I saw a minor accident and a police car heading to it—at a speedy twenty miles per hour; I saw a minivan sliding sideways down a fairly heavily-traveled street. I emailed from the coffee shop that I wasn’t risking a forty-mile round trip. It wasn’t so much the condition of the roads that gave me pause. I’ve driven farther on worse in the past. It was the thought of sharing those roads with thousands of other holiday travelers, some of whom obviously don’t have the patience required to not send their minivans sideways down the street.

I don’t know when the snow stopped falling. I walked back to my apartment a little before six o’clock, was absorbed by a novel, and didn’t look out again until ten-thirty, when it looked like this:

Before I’d even started setting up that shot—before I’d finished planting the tripod legs in the snow on my balcony—I accidentally bumped my hand-made shutter-release button. I’m glad I stopped fiddling with it until the shutter closed again, as it turns out I like the accidental result: