Andrew Harbick

That’s great news! Congratulations. Who is the fine lady?

I bought land in Apr. 2007. Started building in June 2007, had the shell up and electrical wired by Aug. 2007. I failed many times with plumbing in fall 2007. In Spring 2008 my good friend Don took over getting some professional help to finish the job. That was basically done at the end of 2008. Through the end of 2008 I wrestled with how to get power to the cabin because I was going to have pay for grid service and it wasn’t looking cheap. In Feb. 2009 I got some neighboring owners to agree to share the cost of power and the electrical problem was solved! I’m supposed to have power as of now and am planning to move stuff in, in a week. I still need to finish a couple of things and get the certificate of occupancy, but it’s basically done.

Having been through this labor of love, and keeping EVERY last receipt, blueprint, contact number, etc. I’d like to capture it all into a blog/book both for posterity and so that others can learn what it took to make happen. Stay tuned for later in 2009.

I should really spend time documenting all of this, but instead I’ll just do a quick dump:

1. First you’ll need a “Dynamic DNS” provider. Currently there is no guarantee that your EC2 instance will have the same IP address forever. I chose ChangeIP They have a plan that is $6/year/domain once you’ve listed the first domain at $15.
2. If you’re already locked into a registrar like http://register.com don’t worry. Just change their DNS settings to point to ns1.changeip.com That’s how I’ve got it setup. register.com is my registrar and changeip.com is my DynDNS.
3. If you want to do SMTP on your new domain don’t forget to setup MX records for the domain. Otherwise you get “relaying not permitted” errors.
4. There’s no guarantee that the instance will remain available. It could die at any moment and because it’s a virtual instance it’s more likely to die than even physical hardware. So BACKUPS are essential. I’ve got two scripts one for a full backup and one for incremental backups of e-mail and databases etc. You can use the former to quickly spin up a new instance (which is the instance exactly as is was up to 24 hours ago) and then user the later to recover the most recent changes to e-mail, etc. One caveat about the full backup one… EC2 has a image-size limit of 10GB so if your instance has lots of data this strategy won’t work (not the SMS notification on filesystem size error)
5. Webmin is great for system administration.
6. Don’t forget that you need to permission ports in your EC2 instance for everything you wish to have access.
7. The EC2 Firefox plug-in is great!
8. I’m using Exim for SMTP/mail… It does a nice job with e-mail aliases and “catch-all” addresses like andy-is-clever@aharbick.com
9. Exim may solve this, but I don’t know… I’ve got a dozen+ domains on the machine and the e-mail is tied to a user account so aharbick@fivepints.org is the same as aharbick@aharbick.com is the same as… I kinda like that. Though the way that I handle is is with procmail rules to move messages based on the domain they were sent to. Here’s my .procmailrc

I think I’m going to need to track this if I have any hope of knowing whether I’ve done this. That said, I was thinking that the goal was riding to and from work which I’m having a rough time doing since it’s such a short ride and the car trip is less than 10 minutes. However, since it’s only riding my bike once a week I’m much more likely to meet that given that I’ve been doing more mountain biking of late. We’ll see if I can get the guts to actually track this one.

The hardest part is staging everything. I’ve moved all of my domains that don’t get much traffic and no one would miss. My domains that are hosted for other people, serve up e-mail that I depend on (or my wife depends) on require a bit more coordination. I’ve only got about 4 more of those.

See my latest blog entry http://blog.aharbick.com/archives/000198.html

Just realized I haven’t updated this in a long time. I’m officially part of the landed gentry, I have a building permit, and my foundation was dug yesterday. Early next week the foundation footers are getting poured and inspected. Then, it may be possible to have the block layed and start building on 6/30 (materials are being delivered on 6/29). If not then, definitely by 7/7. I forgot my camera yesterday, but I’ll try to get a picture of the foundation tomorrow, and I’m definitely going to have pictures of the actual construction.

I’ve almost acquired the land (I close on the 16th). It’s 50 acres outside of Craigsville, VA (photos here). I’ve also done lots of research about building permitting, building choices, etc. I’m keeping all of my notes in Backpack. I need to cull out some personal stuff before I can share them though.

Earlier this year, me and my officemates went to a conference in Northern Virginia. One evening we headed into D.C. to find beer Mecca. It’s a bit tricky to locate, and even trickier to park at especially if we had been driving instead of getting dropped off ;) The “upstairs” was closed to a private tasting. You enter the downstairs through this somewhat hidden door you pass on the way to the “upstairs”. It feels like a secret place that only you know about. Downstairs it’s dimly lit with dark wood everywhere. There were a few kitchy video game consoles, but the rest of the place was decorated with old beer cans on shelves behind plexi-glass. There were easily over 1000 seemingly different cans from all over the world.

We were seated at a simple wooden table and our server brought us the food menu and beer menu. The food menu was only a single page and had normal pub fare (though the food was great… I had an excellent fish and chips and Mark had an awesome burger that tasted like it was grilled on a Weber somewhere on the roof). The beer menu on the other hand is absolutely OVERWHELMING. It is easily 20 pages long with 8 point font; probably several hundred different beers in 12 and 22oz. bottles. Beers from all over the world. Exotic beers, and common beers (I recall seeing things like MGD, Bud, Rolling Rock, etc.) I started with a few Belgian beers that I let the server recommend. He was a young guy with straight unevenly cut dirty blond hair, dark rimmed glasses and facial hair that was trying desperately to be a goatee. He seemed to know every beer on the menu; clearly an impossibility, but it was clear that the Brick encouraged their servers to know the beers. I spent a lot of time dreaming about how being a server there would be an INCREDIBLE job for a young single male. After the Belgians, I had to have a Lagunitas Maximus, and I wrapped up the evening with a not particularly memorable beer (I think an IPA) from Bell’s in Michigan. We cabbed back to NoVA ending our pilgrimage, but I know that wasn’t the last time I’ll be back.

Last Friday, Mark, Randy, Don, Scott, Jacob, and me gathered in our office starting at 3PM for an extended edition marathon. We had plenty of beer and food, and finished around 2:45AM. It was AWESOME. It’s hard to believe that it really was almost 12 consecutive hours of movie watching. My only disappointment was that I dozed off for a few seconds and missed my favorite scene when Gollum falls into the lava of Mount Doom clutching the ring of power gleefully (so descriptive of humanity I think). If we ever do it again (and I’m persuaded that it would be fun to do again) we definitely should make some Middle Earth food. The pita chips were an OK facsimile of Lembas but it would’ve been much more fun to have an actual recipe ;)

I think next up we might do something like watch the Godfather trilogy.

Days before Christmas I decided that my wife and I weren’t succeeding at this goal. So I gave up… However, my clever wife had been monitoring my 43things to figure out gift ideas and she’s given new life to this goal. For the month of January at least she’s got a plan for our dates. Perhaps I can roll this into a new year’s resolution and be able to mark this one off for real!

Tonight I’m brewing a kölsch to take on a guy’s camping/poker weekend. I’m going to try to keg it (in my own equipment) and take it in a cooler. Now I just gotta get equipment. Todd?? ;)

I’m giving up on this goal because it’s too modern… Discussion groups, too much structure ;) Just kidding. Realistically, my post-modern discussion group happens with my friends, on my blog, and just throughout my life. So I’m giving up on this one

I suppose the only way that I can really mark this off is by buying a standard and driving that as my primary vehicle. But I’m not going to do that because my wife won’t drive it. That said, I’ve been on several lessons with my brother-in-law and haven’t had any issues. I feel comfortable in an emergency or borrowing a “beater” from a friend. About the only think left would be getting comfortable borrowing that M3 from a friend, but that’s unlikely to happen soon ;)

I’m going to leave this goal open, but this summer my family drove from Harrisonburg, VA to Door County WI (the thumb of Wisconsin). We stopped in Cleveland, Chicago, and Green Bay on the way there, and Chicago, and Indianapolis on the way back.

Early next year we’re driving to Disney World (about the same distance). Our kids are GREAT travellers, so we’re well trained for a cross country trip. Only trouble is finding the time… Sigh.

I’m full of half-assed completions today ;) I guess I’m tired of seeing these things on my “Things”. I got a wind-up radio/flash-light/cell charger, water purificationn tablets, and a years worth of MRE-style food that lasts for 20 years (and probably tastes like crap… but hey I won’t die of starvation) from Costco. I also put cash into my firebox, and have roadside kits in my cars (blankets, jumpers, etc.) I could keep pushing this one up the hill, but I’m tired of it. Maybe I’ll re-visit it later.

I got 75% of the way through “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” (Maya Angelou) and couldn’t finish it. Nothing caught hold of me, in fact the whole rape/molestation scene made it harder to keep going and took any pleasure out of Angelou’s writing (very similar “voice” to Steinbeck).

“Slaughterhouse Five” and “A Wrinkle in Time” are still taunting me. Though I’ve read Wrinkle before and Slaughterhouse looks more enjoyable. Maybe I’ll get to them in my infinite spare time.

I’ve got a chanter, but I don’t think that I’m likely to ever have time to take lessons. Maybe when my kids are older.

As part of Banned Books Week (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm) I’ve decided to read (probably not all all in the week ;)

• Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0440180295)

• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0440498058)

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553279378)

I’ll let you know how it goes!

July, but we started dating 15 years ago and met long before that as children.

Our parents have volunteered to watch the kids, but we’re still trying to decide what we want to do though. It’s a hard balance between doing things that you can’t do with children and not going too far from the kids. Right now, the leading contenders are some sort of road trip through the mid-west visiting friends and family, camping, etc. and going on a cycling tour in the northeast (does anyone have any experience with a cycling touring company that they like?), or we may just go to B&B/spa-resort thinger with plenty of reading time. Any other ideas?