Popular Mechanics noticed that data loggers and accelerometers and batteries were all cheap enough that evaluating shipping companies was totally something that was a practical thing to do. I've been telling people that this would be an interesting project for a while, and I'm happy to see that someone else had the idea. The result, apparently is that FedEx is hardest on packages, which I thought actually was really surprising. Certainly their customer service is better.
The Wikipedia List of Cognitive Biases continues to be interesting.
I spent a good chunk of time this weekend finally mostly evacuating my old VM host(/xen garden) (there's still one virtual machine running on it, that has other people's state on it; I'm giving them a few days warning). I had been dithering for months about potential clever approaches and how much state I wanted to preserve, when it finally occurred to me today to actually measure how long it would take to just dd the disk images between machines via ssh.
The answer was less than ten minutes in every case, which made "shut down the machine, dd the disk image into place, boot the new VM in single user to fix up the differences between Xen paravirtualization and KVM hardware virtualization" involve an acceptably small amount of downtime.
So now a big chunk of my personal infrastructure has changed it's physical instantiation, although with less logical adjustment than one might expect, although some stuff did get upgraded along the way. (I have one less etch machine in my life, and many fewer etch kernels; and I have an ETA on the two remaining etch machines; let's see if I can be etch-free before squeeze is released). (Which is to say, if anyone notices anything broken, please don't hesitate to say something.)
