Believe it or not, being a member of junk-mailing lists, in particular those targeted at consumers of high-end "lifestyle" products, can be good. Being a close friend or relative of a person on those lists can be even better. This second approach has gotten me past the door of a surprising number of product launches, luxury car test drives, and top-shelf whisky tastings, usually in the company of my cousin Torm, whose tastes are somewhat better funded than my own and whose addresses are in somewhat wider circulation. But it was this October that Torm, my friend Jay Wilson, and I headed south to the Homestead Speedway to participate in the ultimate free-of-charge luxury-goods marketing event: the Audi Driving Experience. Click on the link to read more and be prepared to accept that all Audi requires from you is a driver's license and the flimsiest pretense of being richer than you actually are to stuff your head into a helmet and set you loose on a racetrack piloting several hundred thousand dollars worth of powerful machinery.

Brandon Moore and I have made it into local glossy Boca Raton Magazine with our desalination project. Many thanks to Kevin Kaminski for the article; many thanks also to the photographer, whose name escapes me, for taking on the thankless task of making two scruffy geeks look good. If you live in Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach county, go and buy a million copies, on newsstands September 1.

So far I'm relatively satisfied with my new Mediatemple DV hosting service. I have, however, discovered a problem with the Mediatemple configuration of Awstats, the logfile-analyzing web statistics package I use. Awstats can't find its images because the path is broken in the standard Mediatemple installation - browser and country icons are missing, and the bar graphs are empty:

Here's how to fix it.

One of my recent google searches about pipe-crawling robots brought up this link, which appears to be a translation into Polish of some of the documents I wrote about my senior engineering project. It includes pictures from both the pipe crawler web page and the final report we submited to our professors. I should thank ... er ... somebody, though I'm not exactly sure who. They appear to be a lab or research institute of some kind. Well, thanks for the translation anyway!

I'd also like to take a few words here to insist that my friends Sheraz Wasi and Mark Miller be credited as co-authors of the Pipe Crawler work. It seems like my name is the only one that gets attached to it anymore, because I wrote and hosted the web page about it, and that's not fair; both of them toiled away in the robot lab from morning to midnight just as I did. By the way, this is not a criticism of my new Polish friends—many web sites and email correspondents get the impression that I was the only author simply because the page happens to be hosted at www.eikimartinson.com, and this seems like a good opportunity to set the record straight.

As of yesterday this site is now hosted at Media Temple on my own "Dedicated Virtual" server. It's not exactly a true dedicated server, but it appears as such to me - I get a root login and the ability to reboot the "machine". I get statistics based on Apache logs (something my old service, csoft.net, did not provide for shared hosting). I'm a good deal more insulated from all the other users than I would be on a shared service, which is good for application performance, reliability, database security, etc. But best of all, regular users of this site will notice load times have shortened by a factor of 5!