Converted AWS T1 instance to T2

Shout out to this blog: http://jsianes.blogspot.jp/2014/07/aws-convert-t1-instances-to-t2.html Go there for all your concerns.

I've been putting off moving this blog for a long while. It involved upgrading from ubuntu 12 to 14, upgrading apache (had a brief scare where I accidentally exposed everything in /var/www for about 20 seconds, fortunately no requests other than for /...), and following the blog. There was one last step of moving my elastic IP to the VPS, which turned out way more annoying than it should have been since it involved setting up the AWS CLI again. (Why can't it just be in the web console?)

Still, the server should now have a better CPU, better storage, better network, more RAM, and cost me half as much. Amazon really hates their legacy T1.

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If you're going to vote, do it like a horse race

I don't intend to vote this election cycle, though I would enjoy seeing Trump win. Last election cycle I half-seriously voted. My write-in candidates for P and VP were Princess Luna and Twilight Sparkle. The rest of the items on the ballot, which consisted of state and county initiatives, some congressmen, and various state and county officers, I took some time to look into each option and convince myself that one choice was better than another. My choices can be found on this site, though it may or may not be illegal to share them. (shrug)

Anyway I did it more for the fun of the exercise. It's a useful exercise everyone ought to complete at least once, because it doesn't take too much effort, and more importantly it offers a glimpse into the amount of effort it would really take to be the "rational, informed voter" the system pretends everyone is. Now imagine doing that more than once every 4 years -- I get ballot mails for all sorts of stuff at the city/county/state level, I ignore them. Imagine attending local city council meetings. I don't even know their schedule but I hear about them from time to time. I ignore them because I know that in order to have an opinion that's worth anything I would need to do a lot of work. I've got my own work to take care of, and it's not in the business of ruling people. I don't want to be in that business. Hence I'm not an expert in that business, and hence I don't see my opinion as being valuable. Let those who govern well govern as they see fit, not as the whims of the governed see fit. Whether this is done under the guise of democracy (like Singapore) or under a proper monarchy matters less than whether it is done. The People make for a terrible ruler, representatives or no. (Tangent, I once participated in the National Young Leaders Conference, that was very eye-opening as well in getting a glimpse of how the machine that is the federal government operates.)

So this brings me back to the title of this post. If you're going to vote, do it for the reasons you'd bet on a horse race. Now, there are a couple reasons one might bet on a horse race, and lots of reasons why one might make a particular bet. I'm not saying to pick any one of those, only to treat the process of voting in a similar manner.

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