We Got Engaged!

I’m very happy to let all 8 readers of this blog (most of you already know this by now) that my girlfriend and I got engaged!

I proposed on a beautiful sunny day on a beach very close to Rosh HaNikra grottoes. It happened a few months ago, but I finally got around to writing about it.

We’re currently planning our wedding. Life has been good to us and we’re very happy.

Happy Birthday To Me, I’m 40

The big Four Oh! Unbelievable. It’s one of those milestones… I wonder if I’m going to go through a mid-life crisis and do something crazy. We’ll see.

To celebrate the event we went hiking in the desert, very similar to what we did the year before. Only this time we’re living together, so we went back home together. And this is probably the biggest thing that happened over the last year – I moved in with a girlfriend, effectively for the first time in my life.

The other big thing is Ace’s death. I still think about her, and miss her, from time to time.

I went to two Prodigy shows this past year – #21 and #22. But not all my travels were to go see The Prodigy. This year’s trips also include Denmark & Faroe Islands, and Northern Spain with my girlfriend. Both were really great,

I still work out 2 days a week. And I follow a diet I said I’ll write about, but obviously forgot (or got lazy about). All things considered – life is good :)

Switching from Dropbox to Seafile Cloud

UPDATE: Since I originally wrote this, the company changed its name to Syncwerk. I strongly recommend NOT to buy into their storage offerings. I will explain more in a new post as soon as I’ve taken my files off their servers.

I’ve been using Dropbox for a long time (more than 7 years, apparently) and it has been very useful. I use it mainly for file syncing across devices and backup, and apart from sharing I almost never used any other features (undelete was useful a couple of times.)

But Dropbox has a package that is too expensive for me – paying 10$ a month while not using even half of the provided 1TB of storage seems very wasteful. So I’ve been looking for an alternative and decided to go with Seafile Cloud (shop link). Since my main requirement was a native Linux client, this didn’t leave a lot of services to consider.

I like Seafile Cloud for a few reasons:

  • There’s a native Linux package.
  • It’s based on an open source project (you can create your own Seafile server and not pay anyone.)
  • It has a package better suited for me, for less than what Dropbox costs (500GB for 5 € a month.)
  • Files are stored on servers in Germany, a country that is better at keeping people’s privacy than the US is.

Registering to Seafile and using it isn’t as smooth as Dropbox, but once you get it going it works great (as far as I can tell.) I hope it’ll stay that way.

My 21st Prodigy Show – Kiev, Ukraine, 12-Apr-2016

I forgot how nice Kiev is. It’s been 3 years since my previous visit there. This time I went with 3 great friends and although we were there for only 24 hours, we had a blast both before and during the show.

The people in Kiev are really nice. Even during the show, in the mosh pits, people weren’t aggressive. Just there to have a good time.

I still don’t have a date for the next show, unfortunately. Hopefully some new interesting dates will be announced soon.

Here are some pictures from our visit, and a video of the madness (give it the minute :)

Hanging out in Kiev

Some monastery of some kind

More of us

Show time

Dudy Prodigy Kiev

Intel® + E8 Storage = 💙

UPDATE: There is now a web page about E8 on the Intel® Storage Builders website. That’s cool.

A blog post from Intel® uncovers their new dual-port NVMe SSDs. To show off the performance of these drives along with the possibility of using their dual-portness to achieve high availability, Intel® used E8 Storage’s Poof of Concept storage setup.

E8 Storage high availability with PCIe level performance
E8 Storage high availability with PCIe level performance

It’s fun to work on the cutting edge :)

If you’re an experienced C/C++/Linux kernel/python developer looking for a job, you might just find it at E8. It’s a great place to work. Contact me at gnobal@hotmail.com.