I remember visiting my cousin Warren Zevon backstage at concerts, usually in the green room with the names of other artists scrawled on the walls and ceiling. His manager would prevent fans from disturbing us while we enjoyed this family time. With most of our family living on the East coast, Warren’s concert schedule in New York, Boston and Rhode Island always included family coming to visit. There were very few opportunities other than his concerts to get together, so this is where our stories and pictures were shared.

Warren passed away a few years ago and after he did we connected with his daughter Ariel, her husband Ben, sons Max and Gus (the coolest twins ever) and ex-wife (and Warren’s close confidant) Crystal Zevon. Warren would have liked that we now have each other – most importantly our kids – in our lives. We don’t spend as much time together as we’d like, but we have email and Google Chat!

In a few weeks we will be together at a benefit concert Jackson Browne is giving to raise money for the local agricultural community exchange (LACE) in Barre, Vermont. LACE is Ariel’s passionate effort to bring locally grown foods back to the community, to support local growers, farmers and businesses, as well as help people eat healthier.

Crystal’s passionate work is the recently released book Warren asked her to write, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. An honest look at Warren’s life (sometimes painfully honest – not exactly the conversations we had back stage), the book tells the story of Warren’s life from those who knew him best. I’m not done reading the book, but I can say that it is very interesting, well written and worth picking up a copy.

It’s a perfect Summer read because the chapters are broken-down with bite-size entries. If you have to put it down, jump in the waves and help dig a moat around the sandcastle, you can easily pick-up where you left off. It’s this same writing structure that has you convinced you can read the next bit and the next (and the next) and before you know it it’s 1:30 in the morning and your day begins in 5 hours!

I can’t tell you how much the emails, phone calls and even the Western Union telegram I received – inquiring about when the next Bitness posting will occur- have meant to me. My loyal readers are obviously in need of a Bitness fix. Before I can satisfy your yen for all things geek and tech, let me bring you up-to-date on the following weeks (since my last real post).

I have been juggling a wife, 2 kids, work, 4 freelance jobs, a vacation, 2 house building (cedar closet in progress, shelves to the right) projects (cedar closet became a club – gear needs a new home), Spring clean-up, bum knee and video to DVD archiving project (Sony RDR-VX555 – get it).

Queue the violins…
About the vacation/cruise. We missed the ship in Miami due to the Nor-Easter on 16-April. We flew to Miami, stayed overnight and caught the boat in Nassau the following day. That alone was a general disappointment and pain in the ass, but when you factor in the cab dropping us at the wrong hotel (and walking to the ‘nearby’ hotel dragging luggage), being assigned an uncleaned room, having my wallet stolen from the front desk of the hotel, having to cancel all the credit cards and put fraud protection on my credit… well you get the picture. Searching through garbage pails until past midnight and again at 5am in the morning was somehow not the vacation I imagined.

Cruising was an interesting experience. I think I might be one of the few people who actually lost weight on the cruise! Watching some of those people eat made us feel full – absolute gluttony. We made the most of it however and the wife even agreed to go para-sailing (here’s another)!

Hopefully after things settle down I’ll have time to dedicate to Bitness. In the interim I have been scoping out new topics and as always welcome your suggestions. Please stay tuned…

I’m always looking for a good deal on gear. I’m not saying I buy a lot of gear (cough) but I do like to know what the going rate is for – oh I don’t know, a Metolius FatCam. Mountain Gear has them for $40, not bad but here’s the thing – I don’t even climb trad, just sport and bouldering.

So why do I even care? I mean I cared about gear deals long before bitness.com existed, so it’s not the blog. It’s because I freakin’ love gear. I’m terrified of horses but check out the deal on this Fleece Lined Hackamore! You won’t ever find me defending my wicket – but how can I ignore the aptly named ‘hot deal’ on this pre-knocked, factory seasoned CA-Pakistan cricket bat?

One of my favorite sources for finding out about reasonably priced gear is SteepAndCheap.com, a Backcountry.com ‘powered’ site. When the clock strikes midnight, I get an email with the first deal of the day. But I don’t stop there. I also subscribe to the SAC RSS feed, so I can track when a new deal is posted. Deals are typically 60% below retail – not bad.

Other good gear sites are the aforementioned MountainGear.com, REI, Campmor and of course Overstock.com, the 500 pound gorilla of discount merchandise.

I’d like to know if anyone else knows of some good gear sites? Leave a comment with the link and description of the site so the rest of us gear freaks can get a fix.

Dear Sergey, Eugene, Dmitry, Aleksandr; with a bunch of 15 letter last names I can’t pronounce (and I’m 50% Russian myself)!

Thank you for your hard work restoring Bitness. You faithfully ran FSCK over and over and again with the brute force of ignorance, even though disk integrity had nothing to do with the problem.

You decided – during the brief glimpse that the server was actually up for 5 minutes – to take it back down again, during working hours, to install more RAM. Because everyone knows throwing more RAM at a downed server is like throwing a life saver to a drowning shipmate.

Instead of having a logical failover plan in place you created more work for yourselves and more aggravation for both you and your clients, incurring more in labor costs, credits and lost business than what it would take to mirror the server multiple times.

When I asked why you don’t have failover and backup systems in place you said, “I don’t pay enough to have that kind of service.” Kudos comrades, for adding insult to injury.

Thank you, comrades, for night after aggravating night of not being able to share bitness.com with all the people I know and unfortunately emailed the night before promoting the site.

Spasiba and dah sveedahnyah.