Jamie Thingelstad

Open Loop #0 - But No Shoes

Open Loop 0

2012-06-01: Drinking beer with our right brain. Introducing Open Loop. Being compelled. Thinking Fast and Slow. The time that Jamie deleted all of his nginx configuration files.

Notes & Links

Transcript

Speaker-labelled transcript, machine transcribed and cleaned up with AI in October 2026. It may still have mistakes. Also as WebVTT and JSON.

Jamie: All right. I got my He’brew. Did we have this last night?

Garrick: Oh, good, good golly. No, no, no, no. But I went home and made a bad decision.

Jamie: You had some.

Garrick: Yeah, that was a better decision.

Jamie: No, I didn’t. You know, you blogged about that.

Garrick: About the beer class last night?

Jamie: Yeah, and

Garrick: Yeah, I did.

Jamie: I didn’t get any link, and I was your plus one and everything.

Garrick: Let’s just remedy that.

Jamie: Quick edit. All right. So now what do we do?

Garrick: I’m editing the past to link to you, so I’m sort of busy at this exact moment.

Jamie: All right, good. It’s important to correct the past.

Garrick: It is. Okay, there. Lest we be stuck with a crappy future.

Jamie: Exactly.

Garrick: All right. There we go. It’s like you were always there.

Jamie: And I was.

Garrick: Did you enjoy the beer class?

Jamie: I thought the beer class was really good. It was not what I expected.

Garrick: No?

Jamie: No.

Garrick: I got the impression you weren’t even expecting beer.

Jamie: I wasn’t sure, because I didn’t know if they could do that. But no, it was really good. But it was… I didn’t expect to have to get in touch with my emotions?

Garrick: Just to drink beer.

Jamie: Right, just to drink beer, because usually it’s the opposite. And I enjoyed the beers, and I thought that it was a great way to enjoy beer with friends.

Garrick: Absolutely.

Jamie: Much more enjoyable way to drink beer with friends than to… reminisce about stone fruit, as he mentioned. So we should help anybody who’s listening, which is probably nobody yet. The beer class talked about—it was Josh Pepper.

Garrick: Pepper. Peppers?

Jamie: And what he talked about was how to enjoy beer by remembering what that beer reminded you of. So,

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: starting with a color. What was it after a color?

Garrick: Sound?

Jamie: A sound, right. Muted trumpet.

Garrick: Muted trumpet.

Jamie: You know, on the sound one, I thought some people were just making stuff up to sound smart.

Garrick: Yes. This structure, this approach for beer tasting, does not remove the arrogance.

Jamie: No. Not at all.

Garrick: It gives you something different to be arrogant about.

Jamie: Perhaps even more arrogant.

Garrick: Right, right, because of that time that I went to Paris and you weren’t there.

Jamie: Right, right. Or when I was in Monte Carlo at the high stakes tables.

Garrick: Yeah, drinking the juice.

Jamie: PBR. But it was a cool thing, and we have a beer from there.

Garrick: We have a beer. Yes.

Jamie: From The Four Firkins.

Garrick: From The Four Firkins, not one that was part of the class.

Jamie: No. And I’d be happy to talk about The Four Firkins even though they don’t pay for any advertisements.

Garrick: No, they’re doing a great job.

Jamie: I know.

Garrick: And the fact that they are so, at least for me, just off the highway makes it terribly convenient.

Jamie: Well, I mean, honestly, they could be a three-day horse carriage ride and you’d still want to go there, but

Garrick: I wouldn’t… as much. I mean, I wouldn’t go there as much as I’d want to, yeah.

Jamie: You’d want to, and maybe even more.

Garrick: Well, their last location was exactly that.

Jamie: It was on Texas. So you kind of picked this beer, Garrick.

Garrick: I picked this beer. This is He’brew’s Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A., double India Pale Ale with rye malt. I’m usually not a big fan of the India Pale Ales. I find them a little bright and shallow, but this one—well, it’s a double, so it’s got a little more body, and plus it’s got rye, and I’m a complete sucker for anything

Jamie: Yeah, the rye is what gets you.

Garrick: with rye. The rye, yeah. Exactly.

Jamie: I like the IPA, I like them bright.

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: I don’t think they’re shallow, but this is a really good beer.

Garrick: I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I enjoy it quite a bit.

Jamie: I haven’t had it before. So you should try it if you’re listening.

Garrick: Absolutely.

Jamie: Get one and listen to the rest of this podcast.

Garrick: Just hit pause right now.

Jamie: Exactly. Come back after a three-day horse ride.

Garrick: And join us on this 10% ABV journey.

Jamie: So what are we doing here? Should we tell people what we’re doing?

Garrick: We should tell people what we’re doing here. This is, I think it’s called a podcast. Do they still call it that?

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Wow.

Jamie: And every time you say that, we have to pay Adam Curry money. So this is the podcast Open Loop. This is Open Loop Zero,

Garrick: Well,

Jamie: meaning the first one, and zero meaning that it may not even be the first one.

Garrick: no, I really enjoy starting projects with a zero. I think it removes any sort of tension and pressure about the first one.

Jamie: Well, that’s not working.

Garrick: No?

Jamie: But I have this awesome new mic for it.

Garrick: That mic is so cool.

Jamie: Honestly, it’s huge. It’s a—

Garrick: Really?

Jamie: I mean, I can sit at my— so it’s the Blue, what is it?

Garrick: Yeti.

Jamie: Yeti, Yeti Pro, because I’m pro. And it’s shockingly good. It’s much better than I am. It makes me feel professional sitting here talking into it. I feel kind of like Edward Murrow, or George Clooney in that movie.

Garrick: The one where he was Edward Murrow?

Jamie: Yeah. So I got this microphone for our podcast, Garrick.

Garrick: I think that’s awesome.

Jamie: I sent an email to you. It was a short email. Said, why aren’t we doing a podcast? You’ve done several podcasts.

Garrick: I have. I enjoy all of them.

Jamie: I’ve done none of them. And so to prepare for it, I got a $250 microphone. Because if you’re going to do something, you have to have the right equipment.

Garrick: You have to have the right equipment. It makes everything go so much easier

Jamie: If you don’t have the right equipment, why would you even try?

Garrick: and people enjoy—

Jamie: Right?

Garrick: All right. All you’re going to find out is that you don’t have the right equipment.

Jamie: And then you’re going to be mad.

Garrick: And then you’re going to ham it. Ha. Just do it right out of the gate. Don’t even worry about it. Yeah. I am speaking with my much used Sennheiser E816S.

Jamie: It sounds very good as well.

Garrick: Thank you. Yeah. It has been just standing.

Jamie: I think I look cooler.

Garrick: I’m sure you do. So it’s been standing on the mic stand since the last time I recorded a podcast. So I did have to brush off some cobwebs and shoo away some small creatures.

Jamie: How long has it been since you’ve done a podcast?

Garrick: 18 months.

Jamie: What was the last one?

Garrick: I think the last one was either Brian Schumacher, who’s this crazy musician in town, or it was our good friend Matt Bauer.

Jamie: Both of those would be good.

Garrick: Yeah, both of them were quite enjoyable, and in unexpected ways.

Jamie: But so why has it been 18 months?

Garrick: I have an 18-month-old. Or almost a two-year-old, yeah.

Jamie: There you go. That’ll happen.

Garrick: Yeah, I used to have my third child used to be podcasting, and now it’s actually a third child.

Jamie: So what are we trying to do with Open Loop?

Garrick: That’s a great question. There’s a higher chance of me enjoying podcasts that I am in than ones that I have not been.

Jamie: I think that, yeah, I can see that. I enjoy most things that I’m in as well.

Garrick: Yeah. Yeah. And so when you said, why aren’t we doing this? I thought, why aren’t we?

Jamie: Exactly.

Garrick: We need to.

Jamie: It makes no sense.

Garrick: The world will be a much improved place as soon as we start. Let us begin.

Jamie: So here we are. We have begun.

Garrick: We have begun. Welcome to zero.

Jamie: So the name of this podcast is Open Loop, and if you’re still listening, you probably know us.

Garrick: That’s right. Thank you, Jim.

Jamie: All right.

Garrick: Something made you send that email.

Jamie: Yes. We could add something interesting. And it sounded like a fun thing to try.

Garrick: Fantastic.

Jamie: So there we go.

Garrick: Easy enough. Your links wiki.

Jamie: Yes. I love my links wiki.

Garrick: I love your links wiki, and I have a question about it.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Can any wiki also be, in addition to whatever else it is, also be a links wiki?

Jamie: Could it be like a wiki that also has links?

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Not just a dedicated link wiki.

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally.

Garrick: Yeah?

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: So it could.

Jamie: It wouldn’t have to just be so… If you go to links.thingelstad.com, I have my link wiki, which is where I keep my bookmarks. And I’ve got bookmarks on there for, I think, going back six years. And the very first bookmarks were done with Delicious, which everybody knows Delicious, and I did it when Delicious was… you know, had two dots in the name before Yahoo bought it and screwed it all up. And then I went to Pinboard and used Pinboard, and I really, you know, I like that as it. And as you know, I started playing around with MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki. And for… boy, I don’t know, six months, I felt like I could do this in Semantic MediaWiki. So finally I did and created this Link Wiki. And it’s at links.thingelstad.com. And it’s been a ton of fun, and I’ve been able to do things with it that I’d never, you know, that I always wished something else would do. And now I can do it and do it quite easily. And you gotta have MediaWiki and you have to have Semantic MediaWiki as well as a few other plugins. And after that you can just clone a few pages off of my link wiki. Well, a few, it’s more like sixty. And after you’ve gone through all the effort of setting up a wiki and then import that content, you can have your very own. In some… Garrick, we gotta get yours set up.

Garrick: We have to get mine set up. Well, that’s why I ask, because I don’t know that I necessarily want it dedicated, but I’d like to smush it into…

Jamie: Yeah, you could just do it on your existing…

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: your existing one.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: You just have to not overwrite the main page or, you know…

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: You could have some collisions.

Garrick: Right. So I’m looking at links.thingelstad.com right now, and

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: the third one down… It’s a really ugly looking TypePad URL, which makes me wonder about if your link bot is slacking off.

Jamie: Well, my LinkBot, so LinkBot checks every link, but he checks five an hour, and he won’t check it if it has been checked in the last three months. So LinkBot every hour wakes up and he finds five random URLs that haven’t been checked in the last three months, and he makes sure that it still resolves to a 200. And if there’s a 301 redirect, he’ll follow that and update the URL. Does all sorts of good hygienic things for life.

Garrick: Cuts off the UTMs, huh?

Jamie: UTMs, all the tracking codes, fixes all that up. So, but he is

Garrick: Five an hour.

Jamie: he only does five an hour.

Garrick: So he’s union.

Jamie: And he sends me an email. Every time he runs, to tell me what he did, and he’s not meant to be purely autonomous. I have to follow behind him and fix things every once in a while. But, you know, he’ll get better with time, like we all do.

Garrick: That’s right.

Jamie: He’s just, I mean, he’s what, he’s 35 lines of Python code, and you can’t expect too much from 35 lines of Python code.

Garrick: I’m all very confused. Does LinkBot live in the MediaWiki install?

Jamie: No. LinkBot is his own Python app that lives completely independent, and he only communicates with the wiki via the public APIs.

Garrick: Okay. Oh, okay.

Jamie: And he has his own account. So in recent changes you can actually see everything that LinkBot did, just like a person.

Garrick: I thought Okay.

Jamie: Which is awesome, because if he makes a mistake, he can just go and undo his mistake.

Garrick: Right. Right.

Jamie: And, I mean, I bought

Garrick: Is that how all the rest of the, like, you had taken a look at Wikipedia and the other MediaWiki bots, and that’s how they live as well, sort of outside of posting an account?

Jamie: Yep. Yep. Yeah, they all have a bot account, and then they run jobs, and they interact as a user would interact. So they’re not given any special privileges. And in fact, actually, LinkBot doesn’t even interact just as a user, he actually interacts with Semantic Forms and posts his changes as a form submit. So if LinkBot tried to do something that the form didn’t allow, for example, if he tried to put a string where a number was expected, the form wouldn’t validate. So he’s got all sorts of protection on him, which is good.

Garrick: Huh.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Huh.

Jamie: Well, you know, they say that on Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a literal army of robots. And the suggestion is that if Wikipedia were to turn all those robots off, that Wikipedia would fall apart in about two days.

Garrick: Sure, sure, because they couldn’t… pull together an army of interns fast enough.

Jamie: Exactly. Even with all the people they have, they still need the robots helping out. And it’s actually, I think it’s the part that I think a lot of people, when they look at wikis, and I had this same affliction for years, was when I looked at wikis, I would look at TWiki or like some of the really, you know, the simplistic wikis, because a wiki can be made of, you know, twenty lines of PHP code, and you just kinda feel like, hmm, I can’t really do what I want to do here. And the reality is that a really good wiki is a fairly complicated beast. And when you look at MediaWiki, whether it’s the templates or bots or extensions, there’s incredible capability there. But as with anything, it takes a learning curve. And, you know, I think it was two years ago now that I decided I was going to really learn MediaWiki. And MediaWiki, it’s just been one of the most enjoyable kind of explorations that I’ve made in tech for a while, even with all the PHP that, you know, makes you want to jump out of your skin. But just because the developer ecosystem around MediaWiki is so enjoyable, and I’ve just never seen an open source community that’s so open and friendly and just a really great group of developers to be around, which is pretty fun. So I think everybody should check it out.

Garrick: In those two years you have created a garden, a garden,

Jamie: A large garden.

Garrick: a wiki garden, a large garden of wikis.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Something compelled you. Something said it’s MediaWiki, you need to figure out MediaWiki. And you did, and it took two years. And you’re figuring out robots and seemingly esoteric aspects of the ecosystem. Right, you are still being pulled in that direction.

Jamie: Truly esoteric. Yeah.

Garrick: Yeah? Yeah. Huh. Yes, that’s where I’m going with this. Like, you can’t not do MediaWikis right now.

Jamie: Can’t… absolutely.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Must.

Garrick: Yeah, you must.

Jamie: Yes.

Garrick: Have you been able to identify the attributes that are so compelling?

Jamie: Well, it’s got all the right things, right? It’s got technical curiosity. It’s got a high rate of return. So putting in a certain amount of effort gives you… enough satisfaction in return that you want to keep making that investment, and it’s just incredibly… Yeah, the deeper you go, the more I want to learn.

Garrick: And that’s not true for all the tech that you are exposed to.

Jamie: No, no, no, no. Well, honestly, a lot of the tech is shallow. A lot of the tech has no more there there. You know, you get five inches deep and you’re done and there’s really nowhere else to go. And so, you know, I think that’s… You know, WordPress is pretty deep. And you can go a long ways in there. But even that, I think, kind of, you know, it’s not quite as deep as something like MediaWiki. But, you know, there’s a lot there. So the thing that I also think is powerful about wikis and MediaWiki is that you know, we’ve talked about this before, about the idea of public versus private, commercial versus residential kind of spaces as it relates to the digital world and to the internet. And what’s great is that wikis, to me, feel completely open, public, and I keep wanting to think of terms like people-sourced. Wikis are open sourced for the development, but the development of the PHP and the code is one thing, but then you can develop on top of that just with your web browser and pointing at a form. And to me that feels like something different. That feels like something that’s even more open than what we traditionally would think of as open source. And it doesn’t feel like crowdsourcing to me. Like, I don’t know, for some reason that feels like something different than what I’m than what can happen in a really robust wiki ecosystem. And so I think that as the web gets more and more commercial, it’s great that there’s this really vibrant non-commercial space as well. And it’s good to know what’s going on in all of them. Yes. Now you’ve also been compelled. You had a brilliant cartoon about that today.

Garrick: Yes. I’ve recently been thinking of all the tech and all the projects and all the things that I do that just seem so obvious. Like, of course I do that.

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: But, right? How could I not play Kubb? That’s ridiculous. What do you mean I couldn’t do that? No, I have to do that.

Jamie: Everybody is Googling Kubrick now. It’s K-U-B-B.

Garrick: Kubb. And when you said, hey, we should do a podcast, it took me all the way back to autumn of 2004 when I said, hey, I think I need to figure out how to do a podcast, and how I would be up until ridiculous hours in the morning troubleshooting tech and trying to figure out how to make an RSS feed by hand and all of that stuff. And then I figured that out, and then I sort of recovered for a while, then I found something else that I good God, I have to do this. And I found that those are the things that I’ve really enjoyed. And I sort of feel a little bit anxious right now because it’s not clear to me what this thing is that’s going to keep me up until 2:30 in the morning.

Jamie: You know what my mic has? It’s got a mute button. A mechanical mute button. So like if I were going to cough. Right.

Garrick: Right, right.

Jamie: You can press it. But here’s what’s weird. And maybe you know why.

Garrick: You gotta know where it is. Yeah.

Jamie: That’s what it is, isn’t it? You gotta know where it is. It’s always lit, and then when you press it, it blinks.

Garrick: Man, that sounds like a really smart mic.

Jamie: Awesome. Super. Awesome. So you don’t know what you’re compelled to do right now?

Garrick: I don’t. There’s not a one thing. There’s not a big thing. In the Buffy universe, there would be a big bad.

Jamie: Do you think that’s just part of getting older? That it’s not one thing, it’s like a hundred things?

Garrick: Well, it can’t be. A hundred small things?

Jamie: Or a hundred big things?

Garrick: That sounds… I don’t like that.

Jamie: You don’t like that.

Garrick: I don’t like that. That makes me feel old. And it makes me feel old and tired, and I don’t feel like I want to be either.

Jamie: Yeah, well, I don’t feel either. You don’t feel either.

Garrick: No.

Jamie: No.

Garrick: No. And there’s stuff to do, but what is the stuff, right? What is the stuff that needs to be done? And that’s one of the things why I am very intrigued by the work that you are doing in the MediaWiki stuff, because it shows me that there is a place that is really deep. And obviously rewards that exploration very highly.

Jamie: Some would say a black hole. Do I want to talk about this book?

Garrick: The thinking book.

Jamie: The thinking book.

Garrick: Yeah, I think that is a really interesting framework for thinking about yourself.

Jamie: So this is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Garrick: Which Amazon kept, kept, kept, kept, kept saying I should buy. And if there is an indictment of recommendation engine robot thingies, algorithms, it is that. It is that Amazon continually said I should buy this book. And it wasn’t until you said I should buy this book that I actually did.

Jamie: And it’s a great book.

Garrick: It’s a great book. I think I even commented as I was reading it, like, wow, I haven’t enjoyed reading a book in forever as much as I have enjoyed reading this book.

Jamie: So what I loved about the book, so the book is about how you think, and how these two, the author Kahneman suggests that there’s these two systems, system one and system two, system one being this autonomous part of your brain that you can’t control, that it’s constantly at work determining if you’re going to be attacked by a lion or reading the word stop on a stop sign. And then there’s a system two which does work that you have to think about. And he goes into some depth on how the two work together, how they differ from each other. I like particularly the part about how system two, this thinking part of your brain, is particularly lazy and is happy to just take whatever system one throws at it.

Garrick: Yes. Like system one says, hey, system two, I need an answer. And system two says, okay, what’s an easy answer?

Jamie: Yeah, you’re good. You’re good. You don’t need any.

Garrick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s fine.

Jamie: Just keep going. And so I mean, I really felt like it was an important book, like it was the kind of book that everybody should read, in a way to be kind of like an operator’s manual for how you approach decisions. And I think after I read this book, I’m constantly wondering as I make decisions, you know, what am I being impacted by? What system, you know, what’s at play here? Why am I making the decision that I’m making? And, you know, I think at some level I think it makes you a better decision maker.

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, that’s a good thing. Particularly if what you do is make decisions, you should read this book. Yes. If you sell things, you should read this book. If you buy things, you should read this book. So that’s pretty much everybody because everybody pretty much sells or buys something.

Garrick: Well, I don’t want to do anything bought, sold, or manufactured, or manufacture anything bought or sold, or sell anything bought or manufactured. I’ll still read the book. You’ve seen the movie.

Jamie: Boombox!

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: Over his head.

Garrick: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Jamie: That’s the movie poster.

Garrick: That’s the movie poster. Yeah. And this is the last, the last scene of it.

Jamie: Yeah, I haven’t. Oh, okay.

Garrick: It’s the last scene. He

Jamie: I think I’m too old.

Garrick: they tells the girl’s father that he really wants to be a professional kickboxer.

Jamie: Yeah, poor strategy, though.

Garrick: Say, hey, read the book. Happy birthday to Dan Grigsby. EOM.

Jamie: Awesome.

Garrick: We gotta talk Kubb Nationals.

Jamie: We do.

Garrick: Oh, man, it’s looking intense already.

Jamie: You need to talk about Kubb. You need to tell everybody what is Kubb. And yeah, just what is Kubb? What is Kubb?

Garrick: Kubb is a deliciously simple wooden lawn game where you throw batons at tiny little pieces of wood and try to knock them down at eight meters, and then shorter than that they’re

Jamie: They’re not so tiny.

Garrick: Not so tiny, but they’re smaller.

Jamie: They’re smaller.

Garrick: They’re small enough that if you throw the baton right, the baton will just jump right over them.

Jamie: As it does many times.

Garrick: It does many times. I got a game and a half in tonight, before dinner, and I really enjoy that.

Jamie: Did you just play by yourself?

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: Man.

Garrick: I play both sides, yeah.

Jamie: That’s impressive.

Garrick: And it doubly hurts when you do badly.

Jamie: Against yourself.

Garrick: Yes, like, oh man, that was horrible.

Jamie: Do you ever get really lopsided games?

Garrick: Yeah, yeah.

Jamie: Really.

Garrick: And then it flops the other side, and then of course I win. Right, right.

Jamie: You’re like, man, this side’s just killing the other side.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Just kubbs everywhere.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Field kubbs everywhere.

Garrick: It’s just a mess. Just a mess. But it’s, I

Jamie: You have that permanently set up in your yard, right?

Garrick: I do. I do. I find it very relaxing to just throw wood across the lawn at the end of a very stressful day.

Jamie: Who wouldn’t?

Garrick: Right, exactly. Yeah, right. Some people chop wood.

Jamie: It’s time to go throw wood.

Garrick: Throw wood, yeah. What I love so much about this game: one, as you and I have noticed over the past, what, five, six months, there is no tech anywhere near this game.

Jamie: Zero. As much as I try.

Garrick: It’s pretty hard.

Jamie: Really hard.

Garrick: Rollback to give you credit, I have been digging Planet Kubb, watching the Des Moines guys on the YouTube. So the guys in Des Moines are doing the YouTube, so there’s that much tech, and they do a pretty good job of filming the games. I think, what, 90, 96 teams in Eau Claire? And so this is what I love about the game, is that it’s so highly concentrated in this region. I don’t imagine that outside of this upper Midwest area that it’s heard of until you get around to Sweden. Because

Jamie: We’re going to nationals.

Garrick: We’re going to nationals.

Jamie: What is that?

Garrick: We’re going to Kubb nationals soon.

Jamie: That’s like a month. July 15th.

Garrick: Oh, yeah, July 14th and 15th.

Jamie: In Eau Claire.

Garrick: In metropolitan Eau Claire.

Jamie: Headed up by Eric.

Garrick: Anderson.

Jamie: Eric Anderson,

Garrick: Is that what his name is?

Jamie: Captain Kubb. Captain USA Kubb.

Garrick: Is that what it is? Is that what his handle is?

Jamie: USAKubb.org.

Garrick: Oh! So I… Remember the Chads?

Jamie: Oh, the Chads. The Chads of Fox Valley.

Garrick: Yes. I am thinking that the Chads need their own Chad tournament.

Jamie: Well, I think they had one.

Garrick: I was thinking about this tonight. The Chads introduced not only us into how you can play a highly competitive Kubb, but also a method of two-person play that I think in and of itself is its own game. Right, the two-person

Jamie: Like beach volleyball.

Garrick: Like beach volleyball. Yes, this is Chad Kubb rules. It’s two…

Jamie: But please wear more clothing.

Garrick: It’s two-person teams. Each person throws two batons, then the next person throws two, then the first person throws one, and then the second person throws one.

Jamie: Oh, that’s how I do it. When I play with a two-person team, that’s how I do it. I played

Garrick: That’s how you do it.

Jamie: this weekend with my in-laws, and I was playing on a team with my brother-in-law, and we did two and two, one and one. And it’s critical, because if you throw two bad, you got that one to recover. Even if you’re on a hot streak and you throw two bad, it’s for two good ones. Get your other guy in there, get him throwing a couple of nice batons, and

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: then you come in with those cleanup batons, and I’m telling you, they’re magical.

Garrick: They are magical. And what are we seeing now? We’re seeing three-person team tournaments or seeing six-person team tournaments. There needs to be a two-person Chad rules tournament.

Jamie: Two per— oh, I see what you’re saying. It’s gotta only be two, no three people

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: or just two.

Garrick: No three person. And you can only play a maximum of two batons at a turn.

Jamie: I love it.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: That would be awesome.

Garrick: It would be intense.

Jamie: So, Kubbchucks.

Garrick: Kubbchucks! Kubbchucks, we’re up to, what do we got, five?

Jamie: Five guys.

Garrick: Five guys, we need one more guy. And then we

Jamie: Then we’re going to have to split up.

Garrick: either split up. Split up, so I can’t be captain of Team B. I might be able to co-captain Team B. You’re going to take Team B?

Jamie: Well, why would I have to take Team B?

Garrick: I’m just… your idea. Your idea to have two teams. That’s the only reason why I bring that up.

Jamie: Yeah, I think that would be the right way to do it. But you’re the captain of the Kubbchucks. The Kubbchucks is our Kubb team.

Garrick: I changed our… our subtitle. What do you call it? Description? Site description?

Jamie: Oh, yeah.

Garrick: Yeah. Oh, but it didn’t take. You take it back. What is going?

Jamie: Well, it’s cached, you know, so yeah.

Garrick: Oh, you gotta uncache it? What are you caching with?

Jamie: Yeah. nginx.

Garrick: Yeah?

Jamie: The one true way.

Garrick: I mean, obviously.

Jamie: I don’t do any of that W3 Total Cache or Super Cache or Mega Cache or Gigacache or Super WordPress Mega Cache.

Garrick: It doesn’t belong there. It’s not belong

Jamie: I just do it the right way. I did in the web server,

Garrick: Yeah, right.

Jamie: nginx.

Garrick: So what do you do? What do you gotta do to

Jamie: All right, you just gotta wait. Or I have to type lots of stuff on a terminal.

Garrick: I understand. I understand.

Jamie: Did I tell you what I did when I did that?

Garrick: No.

Jamie: So to delete my cache, I have to delete all of the cache files. So there’s this directory called fastcgi_cache that I configure, and it’s got all these cache files in it, and they’re nested. So you gotta, deleting them is, you can’t just do rm star. Because they’re not in that directory, they’re nested. So I did a find dot type f exec rm to delete all of the files. It would find all the files in there and delete them. And so I was deleting that over and over and over again. And I also use Z shell, and in Z shell I use a shared history. And so I was working also on my nginx configurations. And so I was in the nginx configuration directory and I wanted to edit a file, and I just edited that file, so I hit up and hit return. And then I realized that when I hit up, it had captured the find, the recursive find and delete, and I had hit return and I had deleted every nginx configuration that I had.

Garrick: Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.

Jamie: Yeah, that’s really bad. So I cried for a while.

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: And then I tried to think, well, did I back those up? You know, because I back up to that server in Switzerland.

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: And turns out I back up everything, but I don’t back up my config files, I back up all my content. So then I tried getting the config by connecting GDB, the debugger, to the running nginx and dumping the nginx memory and trying to get the configs that way. That is terrible.

Garrick: Wow, I wouldn’t have even thought of that. Did it work?

Jamie: No, not at all.

Garrick: Oh.

Jamie: And then the light bulb went off and, you know, as you know, I use Linode and big fan of Linode, and I have Linode snapshot backup. So I was able to just restore one of those to a different host, as I brought a host up for about an hour, got the files off of it, put them on my real host and voila, I had my config files back. So

Garrick: Nice.

Jamie: a big win for virtual private servers and a big win for turning backups on.

Garrick: What do you think of fully baked? Because it sounds like you are, it sounds like this WordPress setup is more baked than… others, especially by default. By baked I mean where it mostly serves either static, either serves a cache or a flat file. Well, that’s what it is, right?

Jamie: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: I know, it’s, yeah, yeah, you mean baked like it’s a static site.

Garrick: Exactly. Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, no, I mean, nginx actually has some really great stuff for that. Like, yeah, like it’s set up so that if PHP stops responding, it’ll still serve the cache file. You know, I set my cache pretty high, to a day, and my WordPress stuff responds in like 40 milliseconds or something. It’s super fast. And I hit it with a ton of traffic and it does fine. It’s great. I don’t have to worry about it at all.

Garrick: Yeah, that’s the way it should be.

Jamie: I could get fireballed. Come on. Come on, Gruber. Fireball me. I dare you. So do you buy that whole thing that Kubb’s a thousand years old?

Garrick: There’s a certain lameness to the game that makes me think, that screams 1980s to me.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: But outside of that, I don’t really care.

Jamie: That’s what they said, that’s what Davi said from Des Moines. He wants to believe. Keep hope alive.

Garrick: And the fact that, from what I understand, international championships take place in Gotland, I’m not sure it matters. Right, if…

Jamie: Are we going to go there? Are the Kubbchucks

Garrick: I don’t know if the Kubbchucks can go this year,

Jamie: Oh, we can’t go this year.

Garrick: but I think we’ll have to go next year.

Jamie: That’d be awesome.

Garrick: That’d be awesome. I could send the rest of the family off to some reasonable part of the continent and we’ll stay on some remote island throwing wood for a weekend.

Jamie: Sounds great.

Garrick: Yeah. And from what I can tell from the YouTube videos, you can’t wear shoes on Gotland.

Jamie: No shoes. No shoes. You could walk around on wood blocks.

Garrick: If the terrain looks dangerous and might hurt you, you can strap some more blocks to your feet, but no shoes.