By now, most of the people who we sent holiday cards to should have them, so it’s time to share the card with the rest of the world! This is this first card our new kitty Toby has participated in, and he’s off to a great start!

As always, we had our cards printed as press printed greeting cards by WHCC. They do an excellent job, and the turnaround time is amazing (we had the cards two business days after submitting the order).

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Four years ago, we decided to make our own Christmas cards, using a photo of our cat Harvey. We’ve since made it a tradition. Getting a cat to pose for a photo isn’t always easy, but we have fun with it. Our new cat Toby has big shoes to fill, but we think he did a great job this year. Here’s a look back at our cards from 2006-2009. I’m not going to post our 2010 card quite yet — I want it to be a surprise for those of you who are getting one! I’ll post it so everyone else can see in a few weeks.

2006

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I don’t really like the terms “the cloud” or “cloud computing.” They’re not very descriptive, and I hate cloudy weather. Give me sunshine and blue skies any day. Please. Regardless, most of my websites, including the blog are now living “in the cloud.” I flipped the switch to move my blog over about a week ago, and so far so good.

Everything here is running on Amazon Web Services. The web server is an EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux distribution (I’d have preferred FreeBSD, but it doesn’t seem to be a viable option right now). The data is stored in SimpleDB and S3. The images and videos are served by CloudFront. These days, it looks like AWS is a solid platform for personal web hosting, especially since they launched the incredibly cheap “Micro” instances. If you’re considering VPS hosting, I think it’s an option worth considering.

Continue reading “Mostly cloudy or partly sunny?”