About
Author
Michael McGranahan. Born in 1980. Raised in the Los Angeles suburbs. Computer Science and Engineering turned Political Science student at UCLA. Formerly a Starbucks barista. Currently a software engineer at UCLA’s College of Letters and ScienceLead Developer at a premiere web development firm based in Los Angeles software engineer at GameFly. Socially conscious current events junkie. Likes to help people. Likes to laugh. Likes to write. Ponders a lot. Wide-ranging interests. Despises hubris and vanity, but acknowledges the self-indulgent nature of this website as a necessary evil. And aware that his impatience, elitism, and lack of committment to formal education demonstrate that he is flawed in oh-so-many ways.
Server History
In March 2005, I upgraded my mail server to support web serving scrambledbrains.net. The machine was self-built and powered by an Intel PIII/733MHz (at 33% overclocking) processor on an Abit BE6 motherboard, with 512MB RAM, a RAID 1 (mirror) of a couple 160GB hard disks, and a Belkin Universal 500VA uninterruptible power supply. In August 2006, that CPU died (it had been overclocked continually for six years), so I installed an Intel PIII/500MHz and a janky Gainward mobo. The machine ran the Gentoo GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache webserver with the PHP server-side scripting engine, the Postfix email server, amavisd-new with SpamAssassin and ClamAV for mail filtering, Courier mail access server, the MySQL database server, Samba CIFS file serving, OpenLDAP directory server, OpenVPN, FreeNX remote display server, and several other facilities, all of which are secure, reliable, high-performance Free/open source software.
At the time the old CPU burned out, I started planning to switch operating systems as well as hardware, since maintaining Gentoo was an absolute nightmare not worth the performance benefits of custom compiled binaries. I decided on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which has a simple-to-administer binary-based package management system, the stability of it’s Debian background, immense popularity and community support, fully open development, FIVE YEARS OF MAINTENANCE SUPPORT, and of course a focus on usability. So, using the old desktop machine that my MacBook replaced, I performed system-administrative acrobatics to install Ubuntu on a degraded RAID 5 array so I could keep the original Gentoo system in production (also on a degraded array). I then ran them in parallel for a week or two, methodically migrating files and services, and switching the port forwarding on my Tomato-flashed router. Due to careful planning and execution, it was a relatively smooth process, though altogether the process of building the machine, researching and installing Ubuntu, and migrating the system took a couple months of free time to complete. Scrambledbrains.net now runs on an Asus P4S8X-MX mobo with Intel Pentium 4 CPU at 1800MHz, 2GB RAM, RAID 5 storage (160GBx3) with 80GB external backup drive, and the UPS listed above (see next paragraph), all in an super cool and amazingly quiet Antec P180 case. With all that Linux horsepower, I was also able to install VMware Server and host a Windows 2003 Server SP1 installation, which I intend to use for Microsoft-based web development in conjunction with Apache’s reverse proxying feature. The new Ubuntu system also runs all of the services listed above for the old Gentoo system, except for the mail filtering (ClamAV and SpamAssassin) and FreeNX. But it will, in time.
Over the summer of 2008, the machine was upgraded to an Athlon 64 X2 5600+, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 250GBx4 RAID 5, 500GB external drive for media backups, two 120GB external drives for data rdiff-backups (rotated offsite weekly), and APC UPS. The operating system was upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
These various machines have all dwelled in the farthest reaches of my bedroom’s closet.
Supported Technologies
Scrambled Brains supports XFN, FOAF, RSS 0.92/2, Atom, XHTML, CSS, GeoURL, and the Blogger API. I am working to implement support for WCAG, but I have yet to fully explore that issue.
Title
No, “scrambled brains” has nothing to do with the anti-drug commercials of the 1990s. Rather, during less optimistic times of my life, I found it common for me to get so extermely caught up in fits of frustration, confusion, and despair that my brain would simply and completely exhaust itself, having spent all its sort, process, and synthetic energies alternately churning inert gears and spinning its wheels. In this state, inundated with surges of neurochemicals, my brain felt like a conductor highly charged with static electricity, imminently close to combustion. Beyond this electricity, my brain’s functionality too acquired a “static” quality - that of the scrambled reception of a broken television. Hence, I coined the phrase “scrambled brains,” ironically in the very midst of one of these cerebral storms.
Site Subscriptions
Scrambled Brains offers several subscriptions services for those of you too lazy to check the page with your web browser on a regular basis.
Email. There are two email subscription services. The first is the New Posts Mailing List, which allows you to receive the text of new posts via email immediately after they are put on the site. What convenience! You can access the mailing list sign-up page from the Meta section of the sidebar.
The second email service is the Comments Mailing Lists. There’s a seperate Comments Mailing List for each post, and they allow you to follow the comment discussion of any particular post. If you are on a post’s Comments Mailing List, you will receive all subsequent comments of that post in your email. To add yourself to a post’s Comments Mailing List, you must leave a comment on that post with the “Subscribe to this post’s comments” box checked.
RSS. (Read RSS Intro for an introduction to RSS.) Scambled Brains provides many RSS feeds, and their URLs are located in the Meta section of the sidebar. There’s the All Entries RSS feed that syndicates (i.e. represents) all the posts; when a new post is published, it will show up on this feed. This feed mimics the contents of the New Posts mailing list. In addition, each post includes a This Page feed that syndicates all the comments for that post. This feed mimics the contents of the Comments Mailing Lists. Scrambled Brains also provides the All Comments feed, which syndicates all the comments for all the posts in one feed. There is no mailing list that corresponds to this feed.
Contact Information
Email: mike-at-scrambledbrains.net
AIM: lunalot
Social media
- SoundCloud
- StackOverflow
- Foursquare
- last.fm
- delicious
- Goodreads
- Flickr
- Yelp
- Wikipedia
5 Comments
Commenting options at bottom.elitest bastard…i am humbly at your service. together we shall abolish hubris and kill all the pretentious hollywood motherfuckers that we make fun of as we sip on our vodka and “i” smoke all of “my” cigarettes. I think I feel anarchy knocking on my forehead…
I just donated 408.50.
“Donated”? More like “payed for rent”.
hilarious
haven’t even perused the website, but I googled New Pornopgraphers - spelled it just like that - and arrived here. So I’ll drop a line. I do recognize the self-indulgent nature of webpages as the scrambler alludes - I is a Leo too….
Ciao and good luck-
David
well, welcome scrambled brains. i haven’t posted much lately, due to work, but if you found any value in the site, as entertainment or otherwise, then i’m glad.