Well, its 83F outside, overcast a bit, but still a pleasant day - got a project last night, finished it last night, a nice $300 payday in my pocket, should help the budget level out a bit more, I do have a invoice to drop off at my job from last week, $85 for an hour of time, not too shabby.
Tonight is the midnight premiere of Harry Potter - however so far, no one wants to go 
I am thinking of going my myself, but that’s never any fun, plus I can’t finish an entire tub of popcorn on my own! 
but we shall see how tired I am, and if I don’t have other plans popup in the day.
Anywhoo - have a good Tuesday folks.
Well the downside of course to sleeping on weekends for me, especially after a migration, is tada, I am awake I just got done tinkering on the piano a bit, just one of those nights where I am shot, yet wide awake - thankfully the server migration went smooth, means I get to send out a invoice on Monday to get paid for my work, and in the next 72 hours we shut down a old server and thus the migration is ‘complete’.
Things with me have been “ok” and I know for some when I say I am “ok” they come back with “Just ‘ok’??” but in my world, it’s better than the alternative, lol - life is highs and lows, and the downside to not sleeping especially with me is my emotions tend to run a tad wild, extremes are not uncommon, either things seem like all hope is lost, a tad angry, or too tired to care - but lately sleep has been easy to come by, got a lot under my belt leading up to this migration, and I was glad I did, was able to work it really well, so far the biggest blip was forgetting 1 usual thing - you’d think after 8 migrations of this style, I’d remember to modify the register_globals bit in the php.ini - but as usual, I forgot, and got the call “Hey did something not move over okay?” - when he described the problem he was having I knew what it was, made the edit, restarted Apache, and tada, it worked.
I may go see my dad preach today, he is doing some fill for a local church literally down the street (okay so like 5 streets over, and 2miles down) but its closer than some of the other places he has filled in for, so I may go for a visit tomorrow, granting I get some sleep soon - but so much going on lately, tight budget, mixed replies from clients about a larger contract, guess too many years charging too little to everyone, folks just expect me to always be “cheap” sadly with gas alone for the car, cheap anymore is not an option sadly - but this week I am going to catch-up with my design client, see if I can get her to sign-off and if so I get half up front, and we roll forward.
Anywhoo - guess I am going to give sleep another shot, take care all, have a good sunday.
Now and again I help out a friend or two with PHP code, today I was given a good little challenge to help on, the issue was a event calendar, one side displayed the text title/date/time of the event, the other side showed a thumbnail of the event’s flyer, the task was simple:
- When you click the TEXT link it would change the side picture template (already working)
- Data for Events/Info pulled from database (already working)
- When you click thumbnail, have it popup the full-sized image (not working)
So #3 is where I came in, to find a solution for the code bit to make it dynamically load the pop-up code instead of the one static image it was doing, so I got to thinking, and what I came up with was tweaking the existing javascript in the PHP end of things - I made a function that set one of the variables needed in the javascript popup code “imageURL” so when you clicked the link and it went to change the image thumbnail, it set a variable that was the image location the popup needed.
Was pretty cool, I realize that seems maybe trivial at some level, but it was a fun challenge to tackle with a hybrid of php & javascript,it was a nice stretch of the ol brain as javascript is not one of my languages of choice, but in this case my knowledge cut it 
and I made a few other tweaks to the code - came out really nice.
Well busy night tonight, Denny’s, Server Migration, Sleep - I personally after the in-and-out heat today could go for “sleep” but the migration should go pretty smooth - so on with the evening - have a good weekend folks!
How is it that with all the increased projects on the table, and money coming in, my bank account quickly found its way to $24 last night? Gone over everything - few spot expenses I didn’t expect this past month, but I guess I just need to get a better budget
Got a few gigs lined up, so pretty happy about that, nearly $450 from one client for some basic work, trying to line up a few monthly contracts to equal another $1500 into the monthly budget, but it’ll probably only end up being $500 - but hey beggars can’t be choosers, money is money, so between that, and a MASSIVE audit planned for all servers, should help level things out, going to do the audit during a migration I am doing for a guy this weekend, all in all should help make up for some of the cash I hadn’t expected to spend.
Budget is a big thing right now, actually I have sworn off credit cards, only spending money I have, the CS3 upgrade was my last big purchase for quite a while, going to try and sort out my banking bits, and get savings rolling, but also with the extra projects and finances from them, I hope to get a little bit of a surplus, and pay off some company cards used for getting the new servers up, software on the servers, etc. so hopefully get the budget all leveled out here before year’s end.
Anywhoo - been a mixed day, got some things done, but also got some things to work out, but all in all, I’m alive, so I can’t complain too much, even the 116F+ weather isn’t too much of a bother to me…. I just want a nap.
Lately the big thing I have noticed in my life is the normal the “status quo”, or the familiar is not always the “normal” I am really wanting - for a few years now I have strived to make changes in my life, from my dealings with anxiety, a hint of anti-social behavior, traveling, and of course my favorite - meeting with clients - so definitely the normal behavior of hiding out in my cave has changed, but some things always seem to go back to what’s considered “normal”.
This week has some things in store for me, a server project, working on a website project which has taken a lot of time for code, design, and learning an entirely new development platform, namely flash - but I find myself falling back on my old habits, and going towards what is familiar and common to me, not venturing past the normal thing I know onto other ventures - but I am trying to, and I dare to quote ZeFrank - “break that cycle” - to get out of old habits, to get out of things I’ve done so long they are common place in my life, from a spiritual standpoint its a perfect description of sin, that little ol secret sin one has (you know that one…) - that silly little thing that temptation rears its head and says “Oh it won’t hurt anymore” - we all have those in our daily lives (how many coffees was that today? or why were you telling at that driver?) its not huge, in all cases, but its that little secret bit.
Lately I find myself desiring change, desiring a larger income to cover some bills, get a place, etc. you know, the little things but at the same time I have to break some common cycles I have which are saying “oh its not a problem, I can do that” and not only challenge myself, but challenge those who claim I am worth my weight in gold, and see if they are willing to help me out even with a 10th of that weight - to saying no to friends when I am simply too tired, to know my physical limits, but not also being afraid to push those limits now and again and see what these sore bones are capable of - this is the first night in a few weeks where I have been up past 9:25pm
But I’d really appreciate your prayers for me, I know there are some changes going on with me, some that I finally just let into that I have been fighting against, some I needed to have happen, and some that happened because I was just pushed beyond my limits and unable to hold back the flood gates - a lot is in the works, a lot is on my plate, and sometimes being a single man business can be tough, but hopefully, things will level out here soon, and that balance I am always looking to find, will be found.
Anywhoo - eyes are starting to close, so it must be time, go see Transformers, well worth the money - and if I don’t get a chance to blog tomorrow, happy 4th of july. I know you don’t all comment, but I know a few of you who read regularly to see what’s going on in my ol crazy world I call life, thanks for reading. Night.
That is the big question for today - had a mixed start to Monday, and a little scare today - but all in all today has been good, been up going on 6 hours, ordered a server, learned how to read XML in Flash, now the hard part, animation/array reading lol - so things have been good thus far, but energy is already starting to fade, its getting slowly warmer, and my level of distrac….. where was I?
So on with the day, more work on Flash, and some PHP tune ups, have to add some hooks in to my Wordpress Bridge for override on content from being cross posted between IPB & Wordpress, by no means is it ready for prime time, I’d really like to create a association wizard, to store the ID of the user in WP with the ID from IPB.. but all in due time, for starters it works, and I can always make it a public project and have folks laugh at my code later
Anywhoo - lunch beckons (sure sure, its 10:36am - but I must beat the rush!) Happy Tuesday!
For the last 2 years I have been trying to find a way to unhook myself from servers a bit, really wanting to focus on other things in life, and have someone worry about the day-in-day out a bit, but the catch is server admin work usually pays well so it has it’s perks, however sadly it can be very high-stress, low rewards, and very demanding - sounds like a job right? Well after a few years, I have begun to get tired - granted some processes are automated now in normal maintenance I would do, but at the same time, just seems like more and more folks are stepping away from hosting with me for the bargain hosts.
I know this isn’t the first time I have wrote about this, and I imagine it will probably not be the last, just a little vent session - I have been testing out managed hosting solutions, to take some of the load off me, and have another company manage server updates, security, firewalls, etc. - why? ease of operation, I’d still run my own servers - probably 2 at most, but mainly for the special cases I have, which don’t fit into the mold of standard “hosting” so to speak - but that would lower the load quite a bit.
My dream solution? Entire infrastructure rebuilt from the ground up, new batch of servers all Dual Dual Core, at least 4GB of ram per, nice raid or sans solution for storage - a better backup solution than the current setup (hate the way cPanel packages accounts, takes too long, but works great if a restore is needed.) - I’d also like 2-3 employees to help balance the load of server work, but then a 4th person to do book-keeping and billing, to take the iron out of my fire, and get the budget leveled out and dead-beats gone.
Who knows, I would love to make some changes this year, pick up some programming and design gigs again, but who knows, lots to ponder, been a busy morning thus far, already 5 hours in, and lots done, but more to do.
