New Shows (Review)

The night started with “CHUCK” on NBC (the night was all NBC really) - but CHUCK was hilarious, all in all it had some fair computer humor, I did find it interesting when a computer fell over that the covers fell off the drives exposing the platters… but for most, I suppose that’d be a more understandable visual cue that “Drive Broken” - but the cast has one familiar face for me Adam Baldwin from Firefly, which for me added a nice bit of “Jayne Extreme” comedy. All in all, I’d say on a voting scale out of 5 stars, easily 4 1/2, just weary about the extent the plot can be re-played.

Heroes - the long awaited return of the series, a interesting start, some questions almost answered, and some new things rolling, like Virus Girl and Anti-Virus Boy? It was a good face paced episode, we find the fate of Peter, we see Nathan alive, but is what we see his true appearance or is he the man in the mirror? Is Sulu dead? very excited about a weekly return, granted this season looks thus far packed with shows I am going to watch, maybe it’s time to stop the BlockBuster online for a while?

Lastly tonight was Journeyman - not sure on this one either, it needed a little faster pace for me - the base story line has been built and some questions have been asked about his ability to move thru time and his purpose, but what is next? The show reminds me of a twist of Quantum Leap [link] and Early Edition [link] - and Apple/AT&T really got their foot in the door with the iPhone as it’s what the main character uses, granted I was a little sad to see them show it not allow any internet cached browsing (so I’m a nerd, little things irk me) - but the show has some promise, and at least a base to build from now - so time will tell.

More to come this week with shows, should give me a nice break in the evenings, but all in all today was nuts, just couldn’t get going, over-thinking again, not sure why - not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing - so two fold #1) Please keep me in your prayers, lots to do, feels like little time to do it, and with a tight budget, makes things even more crazy. #2) Post some comments in my last post, help me out a bit and give me some feedback as to what you’d like to see from a hosting company.

Anywhoo - midnight, part of me wants to sleep, part of me wants to clean, part of me wants to just sit and stare at the wall… ah life. Night all.

What do you actually Need?

So the question floated around in my head the majority of the day, aside from being excited about the new season of Heroes, it came down to a bit in my brain going on and on about a new hosting promotion, package, offering, special, etc. trying to build up the finances, and in some regard I want to do it quickly, it’d be nice to have a infusion of a few thousand dollars, but growth one day at a time.

So it leads me to my question, what do YOU web visitor want to see in a hosting package? I already have had folks say “Windows Hosting!” well that’s all fine and dandy, but even then - what functionality do you need to make it a sale, and have you sign-up today? That’s the question I am trying to get answered, so if you get a minute, please take a second and post a comment about what you feel would be the best bet for hosting in your mind, it can be SSH access, it can be a full-on server, but please take 2 seconds out of your busy day, and post what you need in the realm of hosting, and what you’d be willing to pay.

In other quick news, Wordpress 2.3 is pretty slick - so far so good, even has Tags support via Textmate (use Keywords) - pretty slick indeed! More later.

Spam-Be-Gone

One of the main tools in this new anti-spam system is DSPAM and I must say I quite enjoy it, it’s filtering has been more dead-on than SA, not saying SA can’t be tuned, but just out of the box this seems (thus far) to be doing a lot better, for example…

My dad’s Spam Stats for the last 24 hours, my dad’s email has become a spam-trap (actually that’s my moms) - but all in all, this has done great, some mini-false positives here and there but the DSPAM WebUI is wonderful for managing the Quarantine of spam, and re-training the system what is good, what is bad.

So for the last 12 hours I have moved TN to this filter, and so far so good, like 2 marked as spam that were not, but now it has been trained they are good. So I am thinking if TN looks good tomorrow, FH will follow suit and get anti-spam’d long-term I want to work to really re-configure the system to work off domain, not per-user-account created, I want to make it simple as a pass-through spam proxy, so I can migrate entire servers to this anti-spam solution and give everyone a more robust solution against spam, and in the end, help take some load of SA on the server side of each server.

So this week I am hoping to really push some sales, get some finances in check, and first and foremost get some bills paid off, secondly get monthly revenues up, so I could definitely use some prayers - I want to continue to raise profits, and get things even more streamlined, but it just seems things keep holding me back, but this week my hope is some of the projects pay off, and things can continue to grow and expand and allow me to get my own place, get a stable/steady monthly budget, so hopefully this week will enter a few good things like a new Credit Card processing system including Discover and AMEX, but also expansion into the new billing system and getting folks all up-to-date in their billing, so I know where I really stand on some things - so lift a few up for me, and if you have some spare cash just lying around, feel free to send it to me

Anywhoo - this night seems to be dragging on and on, a tad bored really, though at 10:30pm I suppose I should be sleeping… who knows maybe soon, for now though, I’ll say good night and take care!

Hi, My Name is Chuck

So for the record, I didn’t die. It may of seemed like it, but the truth of the matter is - I got fed up with SPAM, so of course, I do what any good server nerd would do…. start testing everything I can get my hands on - and I came across some great tutorials, some great software, and sort of did a mix of them all to see what I could come up with, and I think I made myself a pretty nice proxy for mail, basically the way mail flows now is as such:

Outside World -> Filter -> (if clean) -> Server

So it’s pretty nice, reduces the load of servers a bit, but the catch to the system as-is, there was no front-end to manage users in the system, so in other words, I unlike my other option (which wasn’t supported by most Datacenters) which was easy simply add the domain, it did the rest, this one requires each… user… for…. each…. domain….. to… be… added. So the original method was using phpMyAdmin to manage a database layer which managed users, which while was handy, for adding say, oh I don’t know 350 users, would be a pain in the but to do at some level, so what did I do? Spent the last two days developing and deploying a very ugly, but functional PHP application which while not GREAT code, it works and allows me to make as many users at one time as needed, so if I want to add all the users on a single domain all I do is make it as such “user:password” - the system does the rest, whatever domain it is managing it appends that domain to the user so say I was using this domain, it’d append @charlesabrown.com to the name for me automatically.

Needless to say I was pretty happy, and the system has some great tools for the end users which I didn’t code, but I am going to spruce up and customize a wee bit to make pretty for my customers, but so far the testing has gone really well - my parents both have accounts on a domain I own, and they were test subjects, so far it’s tagged about 4 good as spam, but that is because I have things turned up to the highest filtering on their two accounts, simply because they get a decent amount of spam, so currently as their MX records update, they are getting a slow steady stream of things going into their Quarantine - it’s lovely.

So that’s where I have been - My goal is to spruce up the code over the next week or so and make a interface for end users, thus it’s hard wired to a customer domain, so if a customer wants the filtering - they have full access to add users, and create new logins for the training interface for their users, needless to say, very nifty!

Tomorrow I am getting my car washed, my friends are working a car wash for my old Jr. High’s music dept. and quite frankly I am a sucker for music programs and I want to do my part, told them if they sold candy too I’d buy it all up but with some light rain, a little car wash will do nicely I hope! But other than that, no major plans for the weekend, I know I have some things to do around here (read: clean room more), and I am still trying to get the budget happy so I can get on my way to an apartment, so if anyone wants to give me money on a constant basis, please do! Heck I’d even work for it if needs be… well work within reason.

Anywhoo - thats really the catch-up of things, a pretty nice week, some good things taken care of, have some sites to clear from servers tonight, and some final bits of billing to adjust for customers, but all in all, tonight should be mellow, I think since no one has responded to going to Denny’s later, I am going to go put in a pizza, and then watch last night’s Burn Notice finale, next week all the good TV starts, how will I get any work done?

Parting Video:

Free Earl!

Tonight as I goto sleep, I leave you with this video:

Hope you enjoy! Night all

Billing, Support, Site Moves… Yay!

So today has been quite the Monday, but in a good way, just busy busy. I solved a Frontpage server issue, which was nice, well by solve I mean the customer hasn’t come back saying it didn’t work, but it’s only 2:30pm so the day is still young! But there have been some nice things evolving here for me, so far very nicely:

• New Billing System Reviewed - I enjoy it, I think Customers will too!
• New Credit Card Processor - Lots of good reviews around the web, applying tomorrow - hope it helps fix up processing issues.
• New Server Setup - Been wanting to do this for a while, not 100% up thus far, but by Friday hope to move support/main websites to a new server.
• New Affiliate Application - To help encourage sales around, I am going to give an affiliate program a whirl, should be fun!
• New TN Website - Layout is simple - not going for a lot of FLASH, just going for lots of clean, simple, concise information.

But all in all, quite a day, still a lot to do on all these projects, as well as on a few others, but it’s a start, hopefully this week I’ll get more info on the other client projects in the wings right now, as well as some side work for the kMan, would be nice, a good day thus far, though I am hoping to take a short cat-nap @ 5pm and then come back to it into the evening (unless I get a invite to dinner) - but the billing stuff looks awesome! Pretty excited overall, means a full billing audit & transfer, but well worth it!

Anywhoo - back to it, few more hours to put in before a good break… okay okay, maybe a short break to play a game really quick… lol. More later.

Ah a new week….

Weekends are always… well uneventful, mainly I use them for sleep, or getting into trouble (muwhahaha) but this weekend was nice, got to hang out with some friends and have some food (which they paid for, thank you Noah & Rosie) - heck they even bought me ice cream - total score but also got to have some good times hangin with the kMan at his new temporary office which is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from me down the freeway, which is pretty cool, even got a key!

But the new week is coming, and I am actually pretty excited about it, get some more money coming in - tomorrow I find out about some server services, which could infuse the business a bit more, which is nice, also helps me pay some bills, not to mention get one step closer to an apartment, so pretty jazzed indeed, already increased the monthly revenue about $350 a month, just need to keep it rolling and keep the side work flowing aside from hosting, I really want to try and wing it before years end for real this year, so some work this week as well on the hosting front’s finishing up a re-vamped/re-tooled TN and get a new special/touch-up the FH site which just had it’s back-end all updated to all the newer security patches, went very smoothly.

Keep me in your prayers, while I know not a TON of you read this daily (heck I don’t post daily) - I know some of you check in on this now and again, and I’d appreciate some prayers, really working hard to find a good balance in life between work / family / friends / and most importantly faith - so hopefully as things level out these next few weeks I can really make a good effort to get things taken care of in that respect, not to mention finding a nice apartment in a good area, already have 2 places picked out from online, I need to go out and see what they are like aside from what the monitor shows me already have had several friends in town offer help in moving, so very grateful for that.

Anywhoo - thanks for stopping by, thanks for taking a minute to read this ol fart’s blog of thoughts, hopefully this week will turn out as good as last week! Take care all, have a good week!