So another night, another “Will I goto sleep!?” question floating in my head, I am thinking of going for a drive - but time will tell I am currently looking over my “Social Networks” to see if anything exciting is going on, granted I check Facebook more than MySpace, but none the less I am poking around them all, and sometimes it just boggles the mind on services like MySpace and Twitter - why just add everyone? I mean granted you could become “more social?” but at the same time who has the ability (or time) to keep up with 8000+ people? I mean really, at some point after 125 I see it becoming white noise - thus why I am happy with my small # of people, that I actually know, have conversations with, and occasionally in some cases - see in real life.
The new week has some new fun ahead (I hope) tomorrow will be a light day, really focusing on working around the ol house a bit, with occasional breaks to work on the web, but I really want to continue my adventure into cleaning my room, which does mean tomorrow will be a day of possibly buying furniture - but really I imagine I’ll just be around here most of the day working to do some filing and such, then in the evening, maybe a nice dinner with some friends if anyone is game.
Website wise, I have been toying with a website, and as it seems more and more there are more folks who were old CMCentral.com staff cropping up with websites which all have a similar (not exactly the same) feel/direction to them, I do want something different, something original, but it seems a majority of the folks I’d have help all want sort of what everyone else is doing lol - but I do want to get a site up and running again, over the last 2 years I have written some code that’d make managing a website pretty easy, not to mention some good setups for syndication of articles written - but I need to finish writing up a game plan, as no one else is going to do it for me, but I am going to setup a Wiki with a layout as I see it, then have folks jump in and help flesh out the details for each area.
Anywhoo - life is crazy, I don’t understand it a lot lately, budget will be tight another month it looks like, but it’s becoming the norm, so not too worried, but my hope, my desire, my goal, is to get it back on par by years end - if not sooner, and like I have said, by the start of 2008 be ready to get a new place. So prayers are appreciated, thanks for reading my ramblings, and I’m off - maybe some tacos…. mmmm tacos.
Back in the day if I was hungry, I’d make a run to Taco Bell - mainly because it was one of the few places open 24/7 - but then Jack in the Box started 24/7 a while back, and then we got the Denny’s, and now a DelTaco on our side of town, and yet with all those choices, I really really am craving 2 tacos for 99c from Jack, they are cheap, they are simple, they are tasty. Sure sure it’s 4:30am, but for me this is the start of a normal day lol.
Not sure if I am going to go, but I’m craving it - and the kitchen is kind of lacking at the moment, so it’s that or run to the store for supplies, which doesn’t sound too fun lol - ah the joys of being awake when no one else is!
So in browsing ol CompUSA this early AM I saw they had OSX10.5 for $99 - it’s $129 up front like I’d get it from Apple, but 2 things - 1) It’s a quick pickup. 2) It’s a $30 rebate - so I’ll have to wait a little for the savings, but a deal is a deal, going to go in this week before Friday and make sure they’ll have it in stock, if not I’ll just wait till they do.
Didn’t get much sleep last night, just a lot on my mind, and a lot of things I am trying to get sorted - things that shouldn’t be in my life, and trying to get things in my life that should be there - busy busy - I just really want to get things in a little bit more stable area than they have been the last 3 months, and the billing migration is one of those things, once things all settle I am going to be able to login via a mobile login via the Dash and do what I need from the road, anytime, anywhere - so a major plus indeed.
Health wise things are going okay, lost some weight, been trying to be a little more active when I can be, but also trying to be good on what I eat, but that also ties back into the budget, as it’s odd that foods that are “good” for you tend to cost more than those you can just pickup and eat… go figure but I am going to keep at it, and try to keep the pounds coming off this ol computer nerd.
On the other side of health, as you can see by the time stamp, its 2:30 - and yes, I am awake, after migrations that go past 5am, I tend to take a few days to level out, but migrations that end up waking me up 2 hours after I goto sleep, several times, for several hours, that’s another story all together lol - but I am just glad it’s done - it has all leveled out it seems, got no calls Saturday which was a plus, but all in all, it seems good - plus beyond the obvious bit of getting paid, it’ll be nice to throw in some additional services from the migration as there were a TON of outdated scripts, I am going to release a similar upgrade service via FH/TN as many folks install via auto-installers like Fantastico, Installatron, etc. and they don’t keep things upgraded, which leads to hacks, which is not a good thing now matter how you look at it.
Work side, I am wanting to work on infrastructure again - it’s been 6 months since the last big shake-up, de-commissioning old servers, migrating to new ones, the move went pretty well, but with everything getting audited via the migration to the new billing system - my hope, my goal, is to add a few more servers to the fleet using virtual servers, which means a BIG BIG BIG Server - I am thinking 4-8 Core, with 6-8GB of ram, storage is the one thing I am looking at seriously, as I want something super redundant, but also tolerant of 2 disk failures, so needless to say, this is not going to be cheap in the least. Part of me wishes local bandwidth was better, and more affordable, I’d love to build a datacenter in town and really do it up the way I have in my head.
Anywhoo - slowly rolling up on 3am here, I am feeling a little hungry, and the ol muscles are sore from what I am guessing is a cold as I’ve been running a temp most of the day, so I am going to go find something warm and tasty to eat, and then I think I am going to try sleep again - have a blessed Sunday folks.
As a random note, I really enjoy blogging from Textmate - it’s a awesome text editor, and the bonus bundles add some wonderful functionality, the blogging is awesome, let’s me manage all my blogs, a familiar markup, good times - but on with the blog!
A good end to the week if I do say so myself, it was busy, it was crazy, and I by no means got done all the things I had hoped to get done, but such is life, and it goes on! Monday I plan to get TN moving more forward, maybe some work over the weekend on content, plus I hope to have some of the new Exchange services up and running soon for public sign-up, as well as the new interface for the anti-spam tool, the PHP front end is coming along, going to convert some of the code to PHP5 to streamline some things, but all in all, it’s a wonderful little setup, just need to spend some time on the design.
Got to goto the movies tonight with Sis and Bro-in-law, my cousin, and my friend - it was a hilarious movie Balls of Fury good laughs, got to come home to more wonderful billing system happenings, which was a nice thing to see, happy the new system is kicking butt and taking names, I hope to deploy it on TN this next week with it’s site revamp - and slowly, 100% phase out ItsMyBill & MyTroubleTicket - though long-term I may bring MTT back as a system for reselling white-label tech support for hosting companies, as I do work for a few, might be a nice service to offer.
I picked up a shirt tonight for $10! Very excited:
It’s a fun design, and for $10 I couldn’t say no, as I am slowly having clothing fall apart, need some new shorts soon too, so time to build up the clothing budget again, I figure on most of these shirts that last over 3 years are good shirts pretty nice though, I picked it up via Woot.com’s Shirt Woot - got the RSS feed for it now next to the normal Woot - hopefully over the next few months I can snag a few cool designs.
All in all, I survived this week, been a lot going on in my ol head, money has been tight, making some cutbacks till things level out with re-structuring hosting/billing - but when that is done, just the re-structure alone is going to add $250 roughly to my monthly budget, just the joy of lowering costs, and if I can close a few partnerships for things like Domains/SSL - I can increase profit margins a bit, but at the same time lower costs a little for customers.
So there it is - here’s to hoping for a semi-relaxing weekend, and if at all possible, a productive week to follow. Night folks.
So last night was a long one. Then it was followed up with a far too early start to more or less tell me what the emails I sent out said were possible glitches, but since no one was warned about the migration (not my servers/clients mind you) - I was woke up to deal with PHP5 issues… yay! It was all tiny stuff, but it required some research on why each app broke under PHP5, granted I could of stayed PHP4, but the core goal of this migration was to ensure a “Rock Star”’s website was functional in the morning and fully migrated without a hitch - that meant the migration of 3GB of data, email, etc. but in the end, I had to go PHP5 as it was coded in PHP5, and the new server is now upgraded to PHP5 + Apache 2.2 - and somehow I imagine there are still bugs to be told.
The rest of my day was more or less shot from that point out, I still need to do some things, but I think I am going to try and just pass out here soon, as tomorrow I have a bank run, mail run, and CompUSA run (checking to see if they’ll have leopard next friday) - but it seems like it’ll all go smoothly I think, just sleep being the key thing I need to take care of, but this is one thing for sure - no more mid-week migrations unless I am getting paid a MASSIVE amount of money, as it washes me out for a few days.
Well that’s really about it - a mini-vent, hopefully tomorrow’s various runs around town will result in some additional funds in the bank, a few check customers have been slow as of late - I also need to see about getting a PO Box for real - something closer to me that’s easy to check any and all hours of the day vs. driving across town to go check mail for nothing - but thats another blog for another day another time etc. I am going to go now, lay my head on my pillow, and fade away into a restful night’s slumber. Night folks.
So tonight rings in the migrations, I have a customer who I will call “k” yes that’s lowercase k, not to be confused with K - TOTALLY different people - but migration thus far is going smooth, going to make some changes to DNS slowly as I can’t do a bulk change since not everything on the server is coming over to this light weight VPS, but shouldn’t be too difficult really - the VPS is smokin though, about a website over a minute, so pretty jazzed to see the wonderful performance - still need to get more ram added, but not a major deal, already have it priced, and just working on getting it ordered, and a window for upgrading.
The iPhone in Feb will get an official SDK from Apple, all I can say is “about time” - one of my main gripe (aside from the use of AT&T) is the lack of apps without hacking the phone up voiding warranty, my hope is also as the new year rolls around that Apple gets a step closer to a unlocked GSM model, thus killing another thing off the list of why I won’t get one, but I suppose one step at a time, and the SDK is a major step for Apple, now if they can just get 10.5 out and happy
Been looking at downgrading cable again, as I have noted before the digital packaging just sucks, not a lot to it, that I didn’t get with the old system, so I am looking at building up a nice DVR - found the parts @ Newegg I want, a 939 dual core AMD is cheap! 2.2ghz = $70, so look at that, and mainly a media center case with a set of PVR150’s it’s not that bad, basically upgrading what is currently bfp under my desk into a media center rig, as it was meant to be, and then I’d bring ol sparky back online after a good dusting, with a few HD’s on board to continue the mission as a backup/dev box - probably a fresh install of Ubuntu 7.10 for it, but all in all it’d be awesome.
All in all, things though seem to be going good, I am just hoping this doesn’t go too late, but it probably will, watching an account moving over, that probably wasn’t meant to be in the list (yay) - but the night goes on I guess, have a good one folks, I’ll probably post more later if I am still awake.
So it seems you can save $20 off the retail price of 10.5 if you purchase via Amazon.com - not a horrible deal, but still means you run the gambit of getting 10.5 late, as some delivery companies aren’t prepared for the massive pre-orders, like with Harry Potter, some folks saw their pre-order days later.
I am not sure of my purchase plan as of yet, as one Canadian asked if I was going to get the family pack, I think I am going to hold off in general, or simply goto my local CompUSA in the AM and just pick it up then as I imagine they’ll have it, if not, there’s always the 2hr drive to visit my brother and his local apple store but time will tell.
I am currently looking over my “Social Networks” to see if anything exciting is going on, granted I check Facebook more than MySpace, but none the less I am poking around them all, and sometimes it just boggles the mind on services like MySpace and Twitter - why just add everyone? I mean granted you could become “more social?” but at the same time who has the ability (or time) to keep up with 8000+ people? I mean really, at some point after 125 I see it becoming white noise - thus why I am happy with my small # of people, that I actually know, have conversations with, and occasionally in some cases - see in real life. 
but I am going to keep at it, and try to keep the pounds coming off this ol computer nerd.
- not a horrible deal, but still means you run the gambit of getting 10.5 late, as some delivery companies aren’t prepared for the massive pre-orders, like with Harry Potter, some folks saw their pre-order days later.
