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.
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.
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?
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.
Well quite a week, can’t actually believe it is Friday already! Just seems like this week has flown by and yet it is still going strong - lot of things went down this week, haven’t had a chance to really blog all that much - but it has been yowza - quite a week, to re-cap some of this week’s happenings:
Expanded my prayer & bible time by getting on Ed Young PodCast & Daily Email (linkage)
Picked up the 80GB iPod Classic (lovely)
Tried to be Sick (not so good at it)
Got a call from a old friend
Getting INC’d - thank the lord
Coded on Projects Some
Got the last of my stuff from the old office #2 (kMan’s place)
It was a fun week though, had some blips, some hiccups, but it worked, almost entirely into a “normal” sleep schedule, it’s odd going to sleep at a semi normal hour and waking up before 7am… not sure if it’ll stick - but I sort of hope it does!
I am sure there are other things I could go into detail on, the topic for one was something I had planned to talk about, but the short version is this week has been some good give and take, constantly I feel like all I do is give sometimes, but this week I got to give and take, it was nice, I have some awesome friends - now I just need to take a nap so I can hang out some more this evening, and this weekend! More Later!
Hard to believe at some level that it is friday. Crazy! But the week has drawn to a close, I just got done pushing some fixes to about 12 servers - got my usual pile of integrity checks shortly there after (few RPM upgrades) - all in all thought it went smoothly, and Apache2 support is nearing as well - so looking forward to that, and slowly migrating things to PHP5 as there is a wider support net for it.
Launched the pre-registration for a client website, some minor blips I didn’t care too much for, but I smoothed a few out, and I am working on the production sign-up form using a bit of jQuery magic -or- possibly LiveValidation - both offer some good form management, but on the jQuery end overall I can do a lot more with data for the site’s listings - I’ll give a full run down of the site and linkage once it’s production, heck I may ask for a few brave beta testers to help out, but all in due time.
Anywhoo - need to go clear my two servers from the office out of the living room, then I will either watch Monk or simply walk to the bed, and pass out… both sound enjoyable so time will tell. Have a Good Weekend Folks.
Well so far a good day, well aside from the massive mess of streets near Oswell St. but hey - even that wasn’t THAT bad I had a good day, some good prayer time, and I am still fighting thru some things, but all in all, I am alive and breathing, so its all good.
Got the first payment from the kMan, just got off the phone with him in fact and really had a nice chat, got some very awesome compliments from him (nice to get a pat on the back now and again) - we discussed plans for next week sitting down and re-arranging his servers and getting things all fancy - possibly save him a couple hundred a month in hosting bills, letting him de-commission on of his servers and get him setup in a VPS, which for 2/3 of his smaller sites would work PERFECTLY - so pretty jazzed it’s all coming together, and the idea that I may have a good steady work flow from him is a promising bit, but still, I have to really get some things rolling with FH and TN here soon, probably more so with FH, but none the less, pretty excited!
Made it to the bank with 30m to spare, got money in, and processed a payment a day early just so it’s one thing off my mind, and have funds in there to cover my insurance payment now, like 4 things appeared overnight and drained the account, and the insurance had not show up yet! So this was a nice day to get that money in, and not have to worry too much, plus I have another $425 coming this next week it looks like from odd jobs, so it’ll be nice to have a bit of a pad again, granting I don’t go too wild and buy an iPod (donations welcome!) - but time will tell on the iPod.
Website projects are going good though, going to make a bite to eat, then basically hit the code for about 2 hours, going to launch a pre-registration page for a website tomorrow, and I just have a few tiny adjustments to make to ensure the database tracks, and the AJAX bit for checking the username availability works it is a very cool feature to have in it, so I am very excited.
Anywhoo - thanks to everyone who has been keeping me in their prayers, I really do appreciate it.
- so far so good, even has Tags support via Textmate (use Keywords) - pretty slick indeed! More later.
