So tonight is it. The big move (just started). Granted it’s not 100% done, but the last move is mainly of FH/TN websites, so that’ll go Tuesday at the latest - mainly want to keep it in one place till after a day or two of tickets is taken care of, but Thursday I’ll be requesting the other servers be shut down - which still leaves me with a bill, but something manageable, until I can relocate that final server - then I can be completely off the old provider.
It’s busy lately it seems, we met up at 9pm last night to see a old friend, however we never heard back that’d he was coming, but we figured - never hurts to try - so instead we had a fun dinner, and I had a nice chat with Jacob, it was a fun evening, I finished it up with some more relaxing - almost too relaxed for tonight, but I am hoping some moving around here at 6:30pm tonight will help wake me up a bit - but the move seems like it should be pretty straight forward, just have to move data, upgrade DNS, and only thing I can see as a “bad” thing is having to re-compile PHP4 on some servers, as I am sure there are some issues I’d rather simply not deal with right now, so I’d be going PHP4 on maybe 2 servers tops.
Got some more work today it seems, still waiting to hear back from EE on the final bits of it, I need to get RM up and online this weekend too - had hoped to get it last Monday, but I just have been so beat from these moves, thankfully this is the last weekend, then I may have a standard 9-5 so a semi-normal sleep schedule steady pay checks, rebuild my savings, get an apartment, build a time-machine, etc. etc. - so preparing for some big changes.
Just got in from a fun evening with the guys, it was pretty fun, had a good meal, some painful GH3, some ice cream from ColdStone - a good relaxing fun to lead into server migrations - so thus I am sitting here with the iPod crankin my car playlist, going to code some between packaging accounts - maybe sneak in a nap later… time will tell Prayers are appreciated! Oh and on my Grandma, they put a shunt in one valve and the meds had helped the other - so she’s going to get to go home on Sunday it looks like! Thanks for the prayers!
More later! Off I go to get this migration rolling!
An amazing day thus far (oh it’s not over yet!) - so far it’s just been a major blessing, got to hang out with my pseudo daughter lol - aka the Foster’s daughter Carlie who’s a sweetie and since we both have red-hair were part of the redhead family, so we hung out today, same with Ethan and Evan occasionally coo’d at me - tasty ice cream, snagged a Chocolate Shake with Malt and PeanutButter! Delish!
After that, I went to dinner, mainly to sit and visit, not so much to eat, but it was fun, got to chat with Matt, his Dad, and play with Evan and help Carlie eat her fries (okay okay, I ate one of the pizza pieces too) - but it was fun, and sad to see them go, but I think my plan will be to fix up their computer and take it up to them one day, get out of dodge for a while, and get a good visit in
Well I got a curious email from a customer with a screen shot which told me this:
Failure on Email servers - so I explored it a bit more, the cause? Firewall. LOL - so many new anti-spam and backscatter spam RBL and Firewall rules in place, it fails that test on DNS Stuff, sure enough, anything on the new server reports this, but the awesome thing is how much spam this is blocking, so much stuff gets hits from RBL’s and such - RBL = Real Time Black List - I am still looking at the ASSP solutions for cPanel, I like the fact that customers can work to train things, so going to setup a cPanel box after everything is off the old servers and migrated over, once things are happy - then I am going to setup a dev box, set d4t on it, and do some email testing with ASSP.
Anywhoo - the night is young! Have to draft up a email to TN customers/friends and a few servers I am moving this next weekend, each has a separate line, so it shouldn’t be so bad one night should do it, but if not, I’ll have a secondary plan in place, going to move Business then too - this way I can test the PHP5/MySQL5 of their custom coding and ensure it works - but tonight, mindless fun awaits, maybe Denny’s? LOL time will tell. More later.
One of the downsides of course to going for weeks with little sleep is your health, and in my case, I know my limits on sleep, well one side effect is of course pain as the body is exhausted, another is for me a family favorite - throwing up. Thus this morning as I was getting ready for church I urp’d and urp’d good - of course I felt better afterwards, cleaned up and was only 10m late for church.
Church was fun, and I am glad I didn’t just wimp out and go back to sleep (Faith is Done now, all accounts over) - got to sit next to Scott and His Dad, got to see Dan and Val, and a good portion of the Poon family, the nephews were there and I scared members of the church as I gave Gavin a big hug, and then I proceeded to share the secret of shirt.woot.com as he enjoyed my sugar rush t-shirt.
So a fun morning, and more things this afternoon, but for now, I can get at least 3 hours of sleep in before the Foster’s shin-dig, so going to try and nap a bit, then load up, and head towards the ice-creamery, I am thinking of a shake with Chocolate, Malt, and maybe Carmel, or PB - not sure so many choices, so little time - anywhoo, thanks to everyone for the prayers, don’t worry, tonight’s move is really just 3 sites, it’s a low-profile smaller server, all the BIG stuff for this weekend is done, next weekend is the move of 2 other smaller systems, but by no means the collective GB’s of data this one had this weekend, so sleep is coming, promise.
Anywhoo - I am off, one more day of the house to myself, tonight aside from sleep I hope to get some headway on my bedroom. Okay, processing a ‘break;’ on random rambling, more later I am sure. Good Sunday to All!
Today ended up being a great day, got a great gift from BdG (big thanks sir!) which really set the day in motion, some more research through out the day, also got some reading material on a project website for my Uncle’s tent stakes, follow that up with a check coming in (PTL!) which led to a few other things, like dinner with dad (LJS Chicken Planks + Hush Puppies!), it was a good evening.
Then it was back to work. I started basic prep on Faith for it’s upgrade to PHP5/Apache2 (compiling now) and placed an order for a server to test out over the next 24 hours to see if I want to make the plunge for sure - the project server is lovingly called Trogdor, he’s a dragon-man of a machine, 8 cores, RAID10, *tear* a nice upgrade, got the call confirming my order, had a nice chat with “Jake” the guy on the other end, he loved the server name of Trogdor, suggested Burninator as another option for other projects down the line (It is officially on the list) - but he said he’d have me up in about an hour, and he had me running in 45 minutes.
So far so good though on both fronts, Faith is at 15 minutes now compiling, and Trogdor has gotten some of the royal lock down treatment, while their initial locks were nice, and some of the mods they have in place I am definitely leaving, I run a tight ship, so have to have them help with a few network tweaks and such on their end to make my life happy, but all in all, it’s looking good, speed is amazing, seeing 8 cores in top is a lovely sight but I think it’s going to work. Sure sure, it’ll mean some changes from the current way I monitor, and such, but really, the savings is a motivator, the growth potential is amazing, and of course, it gives me another set of eyes monitoring, keeping up the server etc. which in itself is like hiring a crew to stand watch as I do things like Sleep.
Also today I talked possiblity of a local job, it’s one I am really going to pray about, but it was one of those things that just leapt from my mouth, and just felt right, but then I found myself saying “Why did I say that?” so I am putting it to a God thing, and see where it goes, who knows, may all work out just right, may not, none the less, if it does, possibly means no moving, and maybe, just maybe I’ll be in my own place by my birthday!
But that was my day, as I go into Saturday, I lead into things by having picked up my mom from my sister’s house as they returned from a Lakers game with my Aunt, then its onto a site-by-site check on Faith to see if anything has post PHP5 upgrade blues that I can easily fix, or at the very least point the site owners to upgrade options to get themselves back on track, but after a few month or two that this upgrade was coming - I hope everyone is up to date, or at least one hot-fix shy. So now I am going to find my shoes, and pack up to head towards my sister’s house - one step at a time.
So a busy night. After my internet went out this afternoon, I gave up and just loafed, which means of course more work today, but hey what can you do when they are doing “brief work” on your line that lasts for 4 hours. LoL. So then I hung out with my sister and brother in law here, my packages came… one was pretty obvious that they figured out, the new 26inch LCD TV for the bedroom, the other ones weren’t so easy. I picked up a Xbox360, a Video card and a TV Tuner for the AMD rig, going to build a nice little Vista rig to do media, I got a good card, linux compatible if I get bored, but I want to link vista up with the 360, so we’ll see how that goes.
So I got things setup, signed up for live, then of course it was Nacho time. Tasty. Fun. Exhausting. We played GH3, Rock Band, and just hung out and munched on some grindage (buuuudy!) - twas fun, left around 11:30, but a good nice, relaxing, fun evening - good friends, some I hadn’t seen in a while, Rock Band was new and fun, but not really my cup of tea.
So that leads me up to now, Money issues, only partial payment from the kMan is expected, which made me sad - he had said he’d adjust his budget to accommodate, but I guess he too is having the money flow problems - then one of my big accounts had their card fail, so not sure what’s up there, but I contacted em, and I was assured one way or another it’d be fixed up, so really, nothing to worry about, especially if I go check my Mail and there is a nice pile of checks, which I am hoping for - but all in all, I hope I don’t have to fidget funds again.
I am now waiting for Vista to install, my copy hasn’t really done much, ran it on Parallels but really not much in the realm of speed - so I am hoping as a stand-alone media rig, it’ll do nicely, be able to record some TV, and since most of the shows I watch aren’t in HD to begin with, no major loss, probably just ditch HD cable here at the first of the year, and build a home-brew DVR for the house. So pretty excited, it’s at 40% extracting, and it’s being navigated with my old Apple Keyboard (tee-hee) - so good stuff indeed.
Anywhoo - back to it, need to go over some of my nightlies, have a meeting with the kMan around lunch to get a check, maybe even sneak in some sleep here somewhere, not sure where - but somewhere, and soon I hope so I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, pictures coming soon!
So a week done, some crazy stuff for a Friday, got a fraudulent order, they charged someone else’s card over $120 for hosting from me, first thing that was odd, the IP - a server in California - not a ISP, not a proxy, just a server with 1 website - second bit was the Colorado based phone number that didn’t work, and third, I found the person’s address to match - so I called their # in the white pages and left a message, sad folks steal information like that - but Today I got another order, still need to square it away - going to try and do so before I pass out tonight.
Got my short from Old Navy, perfect fit, oh-so-comfy, only thing they changed on this line of shorts (Painter Shorts) is the mysterious 3rd pocket, it’s super small. It made me cry - but then I realized how nice and comfy they are, ah to have good shorts again, hopefully these will last another year and a half like the last pair
Health wise, getting decent sleep, granted the UPS last night claims it detected like 3 outages, so I got in this morning and shut off the annoying alert buzz when it blinks off - I need to do some more checking on it this week probably do that Wednesday or so, do the full test on it and the power-loss test as well, its old, may be ready to be run down and brought back up to calibrate it, I think it’s been a year since it’s last calibration - but tonight, it won’t wake me every hour with 2 beeps.
Affiliate program is coming to FH & TN - the latest upgrade on the billing system allows me to make some cool rules, like client must be active 30 days before payout, so I can make some rules to ensure folks don’t just have friends sign-up to get some free hosting/cash out of me, as that’s the last thing I’d want to happen.
Work - been getting a decent amount of it here lately, not a major problem to keep up, just trying to line up more regular work so the monthly budget looks happier and get a step closer to an apartment, or rent for the house if my parents move out again, ah the joys of parents - but I am hoping with a new server client coming online this month towards the end (when I finish code) and some more coding projects here and there, I hope to get the budget up just enough to start savings for first and last month’s rent and find me a nice place to call my own, so I can move my house worth of stuff to my own house vs piled in my room.
Anywhoo - thats the run down I think, had fun with the McNutt’s and the Sherman at our 2nd weekly dinner @ Denny’s - maybe if we do it again this next week we’ll mix it up and try some place new, who knows - but this next time it’s my turn to pick up the bill, so cheap? LOL have a blessed Sunday folks, I am off to find dinner (yes at nearly 11pm) - I hope it’s tasty.
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.
Prayers are appreciated! Oh and on my Grandma, they put a shunt in one valve and the meds had helped the other - so she’s going to get to go home on Sunday it looks like! Thanks for the prayers!
pretty nice though, I picked it up via Woot.com’s 
