So what does one do when their internet is down? Oh relaxes… takes a nap… nothing? Naw - most of the day the internet has been down at 9:30am or so access just stopped, connections I had to servers went down, email pop’d up saying it couldn’t reach the server, and of course IM logged out of everything, so it seems I’d have no access today, but of course one thing I had been thinking about dropping from my cell phone plan, came in very handy (as it is being used now too) GPRS/EDGE on T-Mobile, the Dash is sitting over on the printer in sharing mode and a little Bluetooth PAN is setup between the Mac & the Dash.
So internet access hasn’t be stellar, but it was enough to get online and keep an eye on things through out the day, and so far so good, I just called my cable company again and the automated message notes that it will be down “most of the evening” so that translates to “See you in the morning!” which isn’t a HUGE deal, I do have unlimited data on the plan, so I am in no-risk of some major overage, and if I REALLY need speed - granting Starbucks doesn’t use my provider, I can always get a cup of tea & surf at a T-Mobile hotspot.
So prayers for the techs workin on this, they had 2 major outages today, one was a fiber cut, so I imagine a majority of techs went off on that, and now that its off the list, we *MIGHT* be back up soon, but I’m not holding my breath.
Anywhoo, off to find dinner! Or at least a snack… what to eat… what to eat…
Posted on 25 September '07 by Chuck Brown, under General. No Comments.
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.
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!
Well my old old old old (insert additional old’s) keyboard was having some issues, just seemed to take more and more to get the thing to type, things like oh I don’t know “spacebar” decided on occasion not to work, or the E key would simply not work either - so after thinking about it and watching CompUSA (wanted to see it first) I decided to venture down and give the new Apple keyboard a demo, the feel is actually rather nice, I saw the new iMac’s and I must say - still not impressed, Apple makes nice stuff, but at the same time its the iMac, I had hoped for some innovation in the all-in-one design, but at least it had the keyboard attached for demo.
It is very nice, still haven’t done the apple keyboard update, requires me to reboot, and I have things running for a while, so I can’t really shut down just yet, but probably tomorrow - but all in all, it is a nice feel, sleek look, and things plug in really nicely. Now I just need a Mac Pro and 2 big monitors, and I am set!
Tomorrow flags a new day, some things on the todo include - some CSS, working to make a little “Client Preview” app to replace the ol static HTML, everything will run off a txt file and let me do updates a LOT faster vs. by hand editing some HTML code, all formatting will just work, once it’s done, its easy to update and then some - also the more pressing project is to finish the first run of the sign-up app, still fiddling with AJAX to do dynamic username lookups, but I may ditch that and do a secondary screen after failure that says “Your name was taken” and have them choose another, or simply pick the username first before they re-enter passwords and such 30 times.
So! I am going to wrap it up and call it a night, as much as I’d love to stay up I want to try and keep a semi-regular sleep schedule, granted it’ll be ruined tomorrow with the eclipse, and mars, but hey such is life but tomorrow I have a lot to get done, and more fun playing with the new billing system which I think will become the new backend for billing/support on FH - and soon will do the same for TN - joy joy
Anywhoo - have a good week folks, thanks for the prayers, im’s and kind donations - who hopefully this week will go well, and who knows, in time that ol iPod may be mine again. Night!
So… hi! Yeah, I am awake, had been planning to make this a code-a-thon night, basically work on a project, run a dvd on that screen -> and then just code till I passed out, however a call from a 707 # changed that - the alarm company at the office downtown had be triggered, there was a glass break, they asked my desire, I said “call bpd, i’ll get dressed” thus I got out of my relaxing pj’s and headed to the wonderful world of downtown.
On the way I got a call from Ms. Julie, and tracked down finally Mr. K - got there first and saw the damage, big hole in the glass front-door, talked with BPD, they got my info, everything was intact, nothing stolen, one of the employees had left his monitor on a pretty mac screen saver viewable from the door, they threw a rock thru, but that was some thick glass (I swept it up, I know!) but in the end Kman finally showed up, and helped re-enforce the “cardboard” fix, with a scrap piece of a old door, we screwed it on over the taped cardboard, a lot more sturdy.
So just got home, going to go out again, going to take my mom’s car to get it gassed up for her, and get my self a chocolate milk yes I am so going to treat myself just a crazy night, but we’ll see if I amp down and pass out, or if I am still up and about, who knows, may get my code-a-thon after all.
Anywhoo, life news tomorrow, hopefully some good news to tell about a job, trying to pitch some services to folks, new backup server, new redundant 3rd node DNS, etc. - Good Stuff.
Posted on 1 August '07 by Chuck Brown, under my day. No Comments.
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!
So my order came in today, and I must say its all good, the 3.5inch drive enclosure is pretty slick, going to start sorting drives and making a pile for low-level formats, or dad’s big-o magnet
The printer is awesome, I can scan from any computer in the house, so say I was in the living room, on my laptop, and I wanted to scan a page - I fire up Photoshop, and while it’s loading (CS2, need CS3 for faster) - go put the scan on the printer, and come back and hit scan in the living room, it saves the data to my computer! Network printing and scanning - oh-so-lovely.
The MacBook Pro (aka MyFruit) looks good, it’s new cover is wonderful (linkage) - the Apple is still see thru so folks know I am using a Mac when I’m out and about, and hopefully this coming week I’ll get some sleep at night vs. mid-day the other add-on to MyFruit was the portable 120GB drive, its a notebook drive so it requires no additional power, I formatted it to MacOS vs. FAT32 so I could get over the 4GB limit crap, and moved my Parallels images to it, so now I have Vista (which is angry at me) and XP on the drive and can load up Windows on either my iMac or MBP anytime - it has a pretty good access speed, even played Warcraft 3 on it (Parallels 3 support for DirectX) - its pretty schweet.
Tomorrow I have some work to do, invoices, and a letter to a newer customer who hasn’t paid in a month, but they are new so I’m shooting off a letter (they are local) so see what’s up, and help where I can - but all in all things are good, got invited to a poker game later today @ Scott’s - one catch is I still don’t know how to play poker after last time I went to play poker with the boys - lol - so we’ll see, I have some work around here, and my stomach has been odd (threw up today… ugh) - so we shall see how I feel in the AM.
Anywhoo - that’s my rundown, not much of a Friday for relaxing really - but I’m alive, little worn out, but no worse for wear. So have a good weekend folks!
