And breathe….

So today I gathered $585 dollars in total, $580 in checks, and $5 for installing MacBook ram for a guy, so quite a complete day, but it’s nice to have funds fixing up nicely, and getting back on track, and not only that, being blessed to get a buffer back, which I figured would take some time, some php, and strange side jobs.

I also got the last of the smaller servers setup, while smaller, still 8cores, less ram, less storage, but mainly for some side projects and smaller customers, so pretty happy that in servers alone I am saving some decent coinage, but still getting great hardware, performance on my blog alone has been wonderful, tonight after Denny’s (yes 3rd night in a row) I plan to migrate friend websites over, so friends, be-ware!

Okay - so Apple, while I may use a iMac day in / day out - and have a MacBook Pro, at heart I am a PC user, not a “WINDOWS” user, but a Personal Computer user, so anything that runs on a PC, be it Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, whateva! I am there, in the house alone I have XP, Vista, 10.4, 10.5, Ubuntu, and a small appliance running Gentoo - but that’s a secret - so when MacWorld comes around, the Stevenote while cool sometimes comes off a little “high and mighty”, and this year really was a bit much for my tastes.

The new stuff “eh” - while I will admit out of EVERYTHING shown today, the only thing which really makes half my eyebrow perk up is the 2nd Gen AppleTV - while it’s not the first time it’s been done, and nor is it something I couldn’t do with a off the shelf unit with some Linux magic, the idea I no longer need a system tied to it, a nice thought, but the price still keeps me away for now, maybe when I am rich and famous.

I kept hoping Air would have more redeeming qualities than a multi-touch trackpad, for me that was it, that was the only feature I found cool, the form factor to me seemed more like someone who needed a ultra portable word processor / email rig - something like Palm tried to make with the Foleo but in the end even it ultimately died before it began - but the unit didn’t preach to me and say “Covert unbeliever!!!” it screamed “I AM OVERPRICED, BUT THIN!” I could see it coming in at around $1,000, but knowing Apple’s pricing structure the idea of $1,200 was what came to mind, but nearly 2k, no thanks, I’ll just share my CD-ROM to my MBP and feel like I’m getting the same thing, but play WOW.

Watch the keynote, and once Steve starts talking about the iPhone, note the level of applause, then lead into the iPod Touch, did you hear the crickets? $20 for early adopters? Did we learn nothing after changing the price on the iPhone? Come on Steve, launch it if anything as a $0.99-$2 fee, something small, simple, get your customer base on board, because lord knows at the end of the day these new “adjustments” are going to lead to more Apple buying options for add-on software, iWork for Touch etc. so give the loyal subjects a break.

Other than Rentals which might be nice (but rumor is HD only on the AppleTV) - nothing that said “Chuck Save the Money!” so I doubt other than my hopeful Mac Pro to replace the iMac, nothing jumped out and grabbed me - nothing was “NEW and EXCITING”, a iPhone for non-ATT without jailbreak and such would of been nice, but nope, apparently AT&T still has a while longer.

Anywhoo - there it is, my day goes forward, coming up at 9pm for my evening hang-out with the guys, we are going to brave Denny’s another time, and I pray we walk away alive. Till next time, have a Good Tuesday, a Great Wednesday! Take Care!

Cheesecake. Nuff said.

So what do you do when a upgrade goes smoothly, you combat a few memory hogs, add in a few system tweaks, and just have a good upgrade window? Simple. You make a no bake cheesecake. Mmmm cheesecake. It’s in the fridge now on it’s last bit, since it’s late and when it’s quite electric mixers are insanely noisy, and folks are sleeping - I did the mixing by hand - I feel so old school.

All in all though, things did go good, did a run down of sites, even found a few dead ones, I should do a audit and clean up each server before years end, but honestly, smooth - looks like folks have been doing fair keeping things up-to-date, now if I can provide some easy tutorials to get things rolling in the “Bot Proofing” of apps, that would be even better! I have been looking at reCAPTCHA as an option, in some apps, there is plugin support, so should be pretty simple, but between that, and getting dead beats finally off, things can push forward, and by Feb. (if not sooner) I do want to try and be migrated to the new server, 8 cores, 8gb ram, mmmm tasty.

So I am counting down the time before I can go dig in, with as cold as it is, I could probably go eat it now and it’d be cold, I think it’s colder outside than inside my fridge (31F), there was a 3/16in layer of frost on my car, chevy heaters though, top-notch, from 31->198 (coolant temp) in about 5 minutes, very nice, very toasty, and makes for a quick get away at 5am (hey I was out of milk!).

Anywhoo - Happy Saturday to ya, and if anyone wants to get me something for Christmas (hint, hint) keep an eye on my Amazon Wish-list, I am going to expand it soon and add in some apartment things, starting to plan, and get some of the expenses out of the way now (cooking goods, furniture, etc.) - so aside from the movies/games/books on the list - watch for more goodies for the home, as I would LOVE to have my own place by my Birthday in Feb. I mean hit 28, have my own place again - would indeed be nice. Happy Saturday Folks!

Fridays off? Nevah.

So for a while I actually took Friday’s off, not anymore lol. So much to do as this year wraps up, and I want to make sure it goes smoothly, so Christmas day I don’t wake up to a pile of coal waiting in my email from customers - so today was some more dry runs of PHP5/APACHE2 configurations, also tested out the new feature for SPF/DomainKeys in the cPanel interface, the latest build offers the functionality, but it seems to have some glitches when it comes to domains with more than a single domain in the account (ie: accounts with Parked/Add-on Domains) - however it is workable.

Testing seemed fine on SPF/DomainKeys until the dreaded multi-domain account hit it, and the wrench was thrown into the gears, but another side effect is external DNS, there is no mechanism within cPanel to simply display the new DNS entires involved with SPF and DomainKeys, thus someone who is doing their own DNS, will have issues with true deployment, so a bug report was opened on cPanel’s bugzilla requesting the enhancement to display the records which need to be added.

All in all a semi-productive day, wish I had gotten some code time in, but the night is still young, though I may crash out soon and wake back up for the PHP5 run on Shepherd tonight, going to start it around 1am - but since I am going to archive the old build, that means while it builds that things like PHP and such will be broken for a bit, but never had a build take over 30m, and since mail, spam filtering, etc. on Shepherd will continue there is that chance, but I am hoping that with the early hour, (thus in most cases decreased load) I’ll see a quick build, some quick testing, then hit the sack.

Anywhoo - off to break and watch a flick, not sure what, saw Chuck & Larry last night, not horrible, tad too much swearing, but Ving Rhames - hilarious. Well played indeed. So enjoy your weekend, and if I don’t get a chance to post before Christmas, have a safe and happy Christmas folks!

– AT: New anti-fraud checks in WHMCS from MaxMind were officially tested with a new order this evening, did great! Very very happy, glad to see it work so smoothly. Okay going for real this time.

Craving Chicken…

Ever just have that desire for something? Well I have one right now and it’s chicken, I dunno why, I had Nacho’s for dinner, but that didn’t seem like enough, so at 3am I think I am going to head towards JNB and snag the chicken club. Mmm.

So some updates (aside from the fact that I love chicken) my dad is doing good, he got the results back from his CT scan which basically told the Doc that my dad fought too much in his youth. He found that my dad basically had deformed/damaged cartilage in his nose which was making it hard for the sinus infection he has to clear, so aside from some anti-biotics in his future, they are talking about a 3hr procedure to fix the issue and put in some tubes - which from the sounds of it would make his breathing issues as of late go away. So good news there.

In other news, had Teppanyaki on Friday with the gang, twas tasty (I had chicken then too) - afterwards myself, sis and bro-in-law, and sara went and saw “I Am Legend” and while I think Will Smith did a great job in his role, the story line needed some tweaking, sure sure it could of ended “sort of” the same way, but they lined up some plot possibilities then walked away from them, that and if you like dogs - don’t go. LoL. I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone who wants to go see it, it’s not a “Buy on DVD!” for me, but I may rent it when it comes out.

Coding news, slow going, but going. This week I am going to push forward REALLY hard, and try to just get things finally wrapped up on several fronts - I have a easy project Monday installing a cart, not a TON I have to do until they get me a finalized design on that end, but for the basic install, maybe an hour to get it fine tuned and happy - but the rest of the coding projects, should be fun to push forward and finish up, I want to have the customer sign-up and sign-in done by the end of the week and a skeleton of the admin done.

CentOS 4.6 upgrades came thru last night, final few go thru this morning on 4 other systems, so pretty smoothly, no problems reported. The next few days will be more server fun deploying PHP5 slowly across the board, I am going to do it on a server Wednesday is my current plan, and then another Friday after the clean-up I am sure will need to happen on the first server - also on that list above and beyond PHP5 is MySQL5, but I think on that front after the server migration will be the plan on that as I haven’t even visited that in testing.

Anywhoo - that’s the update - I hope to have Lunch with Mr. Poon this week, and I am trying to come up with something clever for this next Friday - so lots to do, only 120 hours to get it rolling so have a good week folks!

Thanks Bill!

So the day started like any other day for me. Going to bed at around 9am. sure sure one day it’s going to be rough working a standard 9-5 but my thought is how many folks jump for the option to work the hours of 11pm -> 8am! But the early morning turned out very nice, found out a few things, like Jack in the Box’s grilled chicken sourdough club, delightful. Also that Bill from Jabra was kind enough to send me this note:

Thank you for providing your mailing address. I am having two complimentary BT5010 ear hooks sent to you. Please allow about a week for delivery.

So looks like my BT5010 will be with me a while longer, and with two hooks, it’ll probably die with me (unless it stops working in the next 40 years, in which case, it’ll be missed.) - then the other thing, code went wonderfully well, got the last bits nearly done, just making some data input areas for the customer to input things for his project that way it’s in his hands, and I can continue to code the bits around it as he continues to add-data.

This week looks crazy as always, had a glitch between TN and FH’s billing systems, the credit card processing didn’t like the fact that two invoices had the same # so TN invoices bumped up to a range the two shouldn’t conflict in for a while #10000 range - and things are happy again, but TN is on the docket for this week too - going to get things finished up migrating old customers from dusty Quickbooks -> WHMCS which will mean no more silly mailed out invoices, all emailed out, with the exception of one customer who uses a “billing center” and I have no way to email in invoices, that I know of, so I am going to check on that too and see if I can’t get everyone.

All in all this should be a wild week, I hope to finish EE entirely code wise and get it ready to go, which is a little delayed all around some on my part, some on the customer’s part, but I think I can even have the new ideas in as well, so a few coding days ahead, going to try and lay off it in the evenings so my mind can amp down, but that is also on the idea that I’ll get normal sleep so time will tell.

Lots more I could say, but I’ll probably say it later tonight, for now though, that’s all folks!

Tired.

So - another day down this week, drawing close to Turkey Day, needing to purchase AppleCare for the MBP soon, budget getting a little pick me up from all the extra work (ptl!) just now of course I get myself run down a bit, still feeling tired all day, plus stomach has been killing me, so swapping out a few food meals with protein shakes (aka Atkins Shakes) - as odd as it may seem, it helps to lighten the load on my ol gut.

Anywhoo - not a lot to say, heading to bed here shortly, going to try and get a solid night’s rest, not sure that’s possible, but hey I can try can’t I? Also very excited about tomorrow night, first full billing night on the new billing system (giggle) should be good! The joys of work, excited, happy, but tired - hopefully that’ll end soon. Night folks.

You can bank on it… (clever huh?)

So for starters, my bank finally fixed up the missing feature I enjoyed Pending Transactions - it was always nice to see what was flowing in, specially if I ordered something and they over-billed, nice to know and start the ball rolling on a refund. Well WAMU recently re-vamped their website (which sucks even more with mobile browsing) - and they ditched the feature. I complained. LOL and low and behold, they finished more of their upgrade, and as they promised from my complaining “it’s a feature being configured.” so today I logged in and saw:

So there it is, still not like it used to be, but it’s something (no “Expected Clearing” date - but I’m hopeful) - but all in all a nice thing to have back.

Busy week ahead, and of course, I am already tired, worked on some chatroom stuff, working to bring support chat to customers via IRC, so getting that setup, the ground work to EE is continuing, not as fast as I’d like, but none the less, I hope to have a good demo skeleton by end of Monday and off to the owner, if all goes as planned, I hope to get him deployed within the next 15 days (if not sooner), and in-between the code blocks, I’ll be working on RM some, getting its final bits configured, I am ahead on it, and I am also waiting on a call, apparently the site I laid out last week and everyone loved, was only half loved by its owners lol - so waiting for word back on that.

Anywhoo - lots on my brain, lots going on behind the scenes, trying to sort some things out like always, and it seems I may be setup again soon with someone, who knows - time will tell lol. Have a Great Week folks, hopefully I’ll get a good night’s rest here soon, and get a good start on my Monday.