Well today I got the call from the boss man back east, chatted about the meeting they had yesterday, got the skinny on everything - and I mean EVERYTHING, I think there were some concerns which could of been generalized, but straight out I now know how everyone in admin thinks - but a lot of it truly as he said it “perceptions” folks don’t ask me what I am doing, what I am working on, they just assume standing somewhere other than in my office means “playing around”. I am not going to lie, there are times I have had a friendly chat, but simple, quick, casual - not unheard of in an office.
But we discussed quite a bit, not the 2hr conversation from last week, but a hour long conversation which actually taught me some more of the inner workings of their system, as I really didn’t ever have much training on things - so got the skinny on working out some possible new functionality, and getting things up to par with the reports they used to have generated - which no longer work for me - got a budget of $500, got things sorted with “Personal” vs “Work” and also clarified my laptop use here at work, as it was questioned “Why” was I using it all the time, well it was part of the original agreement to allow me to keep my own business, because honestly if all I was making was the money from here? I’d be on one tight budget - but in conjunction with my business, it ain’t too shabby.
So things are mellowing out, and I imagine they will continue to do so, worked some on their “newsletter” and it is starting to look good I think, I am going to layout some things in Illustrator to import for the back page, but it should come out pretty nice and really allow them to have a product sent out that folks actually READ for once, good stories, eyecatching promos, etc. So I hope it will be well received, and if at all possible ready to go by this Friday.
Anywhoo - long day ahead, going to be sorting more of the programming they have in FoxPro, and see if I can better export these data dumps to Excel and maybe into Access or MySQL, and go from there, just need a clean customer list, and a clean OE file - but if I can do that, I can write a PHP app to import the data from the dumps, and a PHP app or two to generate the reports, so busy busy. Thanks for the continued prayers, I’ll post more on the event last night later, still quiet, but who knows if that’s good or bad. Time will tell.
Well things are moving forward slowly, been working on some mainly code in the short-term, so far so good, I am developing a “Missing People” page where it has our senior pictures (sorry everyone) anyone who isn’t found yet is grey’d out and folks can put forth contact information, or fill us in on them, as we know some from our class have passed away, we have a list of at least 4 people I believe at this point - with some folks doing tours over in Iraq, we may have a few more names, but I pray to God we don’t.
I have been up for a reunion off and on, but with the group getting it going, actually a little pumped, mainly because it’s 2 gals I knew in highschool and actually liked So it’s not like I have jumped into a group with that “one girl” or that punk jock, Wendy and Misty were both folks I knew, so it’s mellow, no stress, and we have literally a year to plan (so technically it’s our 11yr reunion)
It’s fun stuff thus far, going to try and call in a few favors to maybe help out some of our class who is now right coasters see if I can’t pull a favor or two with some contacts to lend me a seat or 3 on a jet (yes I know people) lol - but if nothing else see if I can’t get some really really affordable rates and see if we can’t get some folks out here.
Anywhoo - nearly 11, still unwinding but going to hit publish and go relax and watch a movie as I slowly pass out. Night folks, and have a good week!
Lately it just seems there is not enough time in the day. I get side tracked, phone called, spammed, heck even at work I have different department heads asking for different things, and I have a pile of my own personal business to catch up and get active.
Just seems to be my norm now, I really just want 2 days of sleep, lol a guy can dream can’t he? Still waiting to hear back from the nice folks @ Newegg, going on 4 days with no word back on a laptop, and a co-worker getting anxious as he is out a pile of cash and has no laptop to show for it, so going to give a ring tomorrow if the status isn’t updapted tomorrow.
For now though, I am going to call it a night. I hope tomorrow will be a bit more level, I can hopefully get some things done on various projects (got DBF -> MySQL.. so that’s a good thing) but lots of work yet to be done, if all works as planned, I can skip toying with Visaul Fox Pro and write a bash script to nightly re-generate MySQL tables and have some simple PHP handle generation of scripts and get folks a web interface they can easily use to generate reports instead of calls to me for various things.
Anywhoo - Night all, keep me in your prayers, busy busy, tired tired, sleepy sleepy.
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!
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!
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.
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!
So it’s not like I have jumped into a group with that “one girl” or that punk jock, Wendy and Misty were both folks I knew, so it’s mellow, no stress, and we have literally a year to plan (so technically it’s our 11yr reunion) 
