Another Late Night?

Kinda, sorta, not really - okay maybe. I got home earlier, and just crashed out. Dead to the world I needed sleep, I woke up about 2 hours ago, but I am about to crash out again - just wanted to do something for lil ol me, aka upgrade the Blog.

I had read mixed thoughts/feelings about the latest upgrade to Wordpress, some liked it, some thought it was too sparse, some thought it mucked up things - honestly? I like it. Light, simple, some options aren’t exactly where I would think to find them, but such is change.

At some level I think the trade off of features/fixes should of given folks more to try, but as usual plugin conflicts for some were their un-doing - but a nice feature of the new system is live updating, which I know many groups will complain about the security of the concept, but it’s no different than that of Windows / Mac Update systems, you use / trust that product enough to do updates, why not your blog?

Anywhoo - all in all I think it’s pretty slick, it was a simple upgrade, sent my DB backup to Gmail, and uploaded the files, easy peasy - but for now, I am going to wrap up, and goto sleep, meeting @10am tomorrow, last day of “freedom” so to speak, as the boss-man comes back on Thursday, and I am sure he’s gonna have a pile for me. So I’ll say goodnight, and Happy Fake Friday!

Moving right along…

So far nothing bad has happened, no one has called angry and threatening to sue - so so far so good, only 1 small server to roll tonight, should be pretty painless. I got some sleep, but not as much as I’d of liked honestly, but as it stands at 10pm the last bits will move over, and come Monday, DNS servers will be moved, and Tuesday I’ll migrate TN/FH to the new server for them, so going well.

If FTP is down for you, your using the old server, try OpenDNS or clear your DNS cache and close out apps, and try it again. For now, I am going to zone out and pass out, so if you have issues, email me.

The Post Upgrade, Update.

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!

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!

Work Work Work…

So needless to say this day turned out pretty good. Got a pile of mail I’ve been waiting for, the post office has officially be delivering all my old stuff to the old building, which is good, because I was tired of it in limbo, some was dated the 20th of last month, so silly, but my hope is to get the last few Check based folk over to Credit Card or PayPal by the new year, some I know won’t change, but at the very least I want to eliminate paper invoicing ASAP.

Money did come in today, picked up 2 projects one starts next week, and I picked up a HTML gig tonight, which I just wrapped up, came out pretty nice, more or less a splice job, but nothing I couldn’t handle, works well in IE, Firefox, Safari, and across OS’s as well, so pretty happy indeed, got it approved, and just put it online about 20 minutes ago, so all within my 5 hour time frame, so all in all, not bad for $200 worth of work, just need a few of those on a steady basis in a month, and I’ll be sitting pretty.

Servers are looking good for a migration, I have one probably going here sooner than later, sort of a test subject I am hopeful of it’s test run and if things go smooth for a while, then my long-term goal is to migrate folks from this current DC to this new one, but as it stands, looking like more in the realm of next year, unless funds and time suddenly change.

Anywhoo - thanks for the prayers, sorry I missed a few late-nighters last night on IM, I was dead tired and passed out, been trying to keep “normal” hours lol - which means in bed by midnight and up by 6am - not sure how it’s possible, or why - but I have been doing it for a few days now, it’s not so bad, but I do appreciate the prayers, and they are working and then some, nearly $700 in checks came in today, so pretty happy to see things bouncing back indeed, but now it’s that time, to wander away from the ol workstation, and read or watch a movie till I pass out. Night folks.

The House

So this morning I mentioned a house, well to follow up on that in a random break I have at the moment, the house in question is the one I am in now - my parents are looking at a property near my mom’s work, and if they like it, they made me a open offer of $500 a month on this place - which is about $500 cheaper than I was looking at with a 2 bdrm apartment.

As it stands, I’d go for it. I dunno if it’ll happen so part of me like many things in my life, I am not banking on it, but I am making further adjustments to the budget if it does happen, I’ll be able to handle it, because I like this house, and it served me well before my parents moved back to Bakersfield - so pretty happy about the possibility, plus, no pesky moving so another plus.

So time will tell, but I figured I’d put in a bit of an update as I was between projects - hopefully I have relaxing night ahead, but from the sound of the call a minute ago, I am guessing thats going to be a no-go, but not too unexpected I suppose, but my hope is that something fun will come up tonight, granted it is a TV night, but usually rather late.

Anywhoo, back to the grind, some small good news, a pile of mail! Just got word that the old office held some mail for me, so very cool indeed, hopefully my PO Box check goes smooth, if so happy me Have a good monday folks!

Faster, Cleaner, Fun-er

So, you guessed it, I am still awake, working away here, getting things all lined up to bring the iMac back to full production status, I am about 1/2 way transferring back over from the Linux box 47.3GB of “Music” which includes iTunes purchases and such, slow going, but it’s going the big one to worry about is Pictures, lots of digital negatives there.

I have been playing with Leopard for about a day now, like most folks out there toying with new features, though unlike a group of folks out there, I can’t really say I have found any “quirks” that are show stoppers. Granted while copying from a NFS mount I can’t seem to unmount disk images of installs, so I have a LOT on the desktop right now waiting for the data to get copied over but so far everything is running smoothly, all my common apps like Textmate which I am blogging from, Transmit for FTP works fine, I have honestly yet to find a application that gives me any problems, and most folks report that CS3 is working fine, so when that bridge comes up here, I’ll cross it without fear!

New features are nice

• Spaces - It is pretty spiff, I enjoyed it on the MBP however on dual monitors, each “Space” is split into 2 sections (one for each monitor) so if I have 4, there are 8 windows to drag apps into, it’s pretty clever
• Stacks - Some people are finding this very troublesome, but I think its just another feature you can take or leave, and for me, I enjoy it, for downloads and documents (the defaults) it works great, but for me I also have my stock photo purchases, projects folder, and “Desktop” as files get dropped/saved there all the time, it’s pretty handy.
• Time Machine - While I don’t “hate” it, I am not 100% in love with it, the use of a NFS mount would of been better, but just means I need to get a good sized drive to use on my iMac, and I need to clean off the portable drive for the MBP.
• Mail - Lovely - the new features aren’t a “MUST” for me, granted the To-Do’s will most likely sync into the Dash via Missing Sync (or so is my hope) but it’s speed has greatly increased, so much so that I imported my Thunderbird email, and have 1 less app to install.
• Frontrow - Looks good, apparently it shares the layout of the AppleTV device, but it’s workable - not that I use it that much, as I tend to use VLC and full screen it on the secondary monitor, but its a nice touch up none the less.
• Overall UI- Seen a number of complaints about this, folks upset about the transparent menu bar, or the dock, “blah blah blah” people are entitled to their opinion, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time aren’t Mac folk supposed to be this super “progressive” thinkers I mean come on the ad is “Think Different” but instead some folks have been spooked by the new look - all I can say is, deep breath people, it’ll be okay.

But so far so good, I am sure there’s a slew of features I could go on about, and in time, maybe I will, currently doing Software Updates for iLife06, just finished the last one, but it all is looking super good, more later I am sure, more to do while the copy continues it’s long journey of copying