Well tonight sadly marked the end of the “Sleep Fest 2007″ for the last week or so, I got to bed early, woke up for maybe 5 minutes in the middle of the night, then passed out again to awaken early - tonight however, I laid down for a bit to try and stretch out after a day in the chair, and bam, out like a light, which leads me to 1:15am when I woke up and wasn’t just “awake” I was “UP! AND READY FOR DUTY SIR!” no idea why/what - just up.
So I am here working on some misc. things, one of which was upgrading Wordpress, sadly I had to ditch the k2 theme, just too many of the plugins I enjoy and hacked up to work all fancy, no longer work in this version for whatever reason, and I have no desire to poke around and find the old version that worked, so back to Wordpress basic templates again, this one isn’t my favorite, but it’ll work till I can get some time in to code some similar functionality as the last one, hopefully with the new tools ordered, I’ll get some time to give CSS another whirl and see if I can leave the world of tables and font tags behind 
A good day for bringing in the bacon so to speak, cleared $900 in incoming today, should of been $1020, but none the less, $900 is better than $000! But things are picking up around here it seems, taking on this project has me jazzed, not the most money I’ve made on a design in my time, but not the least either, really at some level above and beyond as a way to thank the photographer for the deal and fun photos she took @ my friend’s wedding, its also a way for me to get my feet wet in design again, and while some tasks today took me much longer than they would of in the past, it felt good to be working on it again.
Plans for the early AM include, checking into an expired SSL cert., flushing a site that was compromised, putting in a manual apache hack for a client to help out, refreshing the CS3 order page for a tracking # constantly, and working on the sketches for secret project #20391, may even get some work done on the FH end of things, some updates I need to do, also hacking up the old TN layout I had done about 3 yrs ago, still looks good, just want to clean it up, make it little faster on the load time, and get it ready for production.
Anywhoo - keep me in your prayers, busy busy around here - things always seem to amp up, hoping to get some spare cash in the bank, and then open up a savings account for the first time in a few years, really want to build up my savings, and get some bills paid off, so hopefully I can keep up with the load, and get things rolling up and up. Thanks for stopping by! Have a Good Tuesday!
Well I awoke at 3:30am, and have been awake since, worked on putting up a coming soon splash on the Thrust Networks homepage - the design has been the same since the company started in 2001, so I figured some fresh paint was long-overdue. The splash is a logo refresh I actually did about 4 years ago when I originally started re-working the site, but never put up the enhanced re-build of the site, since then the old layout has gotten stale for me, and I want to freshen it up - rebuild the hosting packages offered, get it linked up in the online sign-up, and see what happens.
I have been working on Photoshop this morning, and purchasing CS2 last year it was fine speed wise… of course then I got my hands on the Photoshop CS3 beta, and wow, speed was dramatically different on the iMac & Macbook Pro, so I have been considering the upgrade - I just have the standard, but I really want to begin dabbling with Flash, and the new Dreamweaver as well, so I have been considering going from CS2 Standard -> CS3 Premium - its $200 more, but I think it’d be a sound investment as with one project I am working on if I could get action script & some cleverly crafted php working together I could do some pretty cool stuff.
So I am guessing the playful iPod 80GB will wait 
I think I am just never meant to get it, which I think *sigh* I can live with but the 35mm is still on the list, as it can be used for projects, business, and help in relaxing me - I want to get out with the Bakersfield photography group on Flickr and maybe shoot a couple events, part of me is tempted to brave the street-fair tonight with the E-500 and get some shots, all depends on my energy level.
Doing good thus far today, sleep last night was good, may try to sneak in a nap before the 4pm meeting, actually heading there around 3:00pm so I can get there, get on the Wifi and make sure I have access, if not the Dash is there and can easily access Edge, but I want to also setup a tunnel again so my traffic is routed via Home vs. open over the wireless @ Starbucks - so some tweaks before the meeting too!
Anywhoo - have a good one folks, continued prayers are appreciated!
Well I got an email tonight that the server was down, checked my phone to see if I somehow magically missed a page, report was okay, so I tried to login to the server, worked, hit the two sites the customer had issue with, worked. The issue? SMF 1.1.1 - it posts a phpsessid to the URL and thus triggers mod_security, well recent tweaks to the intrusion system I flagged a configuration option which reads the mod_security log, and blocks on its fails. Thus the customer’s IP was banned via the firewall.
I think I may be getting overly exhausted, I do that now and again in the middle of big projects and various things looming, I really need to take a photo day, heck maybe even a nap day to follow that but something is definitely not quite right, found myself today around 12:30 just dead tired, I took a nap till 2:30, then woke up, made some calls, helped Sam over at Fluxar get some PHP magic happening, then hung out a bit doing laundry, and I was exhausted again, laid down and woke up at 10pm - so just tired tired tired, going to try crashing out here again in a minute.
Got another project today, meeting a Photographer on Thursday @ Starbucks to go over some plans for her website, already jotted some notes from our call, and our previous talk at the wedding, but I think it should be fun, I have a server migration to plan, and I imagine in a day or so once all options are exhausted I’ll be getting a call from a site to look at an issue they are having, which leads me to spare cash.
Granted now I have some bills to pay, the big server setup a few months ago wasn’t what I’d call “cheap”, and some other expenses came up, so I have bills to pay, but I have been wanting to pickup a 80GB iPod 5G as well as a 35mm lens for the E-500, so I have both items sitting in my cart @ Newegg, just trying to hold off if possible, I know I could live without the new iPod, however I’d love to pickup the E-510 body (not the kit) and the 35mm lens, expensive, but it’d give me two 4/3 compatible camera bodies, 3 lenses - aka - lovely. With a wedding or two this fall season I’d love to get some time behind the lens and the E-510 before, but Newegg only has the E-510 kit, granted it comes with one lens I don’t have, but if I got that, I couldn’t get the 35mm also.
Anywhoo… I feel sleepy, so I am going to try sleep again, hopefully it comes, and hopefully the night is mellow. Night folks, prayers appreciated for my health, and if anyone feels overly generous to donate a 80GB iPod, E-510, 35mm lens, or even just some cash, let me know 
Well tomorrow a few webservers covering the WWDC will be pounded as his Steveness talks most likely the next version of OSX, so we shall see what happens there, my big Apple related announcement tomorrow is a 2GB stick of RAM for MyFruit, taking the MacBook Pro up to 3GB of ram, should be a nice jump.
If your lucky enough to get to see Doctor Who Season 3’s latest episode, the idea of time travel is well shown, with a nice story to boot. I think if I ever was offered a job in the UK, it’s one of the big reasons for going I have Season 2 Disc 1 & 2 right now from my Blockbuster Online, I am planning on purchasing them all for real one day
Anywhoo - doing some research on a project to integrate some various things together, so far no 100% luck, already have some code in my head though - have some rough ideas I am going to put down on paper this week too for the 8 Only deal, so lots to do this week, hopefully I’ll get some sleep this week Have a Good Week Folks!
Sorry had to say that - hello! I have been a sneaky one, server upgrades have nearly been a constant the last few days, lots of tweaks/patches/hotfixes, heck half way through tonight’s batch I noticed the version number went up 3 lol, from 13514 to 13517 - so getting one last patch before I visit my pillow again, or at least consider it.
Last few days have been good, with only a minor road bump, but such is life - got a new client today, another trying to decide what package they want, and me sketching out an ad for the new monthly special of 8 accounts - 8 accounts, when they are gone, they are gone - should be fun!
I started watching World Trade Center last night/morning - and if my power hadn’t been all “eh” (thus the reason for the last post about using my phone for internet) I’d of watched the entire thing - very powerful - but I imagine it’s got that added punch because I remember 9/11 watching the news, and the news for weeks after - so I guess seeing this perspective really makes it hit home even more.
Made an order today, a 2GB stick of ram for myfruit (aka the macbook pro) it makes it have 3gb of ram, should help speed things up, also got a cool cover for it, transparent black (aka the apple logo shines thru) but should help keep the shiny metal shiny, also got a portable drive (120GB) and a external enclosure for 3.5 drives (standard hard drive) so I go through a hard drive pile here in the office - the BIG purchase was the new printer - does Network Printing/Scanning - also acts as a copier, so pretty nice!
Anywhoo - 4 servers to go, then its off to the world of sleep. Have a wonderful Friday folks.
… is server notices chiming, then chiming its all clear.
Part of the nightly server “to-do” it checks for upgrades to base systems which is not a problem usually (well one time before.. but we won’t go there) - the issue tonight was that cPanel 11 was released (well Stage 1, 2 is in 2 weeks), and in pushing the MASSIVE upgrade to servers which I do optionally, cPanel put the system upgrades for mail and such into the Release Tree - and whammo - all servers got their mail systems upgraded - however I had not yet done the cPanel pre-flight checklist as I was going to wait a few days.
So needless to say, I got my butt in the chair, and began looking to see what needed to be done to fix the issue - and I think I got it all squared away, minus the friends server which has no one on it, its really my testing box, where I was trying out cPanel 11 - the pre-flight checklist suggested some system updates and such, of which I had made a list this afternoon on what to do, and was going to mess with it Friday on a low-profile server that was production, however the upgrade required me to give it a live test grounds - but I am happy to say, some perl tweaks and upgrades later, servers are working good.
I went ahead and pushed the cPanel 11 upgrade stage 1, and most customers will wake up to a shiny new cPanel interface, I haven’t enabled things like Ruby on Rails -or- WebDav just yet, going to ease those updates in over the next few days, I already have a side server testing the release push of RoR - and WebDAV while active, isn’t open on the firewall just yet, maybe a few will be by morning, but all depends on how much energy I have
So there ya have it, you wake up one day to find things a tad crazy, but in the end, its all good. If your having issues, please drop me a note/comment - and I’ll get you squared away - but chances are if your having the issues, others are too - I’ll be working on it - prayers appreciated
Anywhoo - thats my bit for now, going to fiddle a bit more and see what I can tweak/get tuned up - have a good Wed. folks.
Well Friday was a early day, started in a little red truck, going to pick up “The Trencher!” - which was huge - and took a while to get used to, but it led to trenching the lines for my sister’s up-and-coming sprinkler system - and I must say, we did well, until about 1ish, then we were dead lol - but we got all the lines done, found a few later that were not so done - but all in all, it came out good.
Had a nice dinner that night, then I slept, and slept, till 645am when my alarm went off, to find only a server online, performing fine, and no tickets to really even note anyone else experienced outages - but the server reported that thru the day, finding out that 2 of the nodes that check my servers for outages, were having high latency thus causing the outage reports, they tweaked their system about 25 minutes ago to do a 3rd check from a good node before sending me another txt msg. - so pretty happy to not have another 25 txt alerts while I am sleeping tonight!
So that’s been my weekend, mildly stressful with the server stuff, but all in all, things are going smooth, and I have some plans for the servers this week, finally ironed out a server blip while watching the servers tonight, going to fine tune the order and make it happen slowly over the process of the week if the server I worked on has no issues for 48 hours.
Things with me are good though, someone commented the other day that I seemed “not okay” but it was IM, was just short as I was exhausted and about to pass out, plus had a trouble ticket poking me - so been mildly distracted by work - but that should cool out in a few days as things level out, this new server system has me excited, and the idea behind these two new plans, and making billing down to only 4 plans total, super small, normal, large, and domain package - is really exciting! Should excite some customers too - as they will see some benefits - at first only those who are new sign-ups, but long-term, everyone will slowly move-over - step by step.
Anywhoo - midnight draws closer, I need a bite to eat here since, but then its off to bed, have a blessed Sunday folks - and if anyone is interested in doing Kosmos every 3rd Friday of the month, let me know!
