D.I.Y.

So our home phone no longer had a dialtone … We called for service and they came out … I was asleep at the time … Wish I wasn’t cause the guy royally screwed it up … He told my wife that things were screwed up outside … That he hooked it up properly and didn’t know why it wasn’t working … He traced some of my internal lines and couldn’t get to where some of them went and marked where the line came in and was working … That I would have to take it from there … What this guy did was rewire it at the pole so it came in on my defunct DSL connection … WRONG! … Being that that’s where it was, I figured out how to mount those wire in the demarc and get the line working internal to the house … I’m not happy about the connection now coming in that way as it’s now accessible on the back of my house whereas the other 7 or 8 lines come in on this big black cable … I’m not using all those lines anymore, they were for the now defunct BBS I had running when I moved in … The Internet took care of that …

This past Wednesday, February 1st 2006 Octane opened up at the TLA for Pray for the Soul of Betty which is Constantine from American Idol‘s band … Considering all of the concern prior to the show, it went fine for me … I made Octane sound good and everybody was happy … I didn’t meet the guy, but I was in his presence and that was interesting enough for me … I didn’t attempt to meet him either as I wouldn’t have had anything to say to him except that I saw him on TV … Still the highlight of my Octane career has been meeting Gene Simmons whereas I did have a conversation at length with him and he signed a copy of his book for me …

ICUHost.Net Billing went out and I also sent out a newsletter … After reading the letter and rereading it, I emailed it out and I missed a blatant misspelling … Damn! … I have started developing a replacement billing application that will replace the ASP one I wrote years ago … I am writing the new one in PHP … I am also using a different authorization system than I normally use for other sites I’ve secured up … This one does hash checking as well as email address verification through links and stuff … Pretty cool … Needed something like this for keeping tabs on customers and verifying new ones … I can’t tell you how many people I just didn’t set up because they were from out of state … Even though they signed up and everything, when I didn’t get back to them, they didn’t get back to me, so I guess I was pretty good in sniffing out the fakers … So hard to trust anyone on the Internet these days … Anyway, along with the new authorization methods, the new billing application will be able to verify domains via different databases and I’ll have a way better handle on billing and domain management … There have been domains that I’ve set up but never assigned to a user and they got a free site for months … When I started verifying DNS against accounts, this won’t happen … I’ll be able to check balances and anything past due I can update the DNS records and inactivate the site … Writing it in PHP allows me to utilize the command line and schedule the billing to run as I see fit … I think I will end up running something weekly if not daily … It will check many things for me that I have not been able to check on a regular basis … Right now, I have someone who moved their site, name servers and everything, but I see that they’re using my mail server and other stuff that I haven’t inactivated … I don’t think that’s right, and with automation, these things won’t happen …

Anyway … no time … need more time … We didn’t win PowerBall … We will this Saturday though …