Possible Job?

Last Wednesday I got a message from a buddy about a job:

Can you update your resume to make it look like you LIKE Microsoft? There is an open position here in my group for a Sr. Systems Engineer. I’m building you up as we speak (read.) I’ll see if I can email you our company application. I’m “guessing” the pay would start in the $55-65k range? That’s a guess though.. Let me know if you are interested..

So I sent back a “Hell yeah!” and have waited to hear from him and also asked about the “LIKE Microsoft” reference … He said he was just kidding … I think this comes from my disappointment with Windows’ performance in my hosting environment … I don’t believe my “resume” is anti-Microsoft … I don’t really refer to it as being an issue … Fact of the matter is that I use a lot of Microsoft all the time … My trials of trying to get away from Microsoft by using FreeBSD as my servers and an iMac as my workstation (OSX based on FreeBSD) certainly haven’t come to fruition yet …

Anyway, he says he will send me an application. So, we’ll see how it goes from there … The solution to all my problems?

Sunday Nights

Sound Booth Here is my little world on Sunday nights. A 40 channel board with 3 inputs being used … 1.) Guitar 2.) Vocal 3.) PC Output … Well, and 3 more channels for effects … Guitar verb and Vocal Echo & verb … The PC is running iTunes (Intel version) and streaming music from the Internet Radio portion of iTunes, usually Radiostorm HardRock … This is turned up between sets. You can click on the image for a full sized picture. I don’t take the cover off the whole board cause I only use so little channels. Also, in the distance you can see the stage with a stool on it and a guitar on the stool.

Categories

I added other categories. Maybe this will help split these long posts I make into separate entries with a relevant category? Then I thought that maybe this would make it too easy for someone to pick my brain via simple links, so I decided against it. But then, I thought, it still would be neat. So, I guess since most of the information I get is from the web, and I like to be able to pin-point that information quickly, I would try to implement the categories. To choose which categories is tough though, and I don’t like thinking too much.

Oh boy …

So, I update the software and the layout, and today they announce that this blog package is going to have to be paid for, but someone like me with one blog and one author will still be able to use this “MovableType” for FREE … So I go to download the 3.0 Developer’s Edition and it asks me for my userid and password … So now I have to register with them? I don’t know … It seems to me that many people that exceed the limits are going to WordPress, and I just think I should go there for the heck of it …

More New Stuff

So, I go to return the card, and figure I would just get the 9600 … welp, the 9200 worked in a P2 he had there, so it’s my computer that didn’t like the card … So I figure, well .. how much to upgrade the motherboard? Got one for a P3? Laugh! So, got me a motherboard that supports my old SDRAM and a used P4 1.8 … It will be faster than my P3 1.0 and it will support the 9600 AGP 8x card … Now, will the operating system complain when I do this switching? Well, it’s Windows, right? Bah! BTW, this is it for a while … this was the culmination of my tip money … It has been depleted …

Finalized and Fires

I think this is the layout that I will be sticking with … I messed with the CSS enough that I like the way the text flows, and I re-arranged the order of the boxes on the left by updating the template … The colors are a mixture of grays with the ICUHost blue color for some of the text … I tried to stay relatively dark (for the eyes) but still keep it sharp …

The fires from yesterday … New iMac keyboard; I bought basically the same one, except I guess it’s a newer version .. It sits in its own little clear plastic tray … I am composing this entry using this keyboard, so I will see how many mistakes I make whilst typing this in … So far, so good … I got it at CompUSA and while there in the Mac section, I saw this book “Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks” so being that that’s where most of my Mac experience has gone to start with, I figured a book might be nice for some further direction.

Before heading there, I stopped by the local PC store and picked up a Radeon 9200 and an 80G IDE drive for the server that had its 20G crash … I tried installing the card last night and no go … It doesn’t work for whatever reason … So, I will go back and maybe try the 9600 … Didn’t get a chance to install the 80G drive, but I did see some 160G Seagates at CompUSA for $160 … Seems it’s about a buck a gig now … Crazy! Since I had my video card out, I tried an Nvidia card that has been laying around for a while, and that works, so I left that in for the time being …

New Layout

You know, the more you mess with stuff, the more you learn … While I didn’t decide to pick today to design a new layout for my personal site, it just happened … Much the way I think most things happen … They just do … For example, when I came home from work Friday night, I learned that this kid who played on my Counter-Strike Server died that day … It started with a sore throat and no amount of penicillun could get rid of it. Finally diagnosed as Toxic Shock Syndrome … forget it, you’re a goner … and it happened unexpectedly … While the re-design of a web site layout is nothing compared to a death, it sort of is, isn’t it? Well, that’s stupid irony and probably a stupid way of thinking, but I guess all this thinking I am doing, I am doing in type. Regardless (irregardless isn’t a word), I have redesigned the layout and have been tweaking it, I will leave it as it is right now for another time … I must now venture out into the world and see about putting out other fires that exist …

Weblogs

Apparently this “Personal Publishing System” decides that my entries are too old and then starts to move them off of the page. Because it’s a CSS layout, it changes the look of the site which is my default web site … I have links here to places I frequent … There are other links I would like to have handy, but I don’t want them public … I haven’t had a solution to that .. yet …

What have I been up to? What’s been going on? Well, sometimes I wonder how much I should actually post on this here thing … I mean, it is public, and it could be accessed by anyone, so what to “conceal” and what to make public? How much of what I type in here has affects on other things? I honestly don’t know … So, I just type and see what happens …

The ENT guy that prescribed me to get bloodwork changed my appointment, so I am going back there later. Today has been rainy, so all day yesterday my sinuses already told me it was coming … I don’t think my antibiotic run did a damn thing, but hey, it’s good for practice. The blood test came back, and my family doctor said my blood was thick so I had to lose weight … So, next time I am going in there I am going to punch the doc in the nose, swipe some of the blood off his face and offer after looking at his blood that I think he’s bald and skinny. Call me fat will he?

Web hosting is now turning around and around … I created new DNS servers on FreeBSD … I put them in place about two weeks ago. Just today I close all DNS ports on the Windows servers. In fact, the secondary box for one of the name servers crashed April 26th or 27th … It also used to be the network’s MySQL server. Thankfully I had moved the MySQL serving to a FreeBSD Server in previous months, and I had just changed the DNS Servers, so the box wasn’t doing much of anything … Fate?

Customers are coming and going … In some cases, it’s a good thing to see some of them go … The people that I gave the world to, much time, and there was no sense of appreciation … Not that I necessarily needed that to begin with, but it’s just that some people don’t realize what the heck is going on out there/here … But, this brings my services into a specialized area … I feel that making my customers people who’re educated in the ways of the Internet makes the acceptance of my ideas or actions that much more justified. There are those that think a change is a hassle … I can see them rolling their eyes and saying “What now?” … but realistically all change has been for the good. Once everything is put in place, I don’t see much reason for change, only expansion …

All the “service” type servers have been moved to FreeBSD Servers … This is awesome … So now, Mail, MySQL and DNS are served by servers that will never go down and are updated much easier than a Microsoft server … I must say, as I always do after tooting FreeBSD’s horn, is that if Microsoft performed well, I would probably have never done this. But, MS Servers have to be booted frequently … and when they’re not booted on purpose, sometimes they decide to boot themselves … Whenever a MS Server boots, obviously DNS isn’t available … It’s one thing to boot from maintenance at 4AM or something, but the Microsoft servers like to boot during peak hours on their own with bugchecks … While this could be attributed to 3rd party applications, there is much money involved in those applications simpy because they’re MS applications … When using FreeBSD you have the availabilty of all the Open Source software you could ever hope for .. Not to mention that the FreeBSD operating system smokes Microsoft servers hands down …

So, I’m not necessarily here to judge the MS Servers or operating systems, I am simply reaching the goal of stability provided by the servers that provide the service that I “sell” … Making those services closer to 100% reliability meant putting FreeBSD servers in those places where MS has constantly failed me … Once there is a base of FreeBSD stability with the ability to also serve Windows type content (ASP, .NET), then we can certainly work towards a better recovery or backup type reliability in the way of data and power …

I appreciate the people who know what I am on the road to accomplish, and I appreciate that they understand the range of what why how and where … With sharing this development with me and by utilizing these services, they’re all molding this web hosting company into a solution for everyone … While I know that there’s a huge competition in the hosting market, I also know why … I spend countless hours reading documents and learning what it is that’s actually out there … PHP.NET has a link to the webhostingtalk.com forums at the top right of their page … I have simply read in there about all the nifty things that people are or aren’t doing … I have also had conversations on the phone with people who hosted with “big” hosting companies and much preferred my way of thinking … They just recently signed on, and they are going through the general learning that I think anyone should know being in the Internet business … This is something that non-RFC-compliant Microsoft people simply don’t know and have a user friendly operating system there trying to solve all the problems … Where I think they missed it was that instead of being user friendly and fixing things for you, they should announce the error and instruct the user on how to fix it … How will people learn if this isn’t done? They will have learned how to accomplish something the wrong way and poison all of those after them on how to accomplish something … Soon the solution will break (with an update or something) …

Well, enough of my rantings … I feel that I am in the right direction when it comes to the solutions I have decided on providing … For myself and anyone else who’d like to share these benefits with me (customers) … This is why there’s no nickel and diming of services or hidden gimmes or gotchas … Straight hosting with the availability of the world! I simply couldn’t justify charging extra for things when I don’t have all of the extras that “big” companies have … But, most of the time, they’re just words on a web site or another check to put in a display table … at least I’m honest about it … I’d say most SPAM’d hosting offers are from people who have colo’d a box with a 160G HD and installed CPanel (or similar) and pay $150/mo for the colocation … This one box does all their hosting/mail/database/billing etc … and when it breaks? Oh well … I think anybody could do this, but in the real world … All of these services need to be separated run and monitored individually on their own machines …

So, if anyone has any questions or anything regarding any of the drivel I have just composed, well before, but the stuff you just read, drop me an email or something … Thanks!