Month: June 2005

Not so hellish

Besides the fact that I still have that improbability of ever having any time, or at least the sense of having any time, things have been progressing pretty well towards … well, towards what? Actually, I don’t know … There are goals I certainly have, but I put them off as I guess most people do, thinking that those goals will be realized “in time” …

This past week with Octane was a surreal one … On Thursday, Octane opened for David Lee Roth at The Big Kahuna in Dealware … While it was pretty clamped down on the security of getting to meet the Van Halen front man, we still got one of our own in there and got a pic for the Octane web site of David Lee Roth with the guitar player … Friday had us at 94 WYSP’s Babefest and Gene Simmons co-hosted … He was much more accessible than the previous night’s David Lee Roth experience … He left his dressing room door open and would talk with anyone that approached him and allowed many photo opportunities … While I did take some of those photos, I didn’t get one myself … Just spoke with Gene for a good while about vices and had him sign my Gene Simmons book which was a Christmas present a couple years back … Saturday was back to reality and a regular gig back at The Big Kahuna but on the smaller deck outside …

I still haven’t got to billing, I still haven’t got to creating some cables I need to get my sound system where I want it, but slowly but surely I reach these smaller goals thinking the whole time that my major goals will eventually happen … I certainly want to move out of this neighborhood … The neighborhood has progressively deteriorated, but it seems with this new riverfront gambling stuff, it may just be worth it to stick it out here until the houses go up a lot in price … Maybe, maybe not … you just never know what the result might be … I would think if you’re going to spend a lot of money, you would probably want a house much nicer than I consider mine … Well, I just need a little work … Some brick pointing and landscaping … the inside is fine and there is a lot of space, so what do I know … As long as I can get to a computer tube, I’m fine …

Anyway, I just have to remain in good spirits to complete those things that have sat for a while … Those things that people are expecting and sometimes I think they expect too much because they ought to realize where I am coming from … Some people are used to the way I have usually been, and that’s been very accommodating … I usually have no problems giving people whatever they want, but I think I might have given too many people what they’ve wanted and spread myself way too thin … I also think that with this I need to devise a better system for prioritizing my “todo list” … Some things fly by in an email, and depending when I receive that email, I may pass it by and then forget about it … I think what I have to do is get those issues that are important and affect “business” … those issues need to become open tickets in a ticketing system a reseller turned my onto … That way there is someplace to reference for the next task rather than the squeakiest wheel getting my grease … This way I don’t have to try to remember all those things that I am supposed to get to …

Ah … I ramble … it was a good week, and now I’m into a confusing one, trying to tie up those loose ends that I remember, and trying to remember those things that were on the hard drive on my old machine … Got through an OOT with the new machine, but need to get some of the software installed again that was on the old machine so I can duplicate some things I did before I switched machines … Confusing? Welcome to my world …

It’s been hell!

My weekend with Octane ended on Sunday morning … I got home about 6am from The Ocean Drive … I left to go there about 10:30am Saturday morning … That was after getting home from Reed’s at about 6am Saturday morning … So that’s what, 4.5 hours shy of 24 hours for The Ocean Drive job on about 3 hours of sleep … sheesh … Sunday was pretty much slept away … So I come down to the computers Monday, and during the course of the day I’m hearing “dink” … “dink” … “clunk” … If you’ve ever heard an IDE drive going south, this is that noise … I had two 40G WD drives in my personal workstation … The original 40 that filled up using W2K and the new one with XP on it that was pretty much full too … How can I tell which drive is dinking and clunking? I run the ol’ chkdisk and determine that it’s the newer of the two drives … The dinking and clunking gets worse, so what do I do? Turn the machine off … Have to get another drive in there and get the data off before it goes away for good …

I get this brainstorm that I ought to just get a new computer … My personal workstation has been a P3 1gHz for a couple years now, so it’s time I should go to a P4 for myself … I’m worth it … So I go to another machine and browse Circuit City’s web site to see if they have any spiffy deals on desktop computers … While I am browsing, I get the message that Firefox can’t find circuitcity.com … I refresh … I force a server refresh (Shift+F5) … It can’t find the site … Hmm … I look to the router … Stuff is trying to go out, but nothing is coming in … Aren’t LEDs awesome?! The phone rings … a guy from a band says he can’t get to his site and another that he knows I host … Yup, the connection is verklempt, I have to place a call … But, the support number is filed away nicely in my Email client in the Savvis folder, but my personal workstation was taking a dive, so I had turned it off … A reseller from the city calls … yes, I know … another reseller from West Chester calls … their customers are calling them, can I email when it’s back … yes, sure thing … (But I don’t have my email working now) … finally my oldest reseller calls and he wouldn’t have called me (cause he hates to bother me) but one of his $ clients called him …

I finally get the support number by firing up my clunky workstation … in loading the email client, it tried to get mail, but with the connection down, I can’t even communicate internally … I actually like this feature sometimes … I call them and they say they know and give me the Master Ticket Number for this issue since it is wide spread … It was ticket# 465020 if you’re interested … In total the connection was down from about 2-3pm … One tiny hour, but it was as if the world had ended … People go nuts without their Internet … I mean, I do too … Anyway, the explanation was that it was some sort of AT&T problem and they had to restart a device or something, but whatever, the connection was back … West Chester called me back and asked me if it was back for good … How can I answer that question? It could go down while I type this entry … I just have to trust that it stays up 24/7/365 … So I can only say that since it has been up more than 5 minutes, it seems they have cleared their problem …

So now back to getting me up and running again … I have an idea what Circuit City is selling so I go to my ol’ reliable local computer dealer and see what he has and can do for me … I usually go in there and buy the bare essentials and come home and piece something together from that … This time, I went full tilt with a complete system … DVD and a DVDRW … two DVDs in one machine … That’s like Surf & Turf for me … P4 2.6, 200G SATA (this new thing he thought I should check out) a pretty case and 1gig of RAM … I also picked up a couple spare power supplies (always need them) and a new optical mouse … The ball mouse that was in the KVM got dirty a lot and I have grown tired of cleaning it … Stupid dust … Everything else is on the motherboard … sound, vga, NIC … whatever … so I plunk $725 in his hand and I am off to install hell … Little did I know the hell that awaited me when I got home …

I pull up to the house and the wife comes running out … ‘You have to come inside right now!’ … okay, scare the crap out of me, what happened to one of the kids … who called … what is going on? Remember that kid who had his 3rd birthday back on October 10th last year? Well this same kid was allowed to go to the bathroom by himself … He flushed the toilet and somehow replayed the events of his birthday party … The same toilet overflowed and the water followed the same path down to, you guessed it, the SmartJack that brings the T1 connection into my location … She said she ran down when she realized what was happenning and felt the box, it was wet … She then said she heard it pop and sizzle … So I am on the phone to Savvis telling them that it’s the same exact thing that had happened 10/10/04 … Verizon has to come out and pop in a new card … Why didn’t they move that box? This time the phone only rang once … Another guy from a different band wanting to know why he couldn’t get to his site … I also got an email when I finally got to emails from a guy at like 11pm … I always kinda think the emails are funny cause you’d think if someone couldn’t get to their site that they might think that I couldn’t get emails … So I replied to this email and didn’t specifically place the blame on my 3 year old son … The pressure would certainly be too much on him …

So as I sit and wait, I figure I can begin the installation of the new machine and stuff … I have no Internet to get updates and stuff, but no matter … I now have the spiffy firewall in place where I am already protected from the nasties before I even install whatever operating system I choose … Since this is my workstation, I still use a lot of Windows based software, so this will be a Windows based machine … I have to complete hooking up the internal wires and things … The computer guy did most of the mounting of stuff … I had to hook up the LED wires … the external USB ports that are on the front of the box, etc … So I get it all together and boot it up … Setup goes through its normal startup and when I get to the part where I tell the installation to begin, it tells me there’s no hard drives to install Windows to … What?! Hmm … guess Windows doesn’t know about SATA when this was released … Okay, no problem, I will press F6 when the Setup begins and let it know with the SATA drivers … So, I do that and when I select to read the drivers from the CD that came with the motherboard, Setup informs me that I have no floppy drive to read the drivers in from … Uhm … I didn’t get a floppy drive cause I never use them anymore, and I have about 30 machines that have floppies in them that I didn’t need one in this new machine … Bah! Exit the setup again … so I figure I will go to Microsoft’s web site and look up how to install onto a new SATA HDD … Guess again, I have no Internet … So what to do? Screw it, I steal a 6G IDE out of another unused machine and decide to install the Op/Sys there and once up and running get the 200G up and running for storage … and that’s what I ended up doing …

Almost 7 hours after reporting my 3 year old’s adventures, Verizon shows up and I am running within 5 minutes … I asked the guy if I could cover the box or something and he said that would be fine … He didn’t seem into moving it or anything, so I will have a plastic bag covering that bad boy within 24 hours … Maybe some gaff tape with the plastic draped so anything will run off and I can leave the sides and bottom exposed … If I tuck it over, I think something may be able to get into the back of the unit, so I will create sort of like a gutter instead … This box is locked and I have no access to it at all … So there you have it, I knew it would only take 2 minutes to put that card in cause I knew what the problem was … Of course he had to go through his diagnostics and pinpoint the problem … It’s also always nice to have someone come in and admire my mess … It’s neat to watch someone else climb through all the boxes and crap that’s all over the place …

So I have the Internet, I begin Windows Update … While I update, I play some Counter-Strike to pass the time … I also moved some machines around since I was down and there was no one accessing them … Some of the machines that I recently developed, and when I say ‘recently’ I mean within the last year, I moved into more permanent spots and got them out of my way … I was also going to replace the firewall’s power supply, but it seems to have lost that rattling noise that it used to make … It was blowing air just fine so I will just keep an eye on that one … In the coming days I will re-vitalize the old Windows MySQL server into a new FreeBSD server with one of the new power supplies …

After all the updates are complete, I immediately go for the essentials … Firefox and I had always been meaning to switch from Eudora to Thunderbird, so here was my chance … got those both installed and working and I started getting the email accounts set up … I am using POP3SSL and SMTP-AUTH TLS for sending … all using the main hostname of the mail server … so far so good … I installed my CorelDRAW 12 upgrade, and it didn’t even ask me for an old disc … Weird … I know both DVD drives are working as I played Revolution-OS in there (a fitting first movie in this Windows machine) … I resurrected my brother’s old Creative Labs powered speakers for this machine … I decided I wanted better sound than the little cheapo speakers I’ve had on my workstation for some time … Already I am getting used to Thunderbird … I had over 350 messages to root from the BSD machines … No complaining from the Windows machines … I don’t think they even knew the Internet was unavailable …

A couple hours of sleep in my chair here, and I am back at it … Typing in this entry a reseller called for a new domain and asked about yesterday … They didn’t even realize the down time from last night … See, it only matters between 9 to 5 I guess … Although I am sure there were many puzzled faces during the outage last night … Right now the mail server is being converted to the SCSI drive that was installed almost a week ago … It spun in there just fine for that time, so now it’s ready to go into production … I also bought EditPadPro for the new machine … It was about time I got a registered version of that … It’s the best editor I have ever used, and I was getting tired of the slow response times of the older version … This new version is much better …

So! With the power outage from last week, and the AT&T outage coupled with my 3 year old’s potty training outage and my workstation’s hard disk crash, this has GOT to be it for a while, yes? I most certainly hope so …

Fired Again

The Whiskey Tango decided Sunday nights weren’t doing what they wanted, so they decided to simply close on Sunday nights … So, I had the job for a week … WooHoo!

UPDATE 06/15/2005: Actually, the Whiskey Tango is closing 3 of their 7 nights … Sunday, Monday and Thursday tanked …

UPDATE 08/29/2005: and shortly after, they tanked Wednesdays … They’re only open Tue, Fri and Sat … Sports Bar is open every night though …

Mail Server SCSI Install

Figured I couldn’t do any worse by installing the SCSI devices I got from eBay into the mail server at a mid-peak time … They had been sitting here since Monday and there was the power outage so I figured I would get them into the machine so work could begin transferring all the mail server data to it … The IDE will remain in the machine to serve as a backup/spare for the mail server’s files … While I went into it blindly not knowing whether there was anything on the drive, it all worked out … Worse case scenario would be that I would have booted into something I would or wouldn’t be familiar … Maybe even have gotten some free software? But that wasn’t the case … the mail server booted from the IDE and now PHPSysInfo displays the drive as being installed, just nothing on it yet …

Power Outage

Had a 45 minute power outage from about 7 to 7:45pm … If anyone knows an economical way to keep about 30-40 computers, 4 Cisco devices, 3 KVMs and maybe a couple monitors running from a battery backup for an hour or two, please let me know … Otherwise, I guess I have to grin and bear these outages as I have no control over them … At least this time there were no casualties … well, none so far …

Back at The Tango

I’m back at The Whiskey Tango on Sunday nights … Brian Bortnick stopped playing Kenny’s a couple weeks back and didn’t go right into another location … The Whiskey Tango wasn’t successful with their Sunday night replacement either, so they’re trying something new with having another original band night hosted by Spin … I am now the house guy for these Sundays at The Whiskey Tango … Last night was the first one … it went okay … It will certainly need to build if they want it to continue … this coming week ought to be good with Juliet … they’re not hosting Wednesday nights anymore …

KathyMarks.com

KathyMarks.com | notes on breaking into web design from Kathy Marks.

In my travels at today’s Zeldman visit, I see that Jeffrey referenced this woman’s post of the reading of his book … Makes sense … to link to positive experiences of his book … It’s probably how the guy makes money …

Anyway, I followed that link to her web design company site, and on her “finding web hosting” tip page the first thing she says “The best hosts offer easy-to-use account control panels.” … I thought that was misleading …

It should say something like ‘Some hosts offer control panels, and this makes their services easier to use for those with not much hosting knowledge.’ Just because I choose to run reliable servers without paying for an expensive web application to manage them shouldn’t jeopardize me as being classified one of the ‘best’ hosts … Thanks …

Jeffrey Zeldman

WARNING! If you’re like me, when you go to this site, your day will be over … Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report … each time I go, I can get lost in links and readings for hours …

I bought this guy’s book from Amazon a while back, and I frequent his site from time to time to see what’s going on … His latest post “10 years” talks of when he originally worked on the batmanforever web site and was using HTML to accomplish this and how far he’s come in the way of development, etc …

I was originally going there to look at his mug picture as a comparitive for us techie people who have some sort of need to post our picture on our site, but we must distort the image so that it doesn’t look like us … I guess it’s also being that we want to post an image, but why post a flower or a computer monitor … surely the only thing we can post is an image of ourselves, but it must not actually look like us …

I can only speak for me in that I personally don’t like looking at images of myself … Regardless of the image, it doesn’t matter … Doesn’t matter if it was professionally done, or a candid … I don’t freak though … I can have images of myself plastered all over the place … but the one place I can have some control, I decided to distort the image as it is to the top right there …

Then there are the images that I find acceptable, and that I would use on a consistant basis, but I no longer have the long hair, so those images are useless to me … I now have to wait through the taking of many painful images of my current self whether I will find a current pic that I find acceptable to use in its unaltered state …