Author: David Pierron

bLogs

In the last week I guess it’s been, I have been following the MovableType press, and I have also happened upon a lot of bLogs … I just read one that said they were changing their URL because “cause well, I get a lot of spam comments and there are some people that read my blog that I would rather not have any information about me. “ and they went on to say “I just want friends and family and random strangers to read it, not assholes.” … hehe … isn’t that funny? I sort of touched on this a couple posts back. I never did get into the comment spamming thing, but I guess that’s a problem that plagues either bLogs in general, or just MovableType … But because of the wonderful world of Internet spidering (WWW), you never know who may have indexed your site, and who might drop by and read about your wonderful life through your comments posted publicly for anyone to see. Yeah, there’s the robot.txt file that you’re supposed to put in your root to stop this, but how many search engines do you think really honor that? Also, who does this stop when it comes to a human web browser? No one … So, bare you thoughts, your life … someone is going to read it. It might be for family and friends, but I think somehow, some way strangers will eventually read it, and I don’t think changing your URL is going to stop that …

All My Sites Are Down!

That’s utimately the worst phone call or email anyone doing what I do can receive. It makes me break out in a sweat immediately before I even know what the problem is … Sometimes, it isn’t my problem, and that makes me angry. Sometimes it is my problem, and that makes me angrier! Most times lately, this is due to the Windows systems rebooting on their own. As I recall, the first time this happened, I researched it and created this page: http://www.icuhost.net/bug_check.html for an acquiantance of mine to look at … After his seeing that page, he sent me the following:

Your Windows issues, it is kind of outside my area of expertise. I can keep my servers running to support my development efforts, but that is mostly with duct tape, spit, and a prayer. Did you go to http://oca.microsoft.com/en/Welcome.asp? In addition, you can turn off auto-reboot and actually see the BSOD that brought your system down. I am going off WinXP/Win2K3, but presumably, it is similar in Win2K. Windows-Break to bring up system properties, on Advanced tab under startup hit settings, and uncheck automatically restart under System failure. You can also change the option to do a complete memory dump, which will give you additional information should it happen again. Do you have anything in your event log? I am also not seeing too many suspects that are running in Kernel mode. Perl should be running exclusively in user mode. Black Ice Defender runs in Kernel mode. Are you running WHQL drivers all around on this box? These are the usual suspects.

So, the decision was made to migrate everything running off of those Windows boxes and create new ones to take their place … This process has been slow going as there are people utilizing the setups on those boxes … The DNS has been moved off, but the mail servers are still active … I have been trying to get everyone to migrate over to the FreeBSD mail server voluntarily, but that isn’t going as well as expected. I thought people would jump at the chance at FREE SPAM and Virus protection? Maybe I need to word it just like that so that it looks sweeter rather than a chore …

Statement Emails

Sent out statement reminders for billing. Wife said that not many payments were coming in as usual. Could be that when I sent them out on the 1st that there were DNS issues. After changing the DNS to FreeBSD servers, I pointed the Windows servers to those new DNS servers … I think this was amistake due to the fact I am running AD here on the Windows machines … Eventually I lost local networking, and I assume this had to do with not pointing the Windows machines to the Windows DNS. So, I have to keep DNS running on the Windows network for the Active Directory … I wanted to avoid this, so I will rebuild the Windows portion of the network into not requiring DNS and doing the networking via a workgroup or something … Utilizing a domain isn’t as necessary as I would have thought when I started all this up … It’s ultimately cool that I have had the ability to experiement and learn with these machines and I have people benefitting daily from my endeavors …

25 Ads

It’s Tuesday morning, and I have 25 ads in my stack to do. That’s less than half of normally what I do each issue. Mike said last night at 10pm he has 4 “with him” and 2 to get … So that’s a substantial loss in advertisers … Regardless, it still doesn’t make sense to do anything on Mondays as there would be phone calls making last minute changes, and we’re sure not to disappoint, right? So being that Monday night is my only night off from the Sound Job, I take it easy with the paper … Ads aren’t ready anyway, so why bust my balls? Bitter? Maybe, but underpaid and overworked doesn’t help when thrown into this equation … If I get the job I mentioned, I might not have time to do the paper anymore … The horror!

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 …