Author: David Pierron

I think for the first time ever in my life this has happened … In one day, I was approached by at least 4 different potential customers … (I seem to think there was a 5th, but if there was, it escapes me) … Two were via email, and two were in person … Now, if they all pan out, that’s another story … but I was impressed with this little turn of events …

I have been really busy working and then doing some more work … Working 6 nights a week at The Tango and all the computer work as well … But a couple things that happened since my last entry over a month ago are this; I renewed my T1 contract for another 3 years … Savvis has been a great provider and has served me much better than Fast.Net ever did … In fact, Fast.Net went Chapter 11 and recently had an asset sale .. so good thing I got out when I did … The other thing that really isn’t such a big deal is that I ran a network connection to the sound booth … I am now able to be online from The Tango … So those were a couple things worth mentioning …

Latest web site I did for Y-Not … I sent a semi-rant to a customer of mine about the benefits of PHP, I will copy and paste that here:

PHP is not only web … there is a CLI version that will come with the Windows version, and where it used to be standard on *nix, you can still install it … I use PHP script all the time to do scheduled tasks … Most notably on the Windows server to open an Access database and see whether an artist’s touring schedule was update and if it was, and email is triggered to those on an elist that wish to be updated of such things … The other thing I really dig about PHP is that you don’t need addition components to complete tasks … No AspEmail .. AspUpload, etc … all can be written simply using PHP … Conditional includes as well … It’s incredibly robust … AND it runs on every platform … So, when I write a PHP web page or application, I can put it on either Windows or FreeBSD servers …

Additionally, I bought Zend Encoder http://www.zend.com/store/products/zend-encoder.php … so I can encrypt my PHP source … Additionally with a custom PHP function, I also can encrypt web site source utilizing JavaScript … I just recently put up http://www.ynotrocks.com … Pixxar did the site, and I did all the rest … It is completely PHP powered, and they have FTP access to all my scripts, but downloading them is useless, they’re all encrypted … Additionally, if you load any page from that site, click View Source and see what you get … So you can’t even swipe my HTML easily … another thing I do is, I do a check within my scripts to make sure I’m running on the domain they were written for … If not, the script exits immediately with an ICUDesign.Net copyright message … and lastly, all the scripts will expire on a specified date … I set this site for Jan 1, 2005 … So even if they move to another host and think they have a running application, it will eventually fail on them … (of course the MySQL server connection is hard coded, and that will shut them down first but they could override their local DNS and run their own local version of MySQL server using my domain name, but the expiration of the scripts cannot be tricked) …

So there you have it … this is my latest update to my busy world …

This Halloween I went to see a play version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was in New Hope, and quite apparently the best place to find sweet tranvestite trans-sexuals from Transylvania-ha-ha … the part that was difficult about this was that it was Halloween night … A big night for the kids, and the show was at midnight. We had to cut the kids Halloween short and take them to their aunt’s house to babysit for us going to the show. I also had to go to work and get the night started there … The sound guy for the other band got there later than expected, but I go him started and set up fine for what he needed. Alex filled in for lights (the light people were the ones who actually invited us to go in the first place) and at the time, we didn’t realize that I would be doing house sound at The Tango … Anyway, it worked out well …

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was at The Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA … Seeing the show live was neat, and it was a pretty relaxed performance in that the actors would pause for the yelling out of the places that were made famous by the cult following to the movie … The songs were sung to karaoke or midi versions of the songs from the movie … They used about 4 or 5 wireless microphones and handed them around as each actor became the primary in the scenes … Rice, toast were thrown as well as water squirted around the playhouse … The narrator who sat to the right in an easy chair the whole evening had a super soaker and at times decided to soak the actors when they least expected it … At times you couldn’t hear what they were saying and at other times the vocals were distorted … Sometimes the actors even addressed the audience and some of the things that the audience said even broke the actors into laughing … At times the actors on the stage (the transvestite “chorus”) would say the memorized lines that were “added” to the movie … The show didn’t run very long and that wasn’t a bad thing … It was just right I’d say .. Probably just under 2 hours but it went very quick …

Drove back and made it to The Tango by about 10 after 2 … Alex had powered everything off and the band was packing up already … I was on stage wrapping some cables when Janine from Zero Cool came in and said that we had her brand new Beta SM58 microphone … She was holding an SM58 in her hand and wanted to swap me this SM58 that she had got from Whiskey Tango the previous Saturday. Only one problem. The bar only had 6 Beta SM58 microphones … I told her that there was no way that we gave her a SM58 instead of her Beta SM58 that she claimed she brought in that night … I remebered specifically the turn of events from that night … When the band was done, I went up to the stage and walked across the front removing each of the wired mics. I put them in my back pocket as I crossed the stage until I got to the mic box to put them away … I dropped the 3 microphones into their place in the mic box, and as I moved to get the guitar mics, I saw a Beta 58 in front of the drums. I picked it up and went back to the box and noticed I had an extra microphone … Oh no! I thought … How will I know which mic is hers? I looked at the microphones, and to my relief, there was a different microphone, a good ol’ SM58 amongst the other 6 Beta 58s … Obviously this was the microphone she replaced on the stand … The reason this was obviously the mic was because the bar only had Beta 58s … The regular SM58 had to have come in with the band … She wasn’t happy about this, and I went into the office and told the Johns about it … They said sure, take the box out there and show her the microphones … I said that I didn’t think that would help because they were all Beta 58s in there, and I don’t see how she could say one of those was hers when I explained the scenario from the previous Saturday … I told them that I thought she should just talk directly to them … So I went back out and spoke with Janine about it and told her to talk to the Johns … She declined and said that she would just forget about it … Chalk it up as a loss … She seemed to infer that I was handling the situation bad by “going on about it” explaining it to her that it’s impossible that she took an SM58 by mistake rather than her Beta 58 since the bar only had 6 Beta 58s, and that’s what I ended up with at the end of the night … I explained to her that I was trying to help her by explaining that the problem lies elsewhere … I thought if she knew for a fact that this couldn’t happen that she would realize this and know that the microphone must be somewhere else … She didn’t seem pleased and left it at that without talking to the owners (the Johns) …

So on the way home, this Spellcaster truck tries to kill me …I’m cruising towards the 95 on ramp from Woodhaven Road, and I have a Spellcaster truck on my left, and a car coming from Rt. 13 on my right … the Spellcaster truck tries to speed around me on my left while the guy on my right comes into my lane … So now the Spellcaster truck can’t cut in front of me … I immediately applied the brake, and the car that cut in on me from the right proceeds to go further left to get into the I95 North on ramp, and the Spellcaster truck takes that car’s place in front of me to get on the I95 South on ramp .. Whew! Near miss … I then see this Spellcaster truck weaving in and out of cars … He puts on his left signal, and moves into the RIGHT lane?! So I decide to catch up and get the plate number for Kevin (the owner of Spellcaster) and the truck is doing 71 (I know cause there’s a thing on the road that displays our speed because you’re supposed to be going 40 into this construction zone) … If you get caught going faster than 40MPH in a construction zone, it’s an immediate suspension of your license and a $500 fine … I know this cause I got stopped speeding in a construction zone and the cop told me what he COULD do to me, but he simply gave me a speeding ticket to ‘cut me a break’ …

So that was my Halloween … I didn’t see any kids, and I saw a bunch of half-dressed girls … I guess it was okay …

My CS PHP-Nuke site was hacked while I sat and played Counter-Strike for a while on Sunday morning … I think I started playing around 4am and stopped about 8am or something … I went to my CS Site and there it was … My latest story edited with HACKED! and some other non-sensical text and images … I had heard of a security bug in PHP-Nuke, so I went to a site and got the security patches … Applied them and removed the hackers edits and insert as an admin on the PHP-Nuke site … I then got hold of this script that would analyze the installation … I found that another bug was present that would allow people to download any file on the server … I removed that … Another thing it told me that my PHP version was a vulnerability … So I went looking for how to upgrade PHP on my FreeBSD server …

I went to FreeBSD.Org … PHP.Net … but nowhere was there something that told me how to upgrade the mod_php4 installation … I didn’t want to delete the install and install the latest cause I didn’t want my config files and stuff to change … I eventually went to an IRC channel #freebsdhelp and was aided by the people in that room … There must have been 100 members in there …

Anyway, so I cvsup my ports collection, then create a database of installed ports, then do a portupgrade … This compiles from source all the latest releases of the ports I’m using … This took a little while, but I restarted the system (system restart without losing power or uptime) and when I came up immediately there was a problem with MySQL … I had moved the location of the default databases as they were originally stored on /var which is a smaller partition than others … So, edited that and all was well … Then the Forums on my CS Site wouldn’t work … In some cases, crashing the IE browser I was using when trying to access it …

I messaged in several forums about my problems and had to go to sleep .. I was very tired … I figured in the meantime maybe I would get some answers … The only answer I got was from someone who mis-interpreted my post … Oh well … So I did some more searching and one thing that sounded possible I tried and it fixed the forums straight away … I turned off gzip compression in the forums … I don’t know if the port upgrade made it incompatible or there was a failure in its installation …

On the plus, I have all the latest ports … I was able to compile PHP with GD support so I have the little security image on the PHP-Nuke site … We’ll see how it goes from here …

Have been sick all this week and have got nothing done at all … Just spent some time going through email and forums … a ton of stuff … have to keep at this stuff every day …

Haven’t updated in a while … I’ve been pretty busy I guess … many changes happening … The major thing is that Weekend at Bernie’s is breaking up. Therefor, I no longer have a job doing sound for bands … I don’t really know yet what sort of ways this will impact me … There have been some other offers and suggestions of what I should do, but I’m not entirely sure which way to go …

A new version of Counter-Strike and the HLDS dedicated server came out, so I have spent way too much time installing and configuring that … Of course, to test things that have changed, I go into the game and waste way too much time playing the game … It’s easy to get lost in the game itself as well as the company you keep with people from all over the country …

The web business is a big troubling as of late … Everybody wants something for nothing, and while I would agree with that myself, I have a hard time being the provider that demands a payment for services … There are so many different levels of what I feel are worthy of my fees, and then there are those that could hands down outweigh me simply due to the network they’re on. I mean face it, I have a T1 going into my house … What can I expect to demand from others coming into this blindly? While *I* know that I have a better uptime than hosting I’ve bought in the past, it’s the catch phrases that I don’t peddle … With all the machines and all the time I have invested in what I am doing, I have to re-evaluate the direction I take the hosting on, and in the process try not to lose anything I’ve established thus far … What makes this difficult that no matter what someone else may have to offer, I have to realize what I myself actually do offer, and not undersell myself … While some people may not agree with this, I guess at some point there has to be a line drawn … and it has to be clear and fair … To me, and to ‘them’ … *sigh*

Received my first payment from PayPal … Turns out I had to upgrade my PayPal account to receive the payment … It was because the payment was from a credit card … The regular account you can receive payments for free, but if the person pays with a credit card, you have to upgrade to a Premier account so that you basically authorize PayPal to take a percentage of the transaction … The payment I got was $30.00 and PayPal charged me $1.17 to process the payment … 2.9% + 30¢ … So I got $28.83 … I guess that isn’t bad … So a $100 payment would net $96.80 … $2.90 + .30 = 3.20 … I guess it’s worth it for the convenience … Now the question, do I convert this PayPal account to a business account and use it for ICUHost.Net? Hmmm …

Almost everything I can think of in my life, it always seems like there’s some sort of give and take that it’s almost impossible to keep anyone satisfied. I think I give a lot, but then there are those that seem to think I take a lot … I don’t necessarily see this …. Then sometimes my wife gives me hell because she feels I do more for others than I do for her … Then the others that she seems to think I do more for don’t think I do enough … Am I being vague? Well, in some respects I have to be, because this relates to so many different mediums as I am involved in many different things … Inasmuch as I feel that I do what I can for people, it just always seems like it isn’t enough, and I personally think it’s more than enough within reason … At some point, I think there needs to be a line drawn, and then when that line is drawn, the people you were doing so much for feel like it’s a slap in their face …

There’s rumors that there’s a cure for cancer, just that it would devastate the modern medical profession so they hush hush it … or kill people over it … but isn’t NOT sharing a cure also killing people? Anyway … Kevin Conroy, Sr. was buried yesterday … He died from cancer. Not even 40 yet with two kids 12 and 8 years old …

Was a different type of wake or viewing that I’ve been to before … This was all done in the church … So, after you went by the casket, you sat in a pew if you were staying for the mass … While you sat there, you saw them close the casket for mass … so you saw the families say their last goodbyes … You saw his two children and wife stand in front of the casket and look on at their father, husband for the very last time … I thought that was pretty damn heavy to be a witness to …

Then after all that, we sat there for an hour mass … I thought it was too long personally … I opted not to go to the cemetary … Like I said, I thought it was too much … Kudos to those who could handle it … After witnessing everything I did at the viewing/mass, and the fact that I hadn’t eaten (which contributed to me not feeling well), I couldn’t take the long drive to the cemetary and compose myself for a gravesite mass as well … The funeral was huge … Kevin had many friends …

I think it was a mixture of all those things … including some things I’m not mentioning … I will leave it at that .. but death is certainly something we must deal with … whether we want to or not …