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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Saturday, March 09, 2002
Ch ch ch changes Wow spend an evening at the hockey game and a Saturday running errands and stuff and things change so much while you're gone it's amazing. Here's the latest. My hosting company is merging with another company and all of the accounts are being transferred starting tomorrow night! I got an email from my current host advising me to make a backup of the whole site before 5PM Pacific time Sunday. They will start moving folks around and could have some downtime off and on over the next 5 days. So if things get crazy on this site, you know why. :) Hopefully it won't be too bad, but we'll see. In terms of what this means for my current search for new hosting, I'm not sure. I think the conservative thing to do for right now is give this new company a chance to get things working and see how it goes before making another transition. But I'm keeping the information I've gathered close at hand, and I'm still open to anymore information you might have. I don't know who the "other" company is, I think if I can find that out, any information I can gather on them will be factored into the equation as well. For now, keep your fingers crossed that things go smoothly this week and we'll go from there! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:08 PM | 0 comments | 
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Friday, March 08, 2002
Updates Sorry for the delay in posting, Blogger was doing some back-end upgrades, which I hope will make this stuff even better! Also, sorry for those of you who might have found a 404 when trying to get to this page very early this morning. I don't know how but it just disappeared off the server. Luckily I had a backup so I could replace it easy enough even though Blogger was down, but I don't know what happened. Maybe someone doesn't like my opinions? As an update to my previous post about the new Mac system here at work, management changed their minds again and went back to green lighting the system we had already all agreed upon. They were thinking of getting an add-on to a new copier instead of buying a new printer for him. It would cost $1500 more but the cost per page was lower on this than a printer. Eventually, however, they did the math and figured out that to cover the cost in the expected 3-year accounting cycle, he would have to print like 65,000 pages per year. That's a lot of printing for one person! *L* I'm glad they figured that out themselves, I'm not sure I could have explained it diplomatically. Today is more database work day. Have to get all the billing details ready for next week's billing and generate past due lists for the sales folks to follow up on. Not fun stuff, or the most interesting stuff, but I do have to at least think about what I'm doing, so it keeps me busy and makes the day go quicker. I'm still exploring new web hosting. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions, some of them look pretty good so far! If anyone has more, send 'em my way. I want to get the best deal I can find, both price-wise and service-wise! By the way, anyone have any good or bad vibes about readyhosting.com? I found them on my own, no one suggested them, just wondering. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:41 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, March 07, 2002
Moving On.. OK, the site is working again and I'm going to take a look at some other hosting packages in the near future, so that's that for now. I'll keep you informed, obviously, and I'm still open to suggestions but I'm moving on from my ranting about it. Life's too short! :) Thanks for the welcome back, Eric! It's nice to see Scoble blogging again. We've missed ya' Robert! Take your time getting back into the flow, we'll be reading anyway! Seems like I'm about the only blogger I read not going to SXSW this weekend, eh? OK, I'm not really the only one, but alot of the folks I read regularly are getting geared up for it. Hope you all have a good time and I expect full reports when you get back, if not before! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 7:26 PM | 0 comments |
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$^&%! hosting company! Well it's now 9AM on March 7, 2002. This site has been dead in the water since 4:30PM March 6. I don't know when it will be back, as the email isn't working either, including the email for the company who's hosting it. I've frankly had it with That Hosting Company. Stuff like this happens far too often, and while I certainly understand that there are sometimes problems, their inability to own up to the problems and communicate about them is disgusting. A little history: I signed up for a flat fee, "lifetime" hosting account with them at Gnomedex last year. That fee was for a 250MB site, with unlimited transfer, within reason, and 250 email accounts. The account features listed at the time included a Windows NT hosting environment, Access and .asp support (which was why I chose the NT platform over Linux), a web-based control panel, detailed statistics, and 99% uptime. I would be limited to only email support with the deal, but I figured that was ok, I wasn't doing ecommerce here or anything like that. I started out in October and was immediately told that, well the web-based control panel and the statistics weren't actually working yet, but they would be in just a matter of weeks. I should have left then. Things seemed to go ok, I got on board, I got everything loaded ok, I started blogging, the site seemed to work and everyone was happy. Shortly after my 30 day money back guarantee ended, naturally, the site started going down, for days at a time. On average the site was down for at least one day out of each week. I was repeatedly told that it was just a temporary server problem and that I would be moved to a new server any day now and to watch my email for the new ftp details when that happened. After one of the last in this series of downtimes, I couldn't log in using ftp anymore. I wrote support an email and got a reply back two days later that, oh yeah, they had moved me to a new server, and forgot to send out the new ftp information! Things seemed to stabilize for a few, they even instituted a support forum for their customers and I was happy about that. Then another outage, this time lasting almost 3 days. When everything came back online they tried to explain it away as a problem with their connection at the telephone company and not a downtime that was their fault. Only problem was, when everything came back, I noticed that certain posts were missing from my blog. They had obviously restored from the backup two days before everything went down, and obviously that wasn't caused by the telephone company, right? When I posted to the forums about that fact, wanting an explanation of why they needed to restore from backup, my post was deleted, "This is not the place for complaints or any posts that we deem hostile in intent". It wasn't hostile, I wanted an explanation of why their official explanation of downtime didn't jive with what I saw on my site. Isn't that sort of information why you go to support forums? When someone, in response, sent a bunch of us an email suggesting that maybe we open up a forum somewhere else, independent of the company, that person's account was killed for "spamming" and the support forums were shutdown, because he got the addresses to spam from there. (I'll grant you that it was, technically, spamming and someone must have complained about it, but it reinforced the notion that you're not to say anything bad about the company. I may even find my own account killed for this post. I wonder...) After the holidays things settled down, I was informed that the statistics and control panel that I had been promised at signup were not going to be implemented anytime soon, and that, in fact, they may just switch everyone over to a Linux hosting plan. (Never mind the .asp pages and Access databases I already have setup) They assured me that switching them over to mySQL wouldn't be that bad, and they would make sure to support .asp in their Linux plans. We'll see about that. I made do, found my own stats, figured out how to do everything else myself so I wouldn't need a control panel, and they even started putting daily status reports on the forums (now reopened with a strict "no complaining" policy). Then Feb 23 happened, the site was down for all but 7 hours that entire weekend. Just like it is now, no connection to any of the sites they host. When it finally did come back, the daily status report for the 23rd claimed some minor problems and the 24th claimed everything was working. There have been no status reports since. There's more, but I think you get the general idea of what I've been dealing with since October. Keep in mind that all of this has happened over the course of ONLY 5 months. I can't imagine dealing with this continually for years. It is now well into hour 16 of this outage, and given their West Coast location, I imagine it will be this afternoon, at the very least, before the site is back online. I really have no idea. I assume that when it is back, there will, again, be no explanation of what was going on, no communication and no apology. I've already paid for "lifetime" hosting, which means, in effect, that outside of a $15 yearly maintenance fee the hosting is already paid for, and moving somewhere else is just going to cost me more money, but I'm seriously thinking about it anyway. The site and the email accounts are no good to me if they don't work. So does anyone know a cheap, good hosting company? Or does anyone want to contribute to the "Help Mike pay for a new hosting account" fund? Go buy stuff from Amazon through the links on the left-hand column, so I can get some proceeds! *L* Update: 24 hours later, it seems to be up. This is completely ridiculous. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:32 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, March 06, 2002
Good morning! Yup, back at work today, migraines are all gone! Had to wade through some emails this morning, but nothing that was pressing, or even that important. A request for a little change in the telephone system programming was about the only thing that needed tending to right away, and that was a fairly easy change. In other news: This is why Angela and I each have our own computers. In fact I currently have 4 working machines, if you include the laptop, at our house and one non-working machine that is waiting for me to find time to try my hand at a Linux install. No computer-waiting rage in our house! So did anyone get Klezed today. My users seem to have avoided this one. I'm guessing we never got a copy sent here, seems I would know if we did by now, eh? I'm learning alot from the Webmaster World forums, but wanted to share this one specifically on taking good digital pics. Lots of good stuff there for me to keep in mind this spring/summer when I try to get more pics taken with the digital cam, even if some of it is way over my head! I see where another of the Lockergnome writers has his own blog. Randy Nieland (Furo) has joined the fun. Welcome Randy! Doc Searls is thinking of marching on Washington to protest what the DMCA is going to do to internet radio. I think he has a point, the DMCA is the poster boy for those of us who crave less government in our lives, because it's an example of what the government can do when it feels the need to "do something". I prefer to have my federal government doing nothing because everytime they need to do "something" we wind up with crap like the DMCA or the Patriot Act! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:09 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, March 05, 2002
All's Quiet Seems like while I was sleeping away my migraine, (I'm much better now, thanks for the well-wishes Meryl!) that I didn't miss much today, eh? There were no pages from work, no big breaking tech news to report, at least that I've found in the last few minutes of reading, and no big personal news. No news is good news, as they say. Except I did notice that two of my favorite bloggers have gone into hiding. Scoble's been away for a few weeks now, hope everything is ok there! And GeekBlog hasn't been updated since he moved to the new domain name and server. Makes you wonder if there was a problem in the move somewhere? On the other hand, I did notice that Jevon, one of the creators of Blogtrack has started his very own blog. That's a cool way to keep users updated on the progress of the new stuff they're working on, which I'm getting somewhat excited about! Oh Jevon, I appreciate the link, I really do, but the name is McBride, not MacBride. *smile* If my grandfather were still alive, he'd smack me if I didn't correct that, he was very proud of the family name. One bit of news though, in the "it figures" category. I noticed that my page views and visitor stats for today were even higher than they were yesterday and most non-featured in Lockergnome days. I spend all that time trying to keep updated so folks will come back, and the day I say I probably won't be updating, the hits are higher. Is there a message in there? *L* Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:49 PM | 0 comments |
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Ouch Home today with a killer migraine, probably won't be much in the way of updates, I'm going to be trying to sleep it off! Here's hoping the pager doesn't wake me with a work emergency! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 8:16 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, March 04, 2002
Oh yeah, the TPS reports... OK, so I'm not actually doing TPS reports, because this isn't Office Space, but I am doing database reports and month-end maintenance today, yay for me! They are about as interesting, although I suspect these reports are more useful, at least to our accounting people. Plus, I have a fast enough machine that I can run them in the background while I post to the blog, that's not so bad. I used to not have a fast enough machine, so when it came time to run these modifications, I had to sit and actually watch it go through the numbers, because any other window would just freeze. Talk about boring! I've heard through the grapevine that the new Mac system that I signed off on for our graphics person has hit a roadblock among senior management, who have different ideas about some of the peripherals on the system. The remarkable thing here is not that they have different ideas, but rather that they have yet to mention these ideas to me, to find out if they're workable or not. I signed off on what we had hammered out because it would work, first and foremost. The new ideas I've heard through the grapevine, I'm not so sure would actually work. And even if they did, they add unnecessary complexity, which is never good! (I won't bore you with the details..) We'll see if these ideas ever get routed back to me or not. Don't hold your breath. Hopefully I'll find some time to go back and browse through the forums at WebMaster World. I realize I'm probably behind the times, but I just discovered these forums the other day, and just reading through some of the posts and responses makes me feel like I'm learning all sorts of new website stuff. There's really good stuff all over the forums there, definitely worth a read, but it may take me months to get through them all. *L* Meryl points us to an interesting article on Google Bombs, or how you can wind up being the top result of a search term if other blogs refer to you with those words as part of the link. Of course it would take a conspiracy of sorts to actually make it happen, but it's interesting. It still doesn't explain the sudden upturn in people searching for "I'm a man looking for another man..." and winding up here, unless somewhere on the 'net I'm being referred to as some sort of gay dating advice site. (Oh wait, just posting that is going to make it more likely they wind up here isn't it? Sometimes search engine logic really sucks! *L*) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:59 AM | 0 comments |
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Sunday, March 03, 2002
Lazy sundays.. Lazy Sunday's rock! OK so it wasn't completely lazy, I did go through a couple of chapters of the VB 5 book, ran through a couple of exercises, and started to get down some of the code. But I also watched the DVD of Father Ted episodes that I picked up at the library, played some Sega Dreamcast Hockey, and read parts of the Sunday paper. Unfortunately, a good part of the Sunday paper got blown off our front porch and spread through the neighborhood, I assume. We tracked down some of it after it hit puddles and got wet, there by staying still, but most of it was gone! *L* At least the comics were still on the porch! Father Ted, by the way, is a BBC show about a couple of Irish priests, very funny stuff, I recommend it, if you like English humor. Speaking of recommendations, Angela, her brother and I took in We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson. It's a very good movie, although it is an extremely powerful movie. If you're not prepared for a gut-wrenching emotional experience, this is not the movie to see. But it will make you think about Vietnam and the people who died there. Have I told you how much I love having a cable modem? I was able to grab a copy of MySQL, a 12MB zip file that downloaded in 56 seconds. Then I got the GUI in a zip in like 11 seconds. I may not keep it, or really use it, but it's nice that I can install it and get a feel for it without having made a big time commitment to downloading it. Oh, and Angela was listening to streaming radio on another computer at the same time, how cool is that? You should get a cable modem going at your house too! :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:59 PM | 0 comments |
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