Eduardo -- it is your fault!
Yes, it is all his fault that I found this out.
Grrrrrrrrr.
Classic Humor
This gives me a smile each time I read it — particularly the closing couplet.
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite—
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”— Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, I
Why the poetry tonight? Well, I'm working on an end of semester poetry project, albeit not dealing with our friend Sidney (although I'll consider my work perfected if I manage to fit in at least one reference to his Defense of Poesy where it is actually meaningful). My poet vicit… errr… subject is Archibald MacLeish — another likable poet. As I'm writing this, I'm staring at a big stack of books by and about MacLeish that have made their way here from across the state through the MOBIUS interlibrary loan system. Sounds like a good weekend project, eh?
Bush Promotes Him Again: I need to do a post on Alberto Gonzales as well. I can't really find much of a record (it seems he doesn't have a huge public record), but he looks like a strict constructionist, as far as I can tell. He also sounds like he might be a bit less of a lightening rod than Attorney General Ashcroft. Certainly, I think the president will retain more political capital with this choice than if he had found an Ashcroft, Jr. Ed, I think, is right though — the AG's seat does turn people into monsters… maybe more frequent turnover would be a good idea.
Spoke too Soon
I'm now being invaded by dozens of zero dollar invoices coming from cyberspace.
I think I will just go to bed for now.
The Hosting Life
It has been nine months since I started up my new server and nearly as long since I ceased being a middleman in web hosting. I say all this to suggest it was high time I got my act together on that evil thing known as “billing.”
For a long time, my primary billable service was consulting, whereas hosting was a minor add-on to those services. As such, I had been using an accounting program oriented toward traditional types of sales, rather than service oriented sales — SQL Ledger. SQL-Ledger worked pretty well, although its installation process was terrible and so I had left it on my aging Dell Inspiron 5000e (running Mandrake Linux 9.1 with some 9.0 libraries) laptop that had been superseded by my new Apple Powerbook. The final, and only, really, nail in SQL-Ledger's coffin was when the NIC in my laptop went out. SQL-Ledger is fine, but it isn't fine enough to warrant going through the install process again…
Like I said, hosting use to be a minor part of my invoicing activities. It isn't that its suddenly become my primary business — but unlike consulting work, it results in more, smaller invoices… the kind that are harder to keep track of unless you have a good accounting package.
I wanted a program that, most of all, would do reoccurring billing (hosting) automatically rather than forcing me to manually enter each invoice every billing cycle. I also wanted a billing package, ideally, that integrated directly with the server, a so-called “provisioning system,” that would automate account creation so that billing and actual creation on the server would occur at the same time. I narrowed things down to phpCoin, ModernBill, WHM AutoPilot and WHOIS.Cart().
Whois.Cart() was cheap, but seemed very immature. ModernBill is extremely popular among hosts — my old host being one of its users — but it was a pain to deal with on the user end (I thought) and the demo version made clear that it was just as much of a pain on the administrator's side. I almost went with it anyway since it offers a really nice system of integration with payment processing gateways that allows for automatic payment status changes inside MB based on payments through the processor (e.g. PayPal). phpCoin seemed relatively well designed, but its WHM/cPanel integration was more of a hack than a real solution, and I was a bit worried that its Shared Source-style license brought in the worst security issues of Open Source and proprietary software (i.e. crackers can see the flaws, as in Open Source, but the community doesn't work to quickly repair them, as in proprietary software).
In the end, I went with WHM AutoPilot (or WHMAP for short). It's price is negligibly cheaper than ModernBill for a small operation (larger hosts will benefit from its unlimited client support), but its interface is much easier to work with. Like ModernBill, Whois.Cart() and other similar programs, it uses the Zend encoder for DRM, instead of being Open Source, but it fits my needs the best since it can handle both offline clients and web hosting clients in an interface that won't confuse myself or my clients.
I've probably bored most of you to death on all of this. Why am I even talking about this today? Well, today, my 21-day trial of WHMAP expired, so I had to make the big decision: do I buy it or wait and try something else. I decided to do the former… I think it was a wise decision as a whole.
Ashcroft Resigns
I feel kind of bad about feeling happy that Ashcroft is resigning. I mean, he's a Missourian and I supported him as a senator. By most accounts, the DOJ seems to be running quite well under his command. My main problem with him is the USA PATRIOT Act and, really, only the PATRIOT Act. As discussion flies around about who will replace him, I wonder — will they be any better? In actuality, I can't remember the last AG I did like… so maybe Attorney General Ashcroft wasn't as bad as he's seemed the last few years.
A Bunch of Things, A Little Time.
I want to expand my review of the Italian Job, mention the other movie I saw this weekend (free Showtime was fun), wrap up my political coverage, look back on my long ago UCC series, and several other things… but time doesn't permit doing so tonight. So, here's what you can do if you are just “crushed” by this announcement: make up your own post for me using amazing psychic powers to read my mind and figure out what I was going to say! Then post it in the comments so everyone else knows too.
Yeah, I know what you are saying… I don't believe in psychics either.
The Italian Job
I found out I could see HBO and Showtime for free this weekend. My cousin had given a good review to “the Italian Job” back when it was in theaters, so I decided to watch it tonight. It was action packed, exciting and fairly clean fun. A good gold heist always makes for a good story.
It wasn't exactly what I should have been doing with my time tonight (see my note from yesterday), but hey, it was a nice break.
Busy Day, lots of Computers
Well, I was busy today — and look to have ample reasons to remain busy tomorrow — working on computers. I have three from church or a related organization that need help, plus I had been planning for a long time to help a family friend get a new computer (which we accomplished today). I think its getting to be time for church to hire a part time IT person or something — we have too many computers that keep breaking (thanks to Windows).
sigh I like to help, but those three computers staring at me are more than I was looking for right now. There are days I wish I didn't know how to do computer repairs…
Summary of My Election Night Posts
In case you don't want to look through all eight of my election night posts, here are the high points:
- Most of “my” candidates won, including U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO 2nd District), whom I forgot to mention in my candidate post (see link) and whom bumps up my total support of the GOP to 9 candidates (vs. 1 Dem, 5 non-partisans and 0 other party candidates). Everyone won that I voted for, save state Rep. Catherine Hanaway (R-Maryland Heights; Speaker of the Missouri House) for the Secretary of States race and Chris Byrd ® for the Attorney General's race. Hanaway, apparently, discovered how hard it is for a St. Louis candidate to win a statewide election, despite Sen. Jim Talent's 2002 win that added “sen.” to his name (he lost the gubernatorial race in 2000 in a very close race).
- TNGALLOP proves an accurate predictor of the winner! Surprise, surprise!
