Another day...
I didn't have time to write anything today. Maybe I'll get my thoughts on the Passion up tomorrow. I hope so!
I'm hoping to be able to post more often again now that I have my server coming along. It's taken a few weeks to get it all arranged, but I hope that things should be running smoothly now…
Moving on up II
We're a movin' on up, (We're a movin on up.) To the east side.(Mo-vin on up.)
To a de-luxe apartment, In the sky-.
Mo-vin' on up (Mo-vin on up.)
To the east side, (Mo-vin on up.)
We finally got a piece of the pie.
Pop quiz: without using Google or another search engine, what theme song is that? First person to get it will be rewarded with 10 asisaid points (Christopher presently holding the only other asisaid points — 10, I believe).
At any rate, welcome to the “other side.” If you are reading this you are on Cedar, asisaid.com's new home. Let me explain. This all started back in January of 2002 when I started ChristianSource FSLUG — a Christian Linux group mailing list. I was unhappy after a few months with cPanel's version of Mailman, so I installed my own copy. Unfortunately, I didn't realize how fast the archives would grow on the site. That along with other growth on my sites pushed my account to over 400 megs in size from about 100 megs previously (not counting my clients' web sites) and I realized I had two choices: upgrade my hosting plan or figure something else out.
As the exponential growth of the archives promised to eat up larger quotas fast, and even a few hundred more megs really would keep me from some things I've wanted to do for a long time, I realized “plan A” wasn't really all that great. And, my host's next upgrade in plan size would cost $20 more a month for only a little extra space unless I split up my sites into several smaller accounts, and even then I wasn't improving the situation much.
Enter an advertisement from 1&1, Germany's largest web host (and sister company to GMX), which recently started offering U.S. services. They spent the last few quarters of 2003 giving away shared 3-year hosting plans (I signed up for one I'm not presently using). That's getting off track — when I signed up, I ended up on their newsletter list and got an announcement for a $50 dedicated server. That sounded pretty reasonable — I was paying more than that for shared hosting!
Okay, but would I really be satisifed with a $50 dedicated server? Yeah the specs were great, but I sat on hold for 20 minutes to talk to anyone on the phone and sales e-mail responses took days to get replies to. Ok, so scratch that off the list. Same went for iPowerWeb's $50 server. Then there was BurstNET/Nocster's $59 server, but BurstNET seems to be just as unreliable as it was when I fled from their shared hosting facility in 2001 (and sales never responded — that's a step down from before).
By then, I realized that the benefits of a dedicated server were great and there just wasn't any turning back. Unfortunately, everything pointed in a direction I didn't want to go — a more expensive server package approaching $100/month. But, I decided maybe I could live with that.
Then I got the idea to sell a few basic hosting accounts, which inevitably lead to upgrading to a better server… all told, I signed up for a mid-grade server from ServerMatrix, a subsiderary of The Planet, a large datacenter in Dallas, TX, that had the largest percentage of growth for a good part of last year, according to Netcraft.
Cedar, as you might have guessed, is my server. You can see its uptime info here. Asisaid is the first of my sites to move to Cedar, but more will be moving over the next week or so. Eventually it will house all of my sites, my web design clients' sites and a few additional basic accounts purchased by CS-FSLUG members in recent weeks.
At any rate, for the first time, I'm leaving a hosting company that I really don't want to leave. I've spent two and one half years at HostingMatters, and I still think they are the best hosting company in the business. ServerMatrix's support is great too, but it's different — a basic managed server is quite different from a quality shared host, since you are still suppose to do most of the work (thus support surrounds a different set of issues). Plus, HM's small size allowed one to “get to know” the team. It was nice.
At any rate, enough rambling. Welcome to cedar. I'm hoping this will turn out to be a Good Thing (apologies to Martha on that).
By the way, asisaid is officially endorsing Bush-Cheney '04 in the Feedster tracking of blogs support for candidates.
| I Blog For: |
  |
Moving on up
Asisaid (as the guinea pig of my sites) is going to be picking up and moving to a new box as soon as WHOIS updates. If things get a little weird for the next day or two, don't worry, it should only be temporary.
Of course, feel free to let me know if you can't get to asisaid at all, or something like that…
Why am I moving asisaid? Well there's a good reason, but I'm too tired to tell it right now, so I'll let you know that (along with my reaction to The Passion) on the other side of this DNS update.
I saw it.
I saw the Passion of the Christ tonight. I need to think about what I saw for a little bit and then I'll provide my “review” of it. All I'll say right now is that it was both amazing and agonizing at the same time.
NASA Tomorrow
Word, I hear, is that NASA has a very exciting Mars related announcement tomorrow. Details apparently aren't really very clear, but it sounds like they've discovered something interesting.
I'm anxiously waiting.
Leap Day Humor
“Leap Day” deserves a bit of humor… okay, it isn’t new, but it is funny.
Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better computer programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.
They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several hours, lines of code streaming up the screen.
Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out.”
“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”
Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers. Satan is astonished.
He stutters, “But how?! I lost everything yet Jesus' program is intact! How did he do it?”
God chuckles, “Jesus saves.”
Site Design
Ok, so its time for the Christmas decorations to come down. Actually it was time along time ago. My problem is that I was really tired of the look I had before I switched to the Christmas layout, so now I have to figure out another new look to replace the Christmas one. I haven't figured such a design out yet.
I'm thinking about keeping the hills that currently have a nativity on them but making them green and grassy. Any other ideas?
SMS
The phone I got back in December is suppose to support SMS messaging (and I don't doubt it does, really), but I ran into a rather peculiar problem. When a internet service tried to send me an SMS yesterday via the e-mail gateway Cingular provides, the arrival of those messages appeared in my phone's log but not in my phone's message inbox. Odd.
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I actually like to read messages that are sent to me rather than being just told they arrived. Maybe my phone took care of them for me or something.
Seriously, has anyone else run into a problem like this?
Busy, Busy, Busy
I'm working on a really exciting project (well, to me, probably not terribly exciting otherwise…), thus why I've been kind of absent here a lot for the last few weeks. I'll post more on this soon…
The Passion of Christ
I just watched Mel Gibson's interview on ABC News's Primetime. It was pretty good. Gibson for the most part did a good job conveying a remarkably Evangelical standpoint. I'm looking forward to the film, although I hear it is incredibly draining to watch.
Gibson also had a good sense of humor during the interview. He said, when asked if he was going to get back into movies, that he wanted to get away for a while — go where no one could find him. “You know where that is? Where no one can find you? I figure I'm going to set up my tent next to weapons of mass destruction — then no one will be able to find me!”
Did he say that he'd like to kill a New York Times columnist, have his intestines stuck on a pole and kill his dog? “Yes. Although I really regret that statment about the dog. I'd never want to hurt a dog.”
Moving back on the subject… It will be interesting to see how one of the first major Christian motion pictures in decades impacts the nation. I hope, at the very least, it makes people think about more important matters than we generally do… if only for a short while. Maybe it'll be just enough to get them started.
