November 2002 Archives

Hey, first off, I looked at the stats file yesterday, and found that someone came to my site via a search on Google for CI Host. Ha ha!

OK, so, the new look. First off, Meg doesn't like it. I finally dumped the blogger.com skin for the clean and simple default skin from Movabletype. I borrow the colors from codenoevil.com. For one, it loads much faster now. Since some of the content is hot linked, a slow server on their end slowed down the response of my page. That content is now at the bottom, and you get the real deal immediately, and the fill second. Nate actually accused me of being a web designer! Bite your tongue.

So, on a technical note, my new Dell machine is livin' large.

• Dell Precision 340 Workstation


• 2.8 GHz Pentium 4


• 1 GB RDRAM


• 120GB Western Digital WD1200JB With 8 MB Cache


• ATI Radeon VE DVI Dual Head


• 2 Dell UltraSharp 17" DVI Flat Panels


• 48x10x40x CD-RW


• 42x CD-ROM


• Keyboard/Mouse/Floppy (All Stndrd)

Now one thing I found is that the Home or Small Office Network transfer method for the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard is poorly documented. Real quick, on the new machine, use the wizard to create a Wizard Disk, and then use that on the old machine. DO NOT CLOSE THE WIZARD ON THE NEW MACHINE. This way the network option won't be greyed out. Use the Wizard Disk on the old machine. The only thing left is that old machine will ask for a case SeNsItIve password that should be appearing in a dialog box on the new machine. That's it.

If I've missed anything, email me.

So, after the problems with DreamHost last week, I decided to leave. I signed up with C I Host. The sales rep, Marla, was everywhere but on the sales call with me. I had to call her attention back to the phone call numerous times. As a result of her not paying attention, MySQL databases weren't setup properly, and virual domains were missing from the account. To make matters worse, when I spoke to Emmanueln from tech support, he had no clue. In fact, this dude sounded like he was heavily medicated.

I called them up this morning to cancel my account. I was quite suprised to find that Matt, in customer retention, made no attempt whatsoever to keep my business. These guys must be very content in their sales numbers to just kiss a brand new customer goodbye, without trying to do right by me.

In the process of cancelling my account, they started in with this bullshit about how it is their policy not to refund setup and add-on charges. I was told that since the account had been setup, and I received login info, that I was on the hook. My argument is that it was never setup as per my request, so therefore I should get all of my money back. I just spoke with American Express to have them go after my money. They told me that I need to wait until the charge appears on my statement. I think I'm going to see if Meg's friend Cortney can write a letter (she's an attorney specializing in technology, and she got me out of my SDSL contract) on my behalf.

My advice, open your own datacenter. Oh, and by the way, I'm staying with DreamHost.

Linux, Open Source have 'more security problems than Windows'

Nathan and I started linuxisforlosers.com today. It's our intent to sell witty t-shirts for fun and profit. I'll let you know when the site goes live.

.net phrase of the day

If you are ever in nYc, you must get pizza from the source. Read about Lombardi's here.

I though Linux was supposed to be free? Oh well.

Phat Linux

Marcelo has release version 3.0 of W.Bloggar. I use his tool for updating my weblog. It is chock full of features to numerous to list. Go checkout the site. :)