Yeah, whatever. Dress up, act out a fantasy, be something that you’re not. Sounds just like Valentine’s Day to me. Oh wait, I got confused. My bad. S’pose to meet in front of the Black Cat Lounge, on 6th, at 9 PM. Onto the mail bag:
> Round a-bout, 10/30/03 6:08 PM, ya’ll wrote:
> (astrology writer) may be able to spit them out, with alot of help, but yours are more
> finely tuned to me, less general, somehow………..SPOOKY EVEN. You have
> actually bothered me from time to time with your ability to personalize the
> application of your work, and your scopes went from “entertainment” to
> “necessity for self defense” some time ago.
Nice letters make me all gooey inside.
One down, one to go. More work than I’d like, but the results of the efforts are starting to pay off. The new host has much more stringent security. Imagine a software engineer in the backroom cursing, “Why do they do it like that? That’s just stupid! Why? Oh now, what the f….” Add many bad words. That added level of security is nice, unless you’re like me, and I’m use to a free-wheeling backend where the technology is loose, easy, and forgiving. There’s no Telnet (command line) access, either. While that complicates certain matters, it sure makes my life easier for administration, in the long run. More thinking required now, less thinking required later.
Simple, keep it all nice and simple. What you’ll see in from the new host/server? More bitching about the cost of bandwidth, better stability, faster loading pages, and few – if any – cosmetic changes. “This web page has a 5 ton load limit,” which means it’s easy for my site to exceed the allotted bandwidth in a month. But if I’m doing more than 5 gigabytes of throughput? I should be racking up enough cash to pay for it all. I think I peaked when the splash page was the big boat – I was doing close to ten gigs in a month.
The default index page will go back to being last week’s scopes. They actually weigh less than the graphic splash page. Depending on stats – all that could change.
Came up with another idea, too. Book sales dropped off. In a more than a noble experiment, I’ll make a downloadable copy of the book’s text available through the subscription area. It’s an experiment. If it costs me time and fails to generate good will, then I’ll pull it.
More than you wanted to know, read the Microsoft ‘graph at the bottom. Makes my disclaimers look weak.
Halloween in Texas. Think I’ll go as a cowboy.
10/30
Best use of chainsaw
In a song? Art of Noise.
I spent way too much time tweaking up some of the new stuff, and I had one of those little breakthrough moments. There’s a balance of BBQ, coffee and weird leftover pasta that makes all the difference. For some reason, Magnolia food still tastes delightful, days later. Right out of the tin foil.
Short – or long – depends on the frame of reference – amble in the fall sunlight. Hardly a cloud in the sky. The neighbor’s banging subsided so I missed any really good coffee shop conversations.
New music: ZZ Top, Wayne Hancock, and the undisputed king of the accordion, Flaco Jimenez.
Didn’t help the tweaking, though, but that Flaco is tasty musica.
Most excellent: British Library online.
One more cycle, is what it looks like, a website in two places, at once. In other words, the pointers aren’t pointing to the new host just yet. I’m still sorting through lines of code, or worse, the usual, “I thought I uploaded that already.”
Pleasant discovery, the new server? Located in New Mexico? MST. Mountain Standard Time. Means the scopes don’t rol over until 1:00 AM, local time. But that’ll be next week. The old previous server got relocated to Atlanta, and I’m not sure how that worked.
I’m pleased though, with the new host. I’ve done a half-dozen sites there already. Rock-solid reliablity.
Two tweaks left to launch and it’s a wrap. If it goes as planned, well, it never does, but if events proceed in an orderly direction, I should be able to swap some time this weekend, when the load is the lightest.
