Tag Archives: Gadgets and Nerdery

Hopefully, you have noticed nothing.

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Anything different around here?  Well, I hope not.  Though the last month or so have seen some major changes on the back end of the site.

We’re no longer hosted by LiquidWeb.  Still being part of Michigan’s unemployed has brought monthly bills to the forefront.  So, we’re now with a small, local start-up company called VPS4ALL.  (Full disclosure – I’m one of the people starting it up.)  Moving from a web-interface hosting solution to one that was command-line only really made me flex some geek muscles that had been out of practice.

All of the differences are behind the scenes, so to speak, in Linux Land, and I hope that it remains that way.  If you notice any strangeness with the way that the site behaves, let me know. :)

Birth of a company.

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A few weeks back, I posted this to a forum called Web Hosting Talk, and I thought that you might want to read it.
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I’d like to introduce you to a new VPS company.

If those words strike terror into your heart, I understand. With all of the get-rich-quick fly-by-night operations (and I use that word loosely) that come and go, it’s difficult to see a new VPS company come onto the scene without cringing.

So, let me start our introduction off by letting you know that my partner and I are terrified. Mortified. Petrified of being seen as one of those fly-by-nights. We want to succeed, and we want to do it by offering a solid, reasonably priced product that’s backed by reliable knowledge and experience.

You can only prove your reliability and experience over time. Since we’re only now starting to offer services to the public, we’re left with the task of convincing you to take a risk on us. Not easy, especially with all of the get-rich-quick nonsense that’s out there.

Here goes anyway.

We’ve taken this rant to heart. We’ve set aside sufficient funds for business expenses to maintain our servers for the foreseeable future. What this means is that if we don’t don’t find a niche in the public market, we have the funds to continue operating while giving our customers the time they need to find other hosts and migrate their data.

We’re not expecting failure, we’re confronting the ugly possibilities first.

We are making a fundamental pledge to never oversell our servers. You get what you’re paying for, no more, never less.

We’re straightforward. Neither of us are tricky or salespeople, and sometimes we’re too blunt for our own good. If something breaks on our end, we’ll tell you what it is, why it happened, what we’re doing to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and we’ll own up to our mistake. On the other side of that coin, if it’s something that’s outside of our control, we’ll tell you. We cannot bend the entire internet to our will, nor can we prevent backhoes from cutting fiber.

As an example of our straightforward candor, let me share a little bit about our setup. Both my partner and I reside in Lansing, MI. We’ve colocated our first server at Waveform Technology, in Troy, MI. We’re running Proxmox to manage virtualization and server clustering. We both see this as an opportunity to further our city and our state in their transition from auto manufacturing to technology services.

We’re both idealists, me more so than my partner. While there are harsh realities in the business world that must be faced, I believe that success can and will come without deception and without trickery. I don’t want to pillage my customers. If I did that, how could they pay me the next month? Or upgrade when the need arose? How could they recommend me to others in good faith?

We’ve got a collected 25+ years of professional experience when it comes to information technology. I have years of hosting-specific experience. I’ve seen how some providers do things, and I want to do better.

As the rant that I linked to earlier says, any customers should grill any possible host with questions. I look forward to being grilled, and welcome both the opportunity and challenge. We want you to take a risk on us. We’re sure that we’re up to it. So, hit us up, ask us questions, and pick the host that best fits your needs.

David M. Crampton, CEO
VPS4ALL
http://vps4all.net
dave@vps4all.net

Nerdiness, delicious nerdiness.

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SETI@Home Graveyard

Let us bow our head in remembrance of two valiant machines, Alpha Trion and Swoop.  They were discovered to be non-functional upon the redeployment of the Graveyard.  They were reliable… er… they were the first two in my rack-wanna-be shelf.  Nemesis Prime has been re-purposed as Hunter’s computer, and will rejoin the Graveyard ranks when Hunter earns a connection to the internet.  Bruticus is now my desktop, and it’s still crunching data.  That left Slag and Snarl as the only boxes to redeploy in the basement.  I’ve set up the other Compaq Presario media computer (the multimedia might of Pentium II with MMX!) as Sludge, and am thinking of setting up the ancient eMachine as Grimlock (Thanks, Matt!).

That basement room is much more clean now.  I’m hoping that this trend continues.

Repercussions and Consquences

Doctor’s appointment today with the OB/GYN.  Pictures of babies on the wall, pregnant women all around, happy expectant faces everywhere… wore hard on Nikki.  Truth be told, on me as well.  Things are progressing normally, the hormone count is way down and still falling.  The loss, the hole, is still preventing things from returning to “normal”, but I don’t feel like I’m running from it.

Writing

What’s this writing thing of which you speak?

Misc.

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I hate cat puke.

I also dislike waking up with the knowledge that very bad dreams were going on all night long, but not remembering anything about them.  Not to mention back and joint pain.

Rebuilding my SETI@Home Graveyard has begun.  This is a good thing.

Highly entertained by YouTube videos that keep popping up in my RSS feeds and in my email.

Time to get the oldest ready for school and to find caffeine.

Geek Success!

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I’ve now got EVE Online working under that older desktop.  A couple of tweaks, and it’s smooth like butter.  Uh, except for sound.  That’s still in the works.

Capsuleer’s Log

Warping through twelve jump gates to get across Metropolis.  I’m seriously hoping that the training agents on this side of space – even though they’re also Pator Tech School – don’t hate me for my long lapses between missions in Embod IV.

Huh.  So Todifrauan VII, the system that houses another Pator Tech School station, is low-security.  How sweet is that.  While I’m biting my nails about my ship getting blown to bits, I’m still distracted by the variances in jump gate construction.  All seem to act the same – swallow the ship in a wormhole, shoot it across space, leaving a trail of light as wake – but there are fundamental differences in construction.

I’ve arrived at Pator Tech School in the far-off Todifrauan system.  I cross my fingers and bring up the station’s agent manifest.  Level 1 Agent is available to me.  Level 2 Agent is not available to me (expected).  Lo and behold, there is a Training Agent under Agents of Interest!  Excellent!  Wait, that name looks familiar.  Embod IV?  *Jaw Drop*  Will he talk to me?

*Shifty Eyes*

He will!  Here we go again, warping across fourteen gates back to Embod IV’s Pator Tech School station.  I’m pretty sure that this guy trains in combat.  At this pint, I’ll take what I can get.

Electronic Upheaval

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So Nikki’s laptop is dead until we can get it serviced.  This will involve dealing with big box stores and “certified” repair centers, and shipping it across country.  The idea of this does not wow me.  So, in the meantime, she’s using my laptop, and I have thrown together a desktop system or two.

A little while back, I received a Dell and a Compaq desktop from my good friends George and Trase.  The machines were given with the intention that they go to use for something that wasn’t sitting in their garage collecting dust.  Into my SETI@Retirement Home project they went.  As they’re Pentium 4 boxen with a decent amount of RAM, I pulled them out and re-worked them.

The Dell takes a particular kind of RAM which is far too expensive to upgrade, so it ended up with Edubuntu, and is pending a setup in Hunter’s room.  The Compaq took normal RAM for its type of motherboard, and I had a gig lying around, so I upgraded it from 2x256mb to 2x512mb, and added a 256mb Nvidia AGP video card.  Ubuntu seems to like the card just fine, and in between job hunting and chores around the house, I’m updating the kernel so that EVE Online will do something other than freeze and stutter under Wine.

I did miss the feel of my first-generation Microsoft ergonomic keyboard.

Thoughts From the Day Job

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Motivation seems to be returning. This is good.

  • Phone tech support for Hunter’s grandma.
  • Replaced CPU fan on Wren’s desktop, thereby allowing it to boot.
  • Updated video driver on Nikki’s laptop, which while improving the overall graphics, did not solve the flickering problem.
  • Keeping today’s food log updated.
  • Got writing done on my lunch break.

The candy canes on my desk (SweeTart and Life Saver) and the chocolate bells in the candy jar (Reese’s and Butterfinger) are tempting me. Oddly enough, I haven’t eaten either because I don’t have the nutritional information.

At home, moving our pantry shelves into the basement has prevented me from snacking as much. Laziness about going down and back up the stairs has made me abandon the desire to snack about 60% of the time. The witty plaques have returned to the kitchen wall, and I will soon have a dishwasher. This excites me in ways that kitchen appliances should not.

Ground my own coffee last night, and brewed it again on the timer this morning. It feels good, and right, and I have no idea why. In the past, I have put off brewing my own, preferring to go to a local coffee shop, even if it was to pick up on the way to work. Even chains like Beaners and Tim Hortons have benefited from my lack of desire to brew at home. Maybe it’s the enormous thermos in which I’m storing my coffee. Maybe it’s that I’ve ground the beans myself (the aroma of the beans as they’re grinding is just… indescribable). I’ve brewed -good- coffee at home before, but I’ve never really enjoyed it this much.

Also, delicious.

Looks like the drive home will be slow and careful. My guess is 2.5 inches of snow, but I haven’t checked with any weather services. I feel for the southeastern states right now; they’re not used to this sort of thing. Lizard popsicle?

Thoughts from the Day Job

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Brought some delicious Traverse City cherry coffee to work today. Got it at Horrocks, ground it in Nikki’s white elephant gift from the Cramptons (which ended up being mine, because she spoils me something fierce), brewed it in my coffee maker, and brought it to work in my white elephant gift from the Cramptons. Did I mention that it’s damn tasty?

I spent most of the Micro Center gift card that I got from my parents. Let’s see if I can tick off the ways in which I spoiled myself:

Still have a bit left on the card, for future miscellaneous geekery.

Horoscope for 23 Dec 2009:
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): According to astronomer Mark Whittle, the Big Bang began in silence. Soon it crescendoed into a majestic major third chord 50 octaves below middle A. Then it transformed, over the course of a million years, into a wistful minor third chord. In my vision of the first two-thirds of 2010, the music of your life will have a similar pattern: It begins with silence. Next, it progresses into a lush major feel, with spirited and complex contrapuntal themes. Then in June, it evolves into a dreamy, contemplative phase. By late September, however — unlike the Big Bang — you will move into a third act, in which the music of your life returns to the lively mood it had at the start, only now with the gravitas that the reflective phase has instilled.

Horoscope for 30 Dec 2009:
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): My Taurus friend Jill had a dream in which she stopped by a blackberry bush on a summer afternoon. All the ripe blackberries were too high on the bush, just out of reach. She stood there gazing longingly up at them for a long time. Finally three people in medieval garb came by, as if having stepped out of a deck of Tarot cards — a warrior, magician, and priestess. “I really want those blackberries,” she said to them. “Could you give me a boost?” They stooped down to make their backs available. She climbed up, but still couldn’t reach the berries. “Oh well, we tried,” she said. “Follow us,” said the priestess, and she did. After a while they came to another bush whose blackberries were lower and easy to pluck. Then the four shared the feast. After analyzing the omens for 2010, Taurus, I’ve come to the conclusion that Jill’s dream is an apt metaphor for your best possible destiny in 2010.