Mon 9/22/08 10:46am

On the plane from Baltimore to Oakland, stop in Denver. Had lots of fun in Baltimore. We went to an overnight birthday party for a couple of K’s friends that were turning 40 and had a great time. I really like K’s Maryland people. I am strangely comfortable around them. They remind me of people from Buffalo. The party went all night. At some point, I got tired of people and went to read in the living room. Most of the people were outside. I was happy that I had a book I could read. Got a Robert Ludlum book at the airport. The Ambler Warning. It’s a fast reader that does not require a full attention span. Other people started coming in and reading too after a while. I thought that was pretty funny. There were some books on the coffee table. K kept bringing people over to say hi and hang out for little bits of time. That was fun too. Little spurts of party.

The next day was fun too. Lots of people had slept over and others came back in the morning. After the party, we went to Kim’s place and then out for a drink. On the way home, she gave us a great tour of her neighborhood. I love tours with stories and she know a lot about her neighborhood. It was great to get to see her again after such a short time.

The first night we went to a restaurant/bar that a couple of K’s friends are opening soon. The place was amazing! Huge. They were building most things themselves, including booths and other assorted furniture from old church pews. It was fun to hang out there. Can’t wait to go back when it is open. We also helped K’s folks with their new fiber optic tv system. It was nice to be able to do that. Some stuff that is very hard for them is very easy for us. K will help them some more tomorrow. She is not coming home until Thursday.

I am looking forward to being home. Have work to do. Server was down for a while yesterday. Of course it has to happen when I am out of town. Got stuck in a loop and was overloading the CPU. A reboot fixed it, but today I got an email that the main hard drive partition might be dying and needs to be repaired or replaced. The server will need to be down for 1-4 hours. Crap. I told the techs to monitor it and reboot if it goes down again, but to wait until 3am US eastern time to take it down. I think it will affect the least amount of people at that time. Update: It did not go down again and is repaired now.

I met with the business consultant again before I left. New plan is to meet twice a month for 2 months, 2 hours each time. We covered a lot of ground in 2 hours. Got the basics of a contract written for my next project. Should be able to easily adapt it for other projects. We spoke some about pricing and how I need to raise mine and also about some other ideas I have that will bring in some steady income.

I am trying a new system of tracking hours. Only got to try it once before I left, but it actually worked. I was reading an article by David Seah that described a system where you set a timer to go off every 15 minutes and then fill in ovals on a piece of paper to track what you are doing when the timer goes off. I don’t do well with paper systems and the online version was alpha and not quite my style, so I combined some programs that I already had to do a similar thing. I set up a spreadsheet in Numbers with a sheet for each project, then set a calendar alarm to open up a 15 minute repeating timer in Alarm Clock Pro every weekday morning at 8am. The timer is set to make the spreadsheet pop up every 15 minutes. When it pops up, I just check a box for the project I am working on. The spreadsheet keeps track of how many hours I have worked on each project for each month by counting the checkboxes and dividing by 4 to get time in hours.

Turbulence. Hate it. The lady who was sitting next to me at the beginning of the flight kindly gave up her seat to another lady with a baby. She got free drinks for doing it. I usually don’t like being near kids on planes because they are loud, but I don’t mind it so much at the moment. Cute kid. Nice mom. Some screaming when they first got settled, but quiet now. My ears are clogged anyway. Enough writing for now.

Thu 9/25/08 3:54am

I never did get around to posting that. It is nice to be home. K is coming home tomorrow. I can’t wait to see her We both have a little time off before going back to work. I am hoping to use the time to do some business stuff that I hardly ever have time to do. Today I set up an online project management system to make it easier to communicate and share files with clients. It is very similar to Basecamp, only open source, free, prettier, and hosted on my own server. Currently, I am using it to manage my hosting affililate program project. The affiliate system is ready to go, but still needs a couple of web pages, graphics for banner ads, and text ad copy. I am also thinking of starting a newsletter to send to clients and other interested people every few months. I would like to announce the launch of the affiliate program in the first one. Hopefully I can get that done this week because I have a big project starting soon.

It is 4:06am. I think I should go to sleep. Jetlag.

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My mom helped me brainstorm about ways to make money to pay for the new server and I realized (after doing tons of math yesterday) that I can actually offer people more disk space and bandwidth than I could before. I need to find at least 13 more people paying $100/year to be breaking even. Not sure how I will do that. I am considering doing a promotion of including a free blog with new hosting accounts. If I ever have time again, I will figure it all out. I also need to update my business site because it is 3 years old and WAY out of date. My demos are especially out of date and the content does not accurately describe my services anymore.

I am booked up until June, so can not take on any more website clients until then. I have 5 projects in the works, but am waiting on content for three of them. It is very frustrating to have so much to do and not be able to do anything! I wish I could at least go outside or play a video game. I can play with the kitten. That is a good thing.

I wish I could hire someone to run my brain. They would keep it organized and running smoothly, and I would do all the things that would be able to get done once it was working right. I suppose that is what a business manager does.

I am glad it is Friday. This morning I was convinced that it was Thursday and argued with K about it. I even made her check the calendar. Somehow, I missed a day this week. Not sure which one, only that it wasn’t Tuesday or Thursday.

Yesterday, me and K went to the dentist. It is hard to get me to the dentist even though we have a great dentist. He is right around the corner from my old house in Berkeley. Ever since the first time I went there, over 10 years ago, I have been asking him to pull out my top left wisdom tooth. Every time, he has some reason why it doesn’t need to come out.

After having my teeth painfully cleaned and being reprimanded for not flossing every day, the lady who looked at my x-rays said that I needed to come back and have both top wisdom teeth pulled. There is no room in my mouth for them and one of them (the one I have been trying to get pulled) is pointing sideways and doesn’t do anything except hurt when I eat carrots. I made an appointment for sometime in May. I am not looking forward to it at all, but am glad to finally get my tooth pulled. K will come with me because she rules

How come I can write this, but can’t do anything else? Except twitch. I am very twitchy today. I don’t understand how thinking works. Is it really as easy for other people as it seems? Why aren’t other people stuck in their house not even able to watch tv? I am not stupid, but somehow end up being totally useless sometimes. I did help my brother get some info about an imac earlier. I guess I’m not totally useless. I wonder why I can talk about computer stuff almost any time, even when my brain won’t do anything else. It is all very strange. Oh well, what can you do? Back to doing nothing now…

No related posts.

It is easier to be with people. I had a really good weekend that turned out to be very social and I didn’t even hate it at all. On Friday, I met D at the White Horse for a little while. It was very nice to see her. She is one of the very few people that I can ‘talk geek’ with. It is a rare and beautiful thing. We have other things in common too that make it easier for me to hang with her than it sometimes is to hang other people. She came over and had dinner with me and K.

After dinner, we all went to Velvet to meet Lorena and Tess. It was a good night. We played pool even though we were all sucking pretty bad, even D who is actually good at pool. There were a few obstacles like a giant pole and huge speaker in the way of making certain shots. Still it was fun, even though my knuckle is still a little swollen from smacking it into the giant pole while trying to shoot around it. Eventually, I completely lost all focus of what was going on around me and went into my own special world where it is quiet and stimuli is almost non-existent. I think D ended up in some other world too. I am lucky to be able to do that. Otherwise I would have needed very badly to get out of the bar immediately.

Yesterday, me and K went to Spin’s birthday party. That was lots of fun too. Happy birthday Spins! Nice people and a custom ‘Pin the Tail on the Tigger’ game with Spin’s features imposed on Tigger and magnetic tails for pinning that was made with obvious love for her by her guy. He even had a special ‘tail’ for himself which was actually a heart that matched the heart on the card that he gave her (at least I assumed that card was from him. Only saw the outside, but it had an identical heart). Very sweet Other than that, me and K did some errands and even had a little bit of quiet time to watch Prehistoric Planet and for K to start a puzzle that she has wanted to do for a while, but hasn’t had the time.

And then, tragedy struck… (not really. just having a sudden flair for the dramatic)

I have often thought that it would be great to have a completely managed dedicated server. In my fantasies, this was paid for by my clients who I provide web hosting for. In real life, this is not the case. I recently made a very big mistake. A website that I finished for a client went public a couple of weeks ago. The main content of this site is audio of a weekly radio show. Huge mp3 files being played through a flash audio player. I have never done a site with audio as the main content and had no idea how much of a load it puts on the server! I went from using between normal and high server resources to using thousands of times that much, causing the VPS I was on to fail repeatedly for me, my clients, the other 7 people sharing the VPS, and all of their clients. Somehow, the sites stayed up. When LiquidWeb claims 100% uptime, they are not kidding! If I had known what kind of load the new site would put on the server, I would have charged much more for hosting, but now I feel like the mistake was mine, and the client based their decision of where to host partly on the price I quoted them. I will charge more in the future.

Now, I must move to a dedicated server which costs twice as much as the VPS and has multiple times as many resources. The problem is that even with all of the money I make from hosting, it is not even enough to pay for the VPS, let alone a dedicated server. I host a bunch of sites for free for myself, family, friends, the autistic community, and other random projects. In the past, I have charged way to low of a price for hosting, often $50/yr. That was fine when I was on a shared host, but not anymore. Even though cheap hosting is all around, my hosting has a lot to offer, like 100% uptime, nightly offsite backups, 2 hour hardware replacement, blah, blah, blah. All of the things that I am paying so much money for, or more accurately, what my family is paying so much money for. They are helping me out yet again until I can get enough clients to pay for it. Good thing is that I now have the disk space and resources for a bunch of new clients. Now, I just have to find them! If anyone needs good reliable web hosting, please let me know!

The new server is built and ready, just waiting for me to transfer the files, settings, and databases from the VPS. I will do this late at night in a few days at a time when I will also be doing a large site upgrade for a client with a very busy site. I think this will be the best time since their site will be down anyway. I have lowered the ttl to 5 minutes on all accounts so that there will be as little downtime as possible when I change the ip addresses for my nameservers. I really hope it is a smooth transition. Luckily, the LiquidWeb folks are amazingly helpful, and will do much of the work for me, including moving the accounts and rsyncing all of the data a final time after the VPS is disabled, so no data will be lost in the process. Once this is all done, whenever I need more resources, I can just add them to the server or move to a new server without having to worry about propagation times and changing ip addresses. That is one great thing about dedicated servers. No one else to worry about. Total freedom.

I will be trying to think of other ways to raise money to pay for this too. If anyone has a million dollar idea, please share. Thousand dollar ideas are welcome too! I am trying to keep advertising either off of this site completely or to only do it in a non-annoying unobtrusive way. Ideas about that are appreciated too. This site gets much more traffic than my business site, so it makes more sense to advertise here. Only problem is that this site is NOT a business site and it is hard for me to think about making money off of it. It feels wrong, but so does not being able to pay for my own server!

I will try to stop panicking (and rambling) now and get back to work.

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I finally got the Share-This plugin to work nearly right. Problems in IE. Surprise. Sending email returns people to a blank page. I give up!

Sometimes, I really hate being me. Usually, I like it okay. I am very lucky in a lot of ways. Most ways. But once in a while, I get very down on myself and very jealous of other people. I get tired of having a hard time doing basic things like reading, traveling, talking, leaving the house, working, even playing video games! It makes me feel like an idiot. I know that there are lots of things I am good at, and that sometimes those basic things are not hard at all, but when they are, it is very annoying. How can it be hard to play video games? That is completely ridiculous!

I will not be going on our trip to Florida and Baltimore. After putting off the decision for months in hopes of a miracle, I finally gave up yesterday and decided that I can’t go. It has only been a little over a week that I’ve been taking the new meds, and even though I feel much better since I got off the Strattera, it has not been enough time for the new meds to really kick in. Karen canceled my tickets and changed hers so that she can fly straight to Baltimore with Lorena on Saturday.

I am bummed. I really wanted to go, but I was afraid that if I did, things would be bad, and I didn’t want it to be a situation where K or anyone else had to be worrying about me or taking care of me. Also, I just didn’t want things to be bad again when I just started feeling better. Too many things. Traveling and being around so many people, passover at K’s folks house, being busy almost all the time, not being able to work when I have so much to do. Too much.

It sucks extra bad because the timing was so perfect. I would have gotten to see my whole family and Cindy and Helene in Florida. Now, I will have to take 2 trips to see them all. I am hoping to be able to go to Florida in a couple of months, maybe for Hannah’s 1st birthday party and/or when Leopard comes out and my dad and Bri get new imacs so I can teach them all the great things about using a mac. At some point, I also want to go to NY to see Cindy and Helene, but it will be harder because they will both be working, and it might not be possible for K to get time off of work for one or both trips.

Somehow, K manages to have hope that a miracle will still happen by tonight and I will be able to go. She knows it is very unlikely, but I love that she can still keep the faith. Right now, it is hard for me to have hope, especially since my tickets are canceled, but in the back of my mind, it is hard to give up completely.

The good news is that K has the week off starting tomorrow until she leaves early saturday morning. It will be nice to get to spend that time with her. Still, I would rather be going.

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Besides from that big adventure, things are looking up. Me and K got to have a mellow day yesterday for the first time in a very long while. It was SO nice! I have been feeling much better the past few days. The iron and gatorade are definitely doing their job. It is easier to do things now. I appreciate it so much after feeling bad for a while. It is a whole other world. The land of the living. I suppose that if I was to be hacked, it was much better that it happened today rather than last week.

Update: the server is clean and protected. i am happy

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