After Victory » Nerdery

Some ’splaining To Do

Posted by Patrick on February 18th, 2008

Where have we been?!

You Have Betrayed Me for the Last Time
Oh man, what a strange and painful situation it’s been on the tubes. The full story reaches a level of nerdery that continues to hurt my head, but the short story is that you get what you pay for.

Here’s the medium-story: Once upon a time (way back in 2002) we registered Rockland-ave.com from the equivalent of the Building 19 (or Ocean State Job Lot if you’re from RI) of web hosting companies. Twenty five bucks a year seemed like a good deal for both the dot com name and the hosting space.

Five and a half years of poor service, frequent outages and slow response times lead me to almost switch hosting companies numerous times. My hand was forced last week when they deleted the database that held all our blog postings. No warning, no error message, just Error establishing a database connection.

I emailed the hosting company, hoping it could all be restored. The only reply from them I received was an error message stating that their email service had been turned off. Fantastic. I viewed this as a bad sign.

We very much wanted to hold onto the Rockland-ave.com domain name, as it was almost a like a brand for our micro-corner of the web, but it was not meant to be. All my requests to transfer the domain name went unanswered. Trying to set up the site again on their servers seemed like a bad idea, fearful it would disappear again.

But here at ~~Rockland-ave~~ AfterVictory.com, we adapt. So here we are, new domain name, fresh new name-brand hosting service, plus I managed to recover/restore almost all our old posts and comments. I still have to plug in a few comments, but that’s more of a next weekend kind of thing.

Timely
Pushing aside my anger for the DMV-like service we had, and looking at this from afar, it’s not a terrible thing that we’ve changed domain names, and the timing seems sort of appropriate. AfterVictory.com (although a reference to jobs we held almost a decade ago) comes at a time when our lives are about to change significantly. It’s cool that we’ll always have the posts from the Rockland-ave days, like a digital scrapbook of sorts, but it’s also cool that we’re starting something new when we’re about to start a new phase of our lives.

That said, we’ll be keeping this site for a while. Update your bookmarks.

Posted in Nerdery, Rockland-Ave |

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A Week in Review

Posted by Patrick on January 13th, 2008

This past week and weekend were busy, but good. My work was very busy, but I did manage to sneak out on Wednesday to meet up with Kate for some more ultrasound action. We got to see Ted wave his hands and wiggle his toes. Too early to tell if he has the classic Irish nose that my father and I share, but he did look pretty cute and happy there. The doctor said that he’s got all the required fingers and toes and that he’s the right size for the number of weeks-in he’s at.

I also found time to finally fix our broken photo gallery here on Rockland-ave.com. It lives again, with all the old pics still in place. Apparently the hosting company upgraded their software, which screwed up our installation, resulting in me having to uninstall and reinstall the gallery a few times. We use the super-sweet open-source software called Gallery, by the way, which is great if you’re into the whole hosting-photos-on-your-own-website thing.

Friday night we went to Kat and Matt’s place where we were served Sukiyaki. It was tasty food, and good to see them again!

Saturday we hung around, did some Ted’s-room related crafts, and then at night went out to see the movie Juno. It was a good movie, filled with quality actors and actresses. The soundtrack was also excellent, as we picked it up on our way home the movie.

Today was comparatively lazy. I slept in, then went to visit DJ at his place. He got a Wii for Christmas, so we played some Metroid and some Super Mario. The Wii remote controller is great, it’s such a departure from traditional gameplay with its waving and pointing and whatnot. I bet Ted would like it.

Quite a week. Next weekend will be exciting as we’ll be back up in New England!

Posted in Baby, Eats, Friends, Nerdery, Random |

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My Personal Nerdy Festivus Miracle

Posted by Patrick on December 23rd, 2007

Around the holidays, we’re reminded that keeping in touch with people is very important. Nothing makes keeping in touch with far away people easier then email (besides you know, the telephone. Work with me here). It’s personal or impersonal, quick, and easy.

Once upon a time (~1998) I picked up a hotmail.com email address. For a long time it was my only address and served my needs well. It was easy to remember (first initial + last name, no numbers) and easy to tell others. It’s web-based interface made it easy to check from any old place that had the internets.

Hotmail has some downsides though. It’s spam filtering is weak, and I get a lot of special offers from microsoft that I’m just not interested in. For a long time they only gave you a very small storage space so I was constantly deleting old messages to make room for new messages and I had no way to save the old messages that I was deleting. Some say that email is temporary and shouldn’t be saved, but some messages you just want to hang onto. Perhaps that’s another post topic entirely.

Side story: In 2003ish I started using a second email address for freelance work. This was good because it kept all my freelance stuff seperate from my personal email. It was bad because it was another address to remember to check and sort of confusing if the same person had both my addresses.

I counted and think I’ve had (between work and life) around 8 different email addresses since I started college.

Anyhow, in 2005 I picked up a Gmail email account. The kids at Google decided to sorta rethink the way people delt with and stored email. No longer was I restricted to 10 measly megabytes of storage space like hotmail (Gmail offers 5+ gigabytes of storage) and now spam was esentially a thing of the past. Almost everything about Gmail’s interface made silly tasks like attaching a file not such a herculean multi-screen effort.

Here are some of my favorite pieces of Gmail:

Gmail Supersweet Feature #1: Check other email account messages

I can now send and receive my freelance email account messages from within Gmail, saving me lot of time. Gmail automatically picks up the messages from my freelance account and then sends selected messages as if they were coming from the freelance account. This lets me keep seperate accounts still seperate but easy to access from a single account. Gmail even automatically labels messages from other accounts so they’re easy to spot.

These labels (instead of traditional folders) let you assign short desriptions to messages that come in. Gmail can even be set to assign them automatically. For instance, every email I get from our credit card company gets the label of the card name and another label for finance. Messages from my parents, sister, and Kate’s family all get automatically assigned a family label.

I also have a filter set up that automatically pulls my work email, gives them a label, and then quickly removes them from my inbox into the account archive. That way I can always get at my work email if I need it, but I never get bothered by/reminded of it at home.

Gmail Supersweet Feature #2: Mail in the browser, mail in the client, all synced up (aka IMAP)

I use to use Outlook to check my freelance mail messages, and then I switched to Apple’s Mail.app client. I liked the email client feel of things, but hated backing up email and really despised not having my sent messages in Mail.app stay when I checked the messages in a web browser.

Along comes Gmail and their support for IMAP email syncing. Whatever I do in the web browser on the Gmail website automagically shows up when I use the Mail.app client, or Thunderbird or Outlook. Sent messages are always in a sent message folder, and labels are preserved (or displayed as folders). Thunderbird is excellent if you’re not tied to an Outlook office enviornment. It has nothing to do with this kind of Thunderbird though.

Gmail Supersweet Feature #3: Google Apps for Domains

Any time you sign up for a new domain name (say Rockland-ave.com, Firepizza.com, or even Northwoodsanimaltreats.com) you receive some kind of web-mail support.

The web-mail setup that came with Rockland-ave.com was particularly awful. It had no room for saved messages, leaving Kate with a lame email setup despite my best efforts. Along comes Google and their Apps for Domains offering. This, for free, runs all your domain’s email through Gmail.

This means that Kate gets to keep her email address and gets all the benefits of using Gmail (lots of space, spam filtering, etc). I also have a Rockland-ave.com email address that I have automatically feed into my Gmail account.

So what does it all mean? The kids at Google are working hard at making Email much easier on me. With the impending birth of our first kid coming up in the next few months, I can’t wait to spend more time emailing news and photos to people and less time dealing with with the administration and technical details of email.

Posted in Nerdery |

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Shorts

Posted by Patrick on December 18th, 2007

Inspection

Saturday I went and took the Celica to get inspected, and besides a license-plate-light that was out, it passed and received a new sticker. Pretty crazy that it’s the second North Carolinian inspection for my car… but more crazy that its the seventh inspection for the car since I drove it off the lot. Seems like just yesterday I was throwing all my savings into a shiny silver car. I really didn’t think it would last this long, but am glad it did as we really can’t afford another car as shiny as the Celica. Kate’s car is getting a turn on the ol’ inspectotron this weekend. Her car’s had even more inspection stickers then mine… but she doesn’t drive like a maniac so it’s not really surprising that her ride still rides.

Festivus

Kate and I did our holiday shopping in (almost) one fell swoop over the weekend. We also picked up a tree from the Raleigh Farmers Market, as its all about locally-grown-tree’s and nice people who put trees on stands for you. Our friends Kat and Matt invited us over for Christmas day this year, so we’re looking forward to that.

iMac

I like my job and what I do, but up until last week my job only provided me with a computer built in the same year as my car. It was a great computer in its day, but not really up to snuff for today’s modern website worker. I don’t have proof, but I suspect it was burning oil. Or silicon.That all changed when they brought in a brand new iMac for me to use. This computer is sweeeeet in every way a computer should be. Big screen, dual monitor, and chock full of ram so Photoshop runs quickly. It even has software that runs Windows on it, which makes testing websites much easier, since I don’t have to get up from my desk and find a Windows computer every time I make a new page. It’s come a long way from the original iMac.

Photo Gallery

Our Rockland-ave photo gallery is currently busted. The hosting company upgraded their server software, and our gallery software apparently doesn’t play nice with it. Hopefully this weekend I can check under the hood and get it to work. Makes a guy want to print out all his photos and put them in a shoe box.

Posted in Automotive, Christmas, Employment, Friends, Nerdery, Rockland-Ave |

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