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2010-08-05: Northwest Road Trip
So I'm about to embark on another road trip. This one is going to be the third week of august, and it's got two points. One, I'm looking for a new place to live, and secondly, I want to get in some good mountain camping. I'm still trying to nail down the exact dates and route, but it looks like I'm gonna be leaving the third week of august (the 21st) and flying to Seattle. From there, I intend to search for a new town/city to move to along the corridor between there and Eugene, Oregon. From there, a sharp left turn to Boise Idaho, where I'll pick up my brother and Will(san) and then drive north to Glacier National Park in Montana, to camp for a few days. From there, up to Calgary, then over for a night or two in Banff NP. Afterwards, Trans-Canadian Highway back to Vancouver and then return to Seattle and fly back to Houston on labor day or so.

Three things: First, I'll be offline for good chunk of that, so just a notice. Second, if any of ya'll live along that route and would like to meet up for a cup of coffee or a pint of ale or something, let me know. Thirdly, I really have no idea where I want to move to. I just know I've done Colorado inside and out, but I still want mountains. That region of western washington/oregon seems like it will have a good mix of cool weather and mountains, while actually maintaining a chance for me to find a job and have a social life. If anyone has suggestions about awesome places I should check out or consider moving to, I'm all ears. ...
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2010-04-19: Accounts Pending Deletion
UPDATE UPDATE: I've finally deleted all the non-responsive sites. Yeah, longest two weeks EVER. :-)
UPDATE: Sites who haven't responded have been disabled. You've got two weeks before I delete things.

It's that time of the year again... time to see who has abandoned their sites and stopped updating. I just sent an email to the on-file addresses of about 2 dozen users who have not updated in over a year. In a week, I'll disable said accounts if I haven't heard from them, and eventually they'll be removed if I still don't hear anything. Do note that this email was sent to the address on file... so it's a good time to remind everyone to log into user services and make sure your email address is up to date. If you find it's not, please update it, and let me know if you're worried that you may be one of the accounts pending deletion. ...
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2010-04-01: Explanation for the March 31st outage
Well, I feel I owe everyone an explanation for the day-long outage yesterday. Let's start from the top.

For the past year, xepher.net was hosted on a virtual machine at a company I used to work for, because I got a discount there, paying $63 for what should've been $250 normally. They finally decided I've been gone long enough, that the discount has to go. So I look for new hosting. I find a place (call it option A), and it's $160/month for ostensibly the exact same level of service. I put in an order, and don't hear anything for a couple days, despite emails to their support and such. This isn't very promising, so I look at other options. I find another place (option B), really cheap, $55/month, with a slightly less powerful setup, but more bandwidth and diskspace, so I figure, why not? They get me setup pretty much right away, and I spend a day or so moving stuff over there.

I switch all the services on, and it runs great for a few hours, some hiccups, but not a big deal. After a couple days, I figure, eh, this'll work for now, and my contract is up in a day or two anyway on the original service, so I have to move, shutting down the old host and closing that account. I go ahead and let the order for A stay in place though, since I'm curious to compare the two. It comes through about 48 hours ago, 6 full days after I actually ordered it, and by then I'm noticing more and more performance issues with B. The problem is that the CPU is powerful enough, but they have too many users on one machine, sharing the same disk, so anything needing a file gets delayed really bad. Since we have about 150 users here, all with websites, this shows up as a system load of over 100... e.g. there's 100 people waiting in line for a file. At this point, I get a letter from B, saying other customers are complaining because I'm using all the CPU. This isn't the case, as it's the disk that's lagging ...
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2010-03-24: Server Move
UPDATE UPDATE: FRAK! Well, that didn't go so well, did it? Long story short, we moved 2 more times in the past 24 hours. I think we're settled down finally. I've been up 30 hours right now, and I'll make a new post later tonight or maybe tomorrow that'll be LONG and explain everything that happened.

UPDATE: Move is complete. So far, bumpy ride, and there've been some issues and brief outages. I'm tuning things to try and make it work better on the new system. Please let me know if/when you run into problems.

Fasten your seatbelts, we're about to move to a new server. Xepher.net has been hosted on a discounted plan I got through my old employer, and now that discount is going away. As such, I'm going to have to find a new home for everything. Thankfully things are all virtual these days, so it should be just a matter of finding a new host and transferring the data. I expect it to be mostly seamless, with a few interruptions in service here and there, maybe a couple hours downtime at most. There's always the chance things could go south though, so I'm giving as much notice as I can here. I just found out a few hours ago myself. Worst case though, I do have full, nightly backups of everything on my own PC here though, so no matter what happens, all the data is safe, and I will get it all back up and working sooner rather than later.

The good news about still being unemployed though, is that I have plenty of free time to work on this. :-) The move may happen as soon as tomorrow, so by the time some of you read this, it might already be past tense. In any case, keep an eye on this thread for updates, and if xepher.net is unreachable, feel free to ping me for status updates on AIM/Gtalk/YahooIM... my screenname is Xepher42. ...
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2010-02-22: Another Ski Trip!
Yeah, I take a lot of vacations... one of the benefits of being unemployed! :-) This time it's to Crested Butte, which just got like 3 feet of snow this week. Should be quite awesome. Anyway, regular comments apply... some internet, but I plan to be skiing and drinking, not web surfing. I'm leaving tomorrow (Tuesday morning) and 'll be back sometime between the 1st and the 3rd of March. See ya'll then. ...
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