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The newer website |
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Sunday, 14 September 2008 |
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Back in April, I decided to move to a new hosting service to consolidate all my domains to one account. I selected a reseller account with the expectation of offering hosting to my web building clients. After a false start at one company, I copied my webstore to this current host and setup all my other domains. I added a secondary webstore for the ArtStampn products and configured it as a catalog only site for the eBay links. And built the BigSpike.org website to demonstrate the various options available. My webstore sales fell off drastically over the past few months and I attributed this to the sudden increase in the cost of gas. But then I started having trouble accessing my websites. I would click on the link in my favorites and get a "website not found error" or "DNS lookup Failed". After installing a website monitor that checks every 30 minutes, I get reports when the website if down and when it is back online. Nearly every day I get an email that the site is down. Sometimes three times a day. When I get the time and the money, I need to find a new host and transfer 785 megabytes of data down to my computer and then up to the new host. All the while trying to not get FAPPED (Fair Access Policy) by Hughes.net. I have a satellite internet connection and we are limited in the amount of data we can transfer in an hour. Last month I got fapped for downloading something over 40mb in an hour. When you are fapped, your access is slowed to 1980's speed. About a quarter of dailup speed. |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 14 September 2008 )
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My Computer is Smoking |
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Sunday, 14 September 2008 |
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A little over a week ago I started having computer problems. At random times, it would freeze. The mouse would not move, the hard drive light would be on and the only thing i could do was unplug it and reboot. Then my USB memory stick failed. When I inserted it into the USB port, windows would tell me that it was not formatted. All the files were lost. I downloaded a program to test the hard drives since I suspected them and discovered the C drive was damaged. I suppose after five years of hard use it is only reasonable that the drive that is used the most would be having problems. I decided to switch the D drive with the C and keep the files on the damaged drive available for as long as possible. I started doing a backup to save my most recent work and my dvd drive started acting up. Then I started getting squiggly lines on the TV when I booted up the computer. Finally there was a big puff of smoke and the computer quit completely. I opened the computer and discovered a hole burned into the middle of a big chip on the motherboard. This chip is called the southbridge. An Intel ICH5r controller chip.This is the chip that controls the drives. Explains a lot of the previous weeks problems. The thing that is really annoyiing is this is the motherboard I bought a few years ago to replace a PNP800 motherboard that did the same thing. This was the PNP800-E version. Five revisions and they didn't fix this issue. I had sent theolder motherboard to Asus for under warrenty repair and it has been sitting around here for a couple of years. I thought about selling it but figured I could only get a few bucks. So I swapped out the motherboard and spent several days fighting with the dvd and various drivers. Reinstalling all the software and looking for serial numbers. Then the dvd quit working completely. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 03 October 2008 )
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Those cows can get you killed |
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Saturday, 29 September 2007 |
A few days ago while driving south of here on a lonely gravel road a 1000# black angus steer ran out in front of me and stopped right in the middle of the road.
Driving southbound with the morning sun shining from the left into my eyes, the cows were right up against the fence on the left. It sure looked like they were on the other side of the fence. Just as I realized they were not, one ran out into the road.
I slammed on the brake pedal, my 1983 dodge mini truck whipped sideways on the loose sandy gravel road so fast there was no time to react or try to correct as the truck skidded into the ditch and just as quickly the left front tire rolled off the rim with a pop. The truck rolled onto the drivers side pushing in the top of the cab. As it rolled onto the top my head hit the roof as the windshield came out. The back window exploded in a shower of glass mixed with sand.
As it finished it's first roll it bounced up a few feet into the air so that the drivers side wheels hit with a very hard jolt. I slammed into the drivers door bending it outward with my side about 8 inches. Luckily it stayed closed. My shoulder hit the ground, then my head hit the roof again as the truck continued rolling for a second time. The truck landed on it's wheels and almost went on over, then came back down to the right with another jolt.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 20 December 2007 )
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David vs. the Bread Machine |
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
When I first thought about getting a bread machine, I searched the Internet for information and recipes. I found that many people complained about how difficult it was to measure all the ingredients accurately enough to make bread in a machine. This puzzled me, since I had made bread many times before by hand and the measurements were never that critical. There were also complaints about having to clean the machine after every batch. I wondered if these same people clean their oven every time they baked something in it.
Since I now live 50 miles from the nearest grocery store and only go to town about once a month. I decided to give it a try. My first attempt at bread making in the machine was unsatisfactory.
I made a loaf of regular white bread using a recipe that came with the machine. Being impatient I used the quick bread recipe which called for additional yeast in order to speed the process. This resulted in a yeasty tasting loaf of bread.
During the mixing phase, I continuously watched and adjusted the consistency by adding additional flour or water to achieve that perfect ball of bread dough. When I was finished, I wondered why bother to use a machine at all since I spent much more time and effort than kneading the dough myself. This got me to wondering.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 20 December 2007 )
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Adapting to life |
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
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When you don't go to town very often you either only have fresh milk available once a month and try to adapt your palate to accept fresh then powdered and back again. Or you settle for powdered milk all the time. For cooking or baking, powdered milk is indistinguishable from fresh. For cereal I pour the powder directly into the bowl, add ice water, stir and add the cereal. An acceptable, sort of, drinkable version can be made by mixing canned milk 50-50 with reconstituted powdered milk. As for vegetables...
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 20 December 2007 )
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Building the new website (part 1) |
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Sunday, 19 August 2007 |
I used Miva Merchant 4.12 shopping cart software for a couple of years and then switched hosts to upgrade to Merchant 5 for another year and a half. I tried to setup an oscommerce webstore a couple of times and while I could cre4ate the store and style it, I never could get the bulk upload to add products to it. I was wary of switching to yet another "free" shopping cart.
Recently my hosting company adjusted the storage space, bandwidth, email boxes and other parameters of my hosting account. They proudly announced that the already generous 100 gbyte per month bandwidth was increased to 3.9 terabytes! I was using 7 email boxes of the 500 allowed yet now I had 5000 available. I was allowed 10 domains and 10 SQL databases before and now this was to be unlimited.
Great ... actually NOT!
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 14 September 2008 )
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Prairie Living