I haven’t been updating this blog; I’ve been far, far too busy with work related issues:

This little utility should help cleanup the lingering issues with several of my global installations. There goes 0.0001% of the daily grind.

I’m going to do something I rarely do – plug a service I really like. I’ve been suggesting these guys for years when friends or associates have looked for excellent hosting with minimal efforts required. Enter ICDSoft.

To qualify this, I’ve been with them for going on seven years. That’s a darn long time, internet wise.

1) They have 24/7 knowledgable, dedicated support staff and their services are incredibly redundant.

As I am both a programmer and CIO of an Internet Marketing Firm, this means they know a heck of a lot more than what most people would require, or expect. I’ve asked them to do bizarre things (Install 64 bit Perl SSLeay support; upgrade packages they have on their system, and so forth.) It took them minutes.

When I asked them to migrate me from iAdvantage to Savvis, it took them a few minutes (and a couple of hours for DNS to propagate everywhere). When my email contact bounced, they actually called to reassure that my ticket was being handled.

2) They have a proprietary, functional administration panel.

If you enjoy cPanel, you’ll probably be a bit put off, because ICDSoft’s product actually works, and you don’t have to click through cumbersome half-brewed wrappers around GNU software.

It’s so intuitive – I was able to train my parents how to register domains to ICDsoft and setup subdomains in minutes. They’re is always adding features to it. They were the first to my knowledge to offer a fully-functional database upgrader; it took me one click to migrate my CMS. They also have the ability to automatically download and migrate your sitex from the control panel via FTP, and they even have a cPanel import system, just incase you decide that you’d prefer form and function.

3) They’re still incredibly thrifty.

When I initially signed up, I was paying $3.33/mo for 300MB of storage, and 2GB of transfer. Again, in 2002, that was a lot – and it’s still more than most folks need. Even when actively pursuing GNU projects (I spent a few years porting UNIX utilities to MacOS X when it was still young), I never paid more than $10/mo, and I used to host such things as DosBox.

So, there it is, my plug for ICDSoft. They’ve more than earned not only my praise, but my continued service. They’ve spoiled me; I wouldn’t consider hosting anywhere else.

I know – I haven’t written nerdy things in my blog for months; and I haven’t written any super-duper nerdy things in my blog for going on, er, years.

This, though, deserves recognition. I managed to shoehorn OpenSUSE 11.1 onto an eeePC 1000’s 32GB secondary (home) partition (I need more than the 8GB allocated to the first virtual IDE device, and wanted to save it from as much wear and tear as possible). I’ve setup an SD card as /home (globally disabled atime and used ext2, of course), managed to build a mostly-functional asusosd based upon the eee-osd code on Google, and even got MediaWrap reinstalled so I can listen to XM.

It didn’t take as much work as I was afraid it would; eeecontrol needed to be manually configured from a homemade 10.3 source package, but being that it’s a shell/perl script combo, that took seconds. asus_acpi and the pae kernel were a bit more problematic; it kept wanting to make an initrd without filesystem support.

But, I can do everything that I’m used to on my little eee now, and have my beloved complete KDE 3.5 back.

I know I’m years late – this was in vogue in 2001, back when people still thought LiveJournal was worth posting on.

I’ve just decided upon a new way to come up with a band name for anyone who wants to write whiny, pretentious lyrics with a backdrop of maybe two chords, and lots of crying.

Obtain a pamphlet for any “Bed and Breakfast”, and read the amenities.

Here’s a sample, from here:

“This beautiful Queen room has a private bathroom containing a bath and a shower. Robes and extra towels being provided for use in the spa and swimming pools. Holmes room is enhanced with a heater/fan, television, radio, refreshment facilities and an electric blanket. Breakfast, chosen from our menu, is served to you in the dining room or on the patio in Summer.”

Pick any three words in sequence; paying no attention to sentence construction.

“This Beautiful Queen”
“A Private Bathroom”
“Containing a Bath”
“Robes and Extra”
“Television Radio Refreshment”
“Electric Blanket Breakfast”
“Patio in Summer”

Any of these would make a perfect emo band name. You can’t take “Electric Blanket Breakfast”; that one’s mine.

Much as the overheard rhetoric of recent times, I agree that it is time for a change. I’m selling my televisions, disconnecting my cable, and only keeping basic cable service.

Update: 3 weeks later, and I have not grown a beard or moved to rural Montana. I’ve been getting a lot more done, though!