Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I know, it’s been a while. I need to get back to posting on a more regular basis, but it is hard when as soon as you leave work you are moving, unpacking, or doing some sort of housework. I don’t think we’re going to actually going to have much free time at this rate until June! My Wife’s father, who has been staying with us this last month, just left, and he was doing a lot of the work that needed to be done both inside and outside the house. Now we have to do this ourselves and it seems my wife may be away on business a lot in the coming weeks.

I thought I’d give up my usual tendency to post about one topic, since this is often where I start telling myself that I don’t have enough to write about X or at least not enough that would be at all interesting. With that in mind, I thought I’d just ramble a bit on various things and maybe altogether they will add up to something moderately interesting to someone!

First, the cicadas. Yes, I know I just wrote about these, but I can’t stop thinking and talking about them. They had gotten really bad by a couple of days ago. I tried playing tennis at the courts near my house, but they were covered with cicadas and I just couldn’t take sharing my side of the court with several dozen at a time! It seems that when it rains, or at least rains pretty hard, the cicadas go away for a while. I am still moving some of my stuff out of storage and was dreading having to move it into the house with all the cicadas flying around, but we had a lot of thunderstorms go through the area last night and by the time I got home it had cleared but there were no cicadas out. None! I don’t think it was just coincidense and besides, at least according to Cicadamania.net, they are supposed to be out for a month, and it’s only been a couple of weeks here. My current question is if the rain did indeed cause the cicadas to not come out the way they have been, did it just postpone them, or did it actually kill the batch that would have come out today. In other words, will we get an extra day of cicadas, or not? I’m wondering this because, of course, because if it could rain for the next two weeks and prevent cicadas from coming out, and then that would be the end of it, well, I would be all for it raining hard for two weeks streight!

Meredith, who happens to have the same commute as I do, gave me the idea to change my route a bit and I was able to shave at least 25% off of my commute, which is definitely helping with the transition to the new house. Meredith had pointed out in this entry that Route 50 actually goes coast to coast, which I didn’t know about. One of my daydreams since we honeymooned in Key West was to leisurely travel the coast via Route 1. But now that I know of a East-West route, I now have another daydream. I suppose there are much more scenic roads to take, but it would be neat to say you took one road accross the country…

I’m finally trying to get my old site, dvdmon.com, back into shape. I recently switched it from my old host, Interland. Interland was the first hosting company I had become familiar with, and I have no idea how, but it was many years ago before they were bought, and they may have been bought more than once. They are pretty huge at this point, and their prices are not cheap, but they are a premium service. I had a Cold Fusion account with them, which they later decided to make into a special type of account that costs way more than others that allow you to use ASP or PHP. Luckily I was grandfathered in, but that also meant that they couldn’t switch me to a faster server, and I’m not sure whether they were actually upgrading the server I was on. I wanted to just transfer everything to another host I had been using for other things, called Brinkster. They are a lot cheaper, and you get a lot more in some ways, and they just provide a lot of tools and resources. Yet, some things you don’t get and their support isn’t quite as good. On the other hand, when we used Interland at my old company, we often would run into problems that would take days or weeks to resolve with them. I think ultimately it is probably just the lack of really good tech support folks (or at least relative to the incredible number of people to support) that causes problems for a lot of these types of companies. Anyway, I did some preliminary work to convert my site from Cold Fusion to ASP and then transferred it, but it’s still pretty rough. I’m hoping to make this an opportunity to redesign the database backend which I had previously made overly complex when I created them 4 or 5 years ago, and to just redesign layout to make things more readable, use stylesheets more and even integrate in some 508 stuff.