Okay, there’s something important you all need to know about me. If you’ve talked to me for any length of time, you’ll notice I’m very evangelistic about certain things. Let’s clear the air right now. If you talk to me currently, there are 4 things I’m evangelistic about. (This list changes every few months.) Here are the current items on the list:

1) Treo 600/650
2) Tivo
3) DirectAdmin control panel
4) IBI

If you know me, you’ll know that I love these 4 things, and depending on how well you know me, you will slowly be convinced to try at least 2 of the 4. After all, how many of you have Treos now because of me? Tivos? (That’s at least 15 people all told.)

My evangelism about certain things bugs some of you, and I know that, but take this to heart: 1) I’m only going to recommend something if I think you would be interested in it; and 2) I obsessively compare everything, and nothing gets put on my evangelism list unless it’s so radically awesome that I simply could not imagine living without it. So listen up! 😉

I think the Fark headline describes it quite well, actually: “$125 Walmart gift card sells to value-minded Nascar fan for $127.51.”

Well, I typed the word “reboot” into a server today, not expecting that I was going to cause myself and my team a combined total of 27 hours of work (between 4 people.)

Here’s what happened. We had about 40 websites, including simpli.biz, hosted on a RaQ 550 server that I’ve been wanting to get rid of for a long time now. Mooneer and I had been slowly moving the sites off of the RaQ 550 for the past week, planning to do a full-scale migration starting today and going through the end of next week. As of today, there were 26 websites still hosted there.

Well, the darn SMTP server kept crashing, and every day I was going without email and having to log in and restart the stupid SMTP server (and then get caught up with the email I had missed as it flowed in for the next hour.) Finally, today around 1PM, it crashed again and I decided I’d had enough. I rebooted the server through SSH.

It didn’t come back up.

I knew I was in trouble about an hour later. I’d rebooted it through SSH to begin with. After 15 minutes, I ran a hard reboot. About 20 minutes after that, I put in a ticket with AboveNet and had them unplug it and replug it. At 1:45PM, I headed to the datacenter to confirm that the server was, in fact, going through fsck. I figured I’d let it fsck while I ate lunch, and came back to find that it had stopped fsck’ing and was just sitting there like a total lump.

I rebooted. Nothing.

At that point (around 3PM), Mooneer came online for his shift and I realized we were going to have to take drastic action. I told him to grab our backup (made 14 hours previous, so it was pretty fresh) and we’d get to work restoring 26 websites. I then called Brandon and had him come into the datacenter to work the hardware end while I went home and helped Mooneer restore websites and email to meowcat (our new sexy dual Xeon server.) simpli.biz was moved to my ULTRA-POWERFUL AWESOME Celeron 800 server 😀 that I picked up for next to nothing (which also hosts this website and our helpdesk and ticket system.)

Well, the day wound down with Mooneer and I still restoring websites and email around 9PM PST (8 hours after this whole thing had started.) Just after 9, we finally got my email restored. I’d helped restore a couple websites, including simpli.biz and onthehouse.com (our two most hairy ones), and was working with customers to get them control panel access.

Why did it take almost 9 hours to restore 26 websites, you ask? Well, unfortunately, there is no easy way to convert sites from a RaQ 550 to a DirectAdmin-based server. We created all of the sites manually and slowly put back the public_html folders and the email inboxes for every person on the server, which turned out to be quite time-consuming. The lack of a migration utility meant we also had to change everyone’s passwords, so if you’re reading this and thinking “I haven’t been able to log into my email all day!” (George, that means you!), that’s why. (Email support@simpli.biz from an alternate email account, or call us, and we’ll get you your new password.)

So that’s how I spent Black Friday. And here I was really looking forward to getting cozy with Photoshop CS, DWMX2004, and a copy of Designing with Web Standards. Ah, well. There is no rest for the wicked [servers].

I went to Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle’s house, as usual. This year was a little more entertaining than normal since Jan Altman came along with me. (Yes, Jan went to my Thanksgiving!) Jan brought a ton of games and we kept the kids entertained with Rummikub for most of the night. (I lost badly.) Jan turns out to be an oldschool math nerd, which I already knew, but also a fun person to have along on most any trip. (Plus, I am a nerd/geek too, so it works.)

There were lots of people there, but most of them didn’t speak any English (background: my aunt is Chinese and it’s her side of the family that doesn’t speak English.) Thankfully, my aunt remembered that I don’t like turkey and made roasted crab for me, which I devoured. (Another Thanksgiving Day where I didn’t eat a single piece of turkey! Take that, Pilgrims!) Jan and Jessie (one of my cousins; she’s 11) got on the piano, with Jan playing one hand and Jessie playing the other. Then Kelly (my other cousin; she’s about 9 years old) got out her violin and played along with them. (Everyone on that side of the family is musically inclined, including my uncle, who plays the guitar.) Jan and Jessie were having a blast and I had to remind them that we needed to leave around 10:45PM.

While the piano duet was going on, I was talking to my uncle about taking some college courses. As you know from reading the sidebar on this site, one of my life goals is to learn another language, and I figure if I’m going to learn another language, I might as well get college credit to do that. I think I may re-enroll at SJSU and take a class next semester. I also want to learn to play piano and this may be possible at SJSU as well. I’m going to look more into it.

I went to an IBI potluck the night before Thanksgiving. I carpooled with Jan since it was in Marin, and there were a bunch of cool people there. One of the new guys there (he signed up for December) owns Asians.com and is going to host it with Simpli. (I didn’t tell him this at the IBI potluck because I didn’t know whether he’d be offended, but that’s one of the best porn site domains ever.) After the potluck, Jan wanted to introduce me to some friends of hers, Rob and Nita, that she’d met through IBI… they turned out to be a photographer couple (Rob does nature and Nita does people.) Their condo is decorated with fabulous pictures that they’ve taken, and the photos are really breathtaking.

The constant torrent of phone calls and emails from IBI grads continues (not that I mind.) Kevin Keithley sent me a business plan today. Joe Moss sent out a “Happy Thanksgiving” update. Stewart Levine has been trying to get in touch with me for several days, and I even heard from Rich Lehmann again… he wants to do a testimonial for Simpli for other IBIers. (Cool!)

My parents are coming to IBI in February, and it looks like willfe got sucked in too… he’s now fundbusting for December IBI. (I told him that he’s already made $1800+ off IBI, which is about $1500 more than I’ve made!) 😉 If it helps him get more programming projects, then it’s totally worth it, and being in an environment like IBI will probably help him boost his self-confidence as well.

Oh, and about the Treo 650. I got it a couple days ago, but it’s been too hectic to set it up. Today I installed everything on it from my 600 and it promptly ran out of memory. #&@*!! I deleted some old programs, but honestly, this should have been caught way before release. I have 5.5MB free on my 600, and with fewer programs on my 650, I have 1.4MB free. Ridiculous.

However, that aside, the 650 is stunning compared to the 600. The keyboard is a joy to type on (Palm finally got that one right!) The screen is much nicer and would be worth the upgrade just by itself. Mine came with a free Bluetooth headset, which I will try out tomorrow and which will probably become my new best friend. The downside is that you actually have to charge the headset. Look, I’m already out of plugs in my office. I don’t need anything else to plug in. 🙁 But it will probably be worth it in the long run.

I also made a note to myself to write down what I’m thankful for. I’m thankful for the friends who have stuck by me in the past few weeks. I really got to see the true colors of a lot of people throughout this, and for those of you who were there for me, even just on IM or over the phone, THANK YOU. I’m still not 100% back to my normal self. I’m a little more introspective than normal, and I catch myself listening to sad music and staring off into space every once in a while. But I know that I will be okay eventually, and that makes it bearable. I realize I have been more needy in the past few weeks than I probably ever have been before. But to those of you who realized it and listened patiently on the other end of the phone or IM window while I was crying or screaming “Why?!”, thank you. Seriously. It means the world to me.

DW sent me this site a while back, only I hadn’t been there in a while. Today I needed a good laugh, so I went back.

The subject of the site is “Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!”, and yeah, that pretty much sums it up. 😉 A good recent one is I Flew To London for $75 Round Trip. They also have a contest that’s great for a laugh. The contest was to send in a picture of you acting out a scene that he’d drawn as a cartoon. My personal favorite was who likes masturbators! (Original drawing here.) I can’t believe that guy actually got 5 friends to participate in that insanity!

Anyway, the site is another example of the thing that makes the Internet great — crazy people. Crazy people plus digital cameras. And someone with a pen tablet and too much time on his hands. Heh. 😀