Hey folks. PLEASE, for the sanity of everyone close to you: if you get an Email about Saddam Hussein being dead DO NOT open any attachments on the message. There’s a triple worm threat going down that’ll really screw up your machine. Check out this article at ZDnet for more information.
Chalk up another entry for the Top Ten List of Oops!! The European Space Agency is reporting a story about how a mission that took 18 years to develop and 7 years to fly out to Saturn’s moon Titan was pretty much a complete failure because someone forgot to turn on a piece of equipment back in 1997 before the launch… Update in 2017: add to that the growing list of other mission failures like writing some of the code in metric and other code in imperial measurements.
After much thought, I’ve decided to close down MyFiveYearPlan.com at the beginning of March 2005. MyFiveYearPlan was a web application allowing users to enter goals or plans they wanted to achieve in the future, break those goals down into smaller tasks, and had a social component to attach friends to those goals to ensure accountability. Users could then download a generated PDF of their “five year plan”. I ran the site as a subscription service, for $4.
I used GoToMyPC for quite a while - almost since they started. I was a member for quite a while, too. So long, in fact, that when I wanted to quit their service, they cut my monthly cost in half to keep me as a customer, which I did for a few more months. I loved that I could connect to my PC at home while it was behind a firewall, and get files or access some archived Email or whatever.
I first heard of LunarPages from a job posting in 02/2004, and it would have been amazing to have a job in that area of town, very close to where I lived, working professionally in a web hosting business. While I never did get in for that interview, I’ve had great success with them as a customer. I had my own web servers turned off by NHI Colo in April 2004, and needed to find hosting very quickly for MyFiveYearPlan which at the time was doing nightly credit card billing.
When I lived in Canada, I ran a hosting business with some friends. In the summer of 2000, I relocated to the Los Angeles area and later had my servers shipped to California and I set up an account with NHI Colo. Pros: Cost was great, guys were generally pretty knowledgable Cons: On April 1st, 2004 they unplugged a LOT of their customers with ZERO notice. I had a good deal going.
Voice Over IP isn’t anything new. It’s been around for ages. But only recently has it been cheap enough for Joe Public to afford using it. I signed up in 02/2004 when I was going to be making lots of long distance phone calls for finding a new job. For $14.99/month, at the time, I got 500 minutes of long distance within the US and Canada. For an additional $4.
Converting my site to XHTML 1.1 isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. It’s all about closing tags, basically, and forcing you to really understand what you’re trying to accomplish. I’ll have to look around for some truly compliant XHTML authoring software though - typing it by hand is prone to mistakes. update: May 2005 obviously, the geeklog CMS system isn’t xhtml 1.1 strict compliant, so that’ll give me something to do in all that spare time i have.
Update 2017: DBlack and I never finalized any deal with the band, and I’ve never seen a penny from the rights to this song. But hey, I have my music on two albums. Hey all. Well, I’ve mentioned it, eluded to it, and talked about it and figured I needed to actually share the song with you to lend weight to what I’ve been braggin' about for the last few weeks.
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All content authored by Ian Douglas unless explicitly stated otherwise.