July 2008 Archives

I'm developing a rather healthy love/hate relationship with my Nintendo Wii Fit. Ever since we got the thing I have tried to give it a fair trial. I know I am not getting any younger and my life seems to be in complete turmoil making it nearly impossible for me to find time to go to an actual gym. So anything that I can find that will get me a little more active I am all for. I initially attempted to use Wii Fit and was completely miserable. According to the documentation that came with this torture device, it is built to help you with strength and balance. Really all it did was confirm my worst fears. I am old, out of shape, and have all the balance of a yak with an inner ear problem.

Today marks another episode in what is quickly becoming the never ending InvisibleSHIELD saga. When we last left our hero he was anxiously awaiting the conclusion of his wife's InvisibleSHIELD installation training. I was anxiously looking forward to having an iPhone that had been sealed for my protection. And although I had no intention of ever running my keys across the iPhone it would be good to know that I could without having to worry about whether it would be scratched. As Trina finished installing the film she brought the iPhone to me to make sure everything was cool. She was carrying it as if it contained nitro glycerin. I was really hoping that the instructions did not include that I had to carry my phone in that manner. Being a typical guy, I just reached out to grab the device and begin messing with it.

From an early age I was told I was not quite normal. That seems like kind of a harsh thing to tell a kid especially if you are that kid's parents. The thing was, I thought that was a good thing so I grew up thinking that not being normal was actually a good trait to have. I can't really explain why but I just seem to have the ability of piecing things together slightly different than other people. In some ways this has been a great thing. I have a knack of looking at something from a different perspective and providing an observation that might otherwise go unnoticed. On the other hand this can sometimes get me in trouble or at least into an area that is uncharted and pretty weird. The invention of the computer and more specifically the Internet hasn't helped at all; in fact it has made matters worse. Now I have a lot more information at my disposal I tend to put it together in rather unique ways. Take e-mail for example. Like many of you I get up each day and check my email and find out that more than half of my in-box has been filled with SPAM. Usually at this moment I take a severe detour to begin trying to understand why unwanted email was named after a canned meat product but I'll spare you from that and try to get right to the point. Unlike most people, I don't just immediately start deleting these unwanted messages. Instead I read each one. I blame my mother for this. She always said that if someone is willing to take the time to send you a letter you should at least have the common courtesy of reading it and acknowledging them. So for some unknown reason I started replying to SPAM and what I found is that those people really don't want you to reply because they never respond back or if they do it is usually to ask me to quit emailing them. That seems a little messed up don't you think? Today I got an email and I thought maybe I would share it with you.

It seems like every year the summer gets shorter and shorter at least as far as the kids are concerned. I seem to remember back in the dark ages when I was a kid that we didn't actually go to school until after Labor Day. We always got out the week before Memorial Day. So I have no idea what happened. Now the school year starts for our kids on August 4. They still get out of school the later part of May but somehow we just moved the calendar up a whole month. You would think that with an entire extra month of school that we would be churning out some kind of kid super geniuses. I have been around my kids and their friends enough that I can assure you that is not the case. If anything we are raising an entire generation of idiots. Ok, that's not exactly right, some of these kids are pretty smart. They have to be, they are dealing with parents like us.

Recently I wrote about the InvisibleSHIELD over for the iPhone 3G. I spoke at length about how cool I thought it was and how well it would protect my iPhone. I bought on-line because I could not find one of the covers locally. After reviewing the web site and watching the installation videos I figured that I could handle the installation myself. I'm a college graduate; I mean how hard could it be? I looked at the package and reviewed the graphics and the instructions. By about the second paragraph I figured there was no way I was ever going to be able to do this. Not because it was hard but because I have absolutely no patience for stuff like this. So I did what I always do in times like this, I asked Trina for help. She told me she had time. That was Thursday.

Ever since our return from vacation, I've noticed that my son Dakota seems to be obsessed with the mail. Usually it is like pulling teeth to get one of the kids to go down to the mailbox and retrieve the mail. You would think that I was asking them to do battle with Big Foot or try and cure cancer instead of going down to a community mail box and get envelopes from a small metal box. Oh sure their reluctance may have something to do with the concrete being fairly close to the temperatures of the sun. But it's not like I am asking them to walk down there in their bare feet. As I said, for the last week Dakota has not only volunteered to go down and "get the mail" he have actually taken it upon himself to go down to the box and check the mail several times per day. One or two days of that and as a parent I begin to get suspicious. If I didn't know any better I would think he was trying to get to something before his parents had a chance to see it. Perhaps I am just being paranoid. Still my parent spider sense was definitely tingling.

I truly thought that after I posted that my hosting services had finally been restored that this would be an end to this never ending saga. I expected that the servers had to be bullet proof and I would not be seeing any more outages. I was of course temporarily delusional as I expected that IX Web Hosting would be about to maintain their hardware. On Monday of this week my sites again incurred an outage of nearly an hour. I went back to the problem ticket center and entered a ticket and followed up with a visit to the online chat. I was told that the server was having communications issues and that the administrators were aware of it. I asked for an estimated time this would be resolved but the chat host never returned to answer my question. I can only assume that he fell over dead and was laying there waiting for medical personnel to appear to remove the body. After the outage and services were restored I noticed strange behavior with regards to my blogs. Prior to the outage I was able to post entries and have those entries broadcast to several of the micro-blogging services including Twitter and Plurk. Now though that functionality was not working. After a quick troubleshooting session I realized that IX Web Hosting had somehow removed or uninstalled two PERL modules. I went back out to the web and opened yet another problem ticket requesting that these modules be added back to the server. That request occurred on Tuesday. Here it is Friday and the modules are still not installed and there is no timeline of when these might be completed. This is pretty much the end of my patience and I decided that I need to finally change hosting providers.

Ever since getting my iPhone I have been completely paranoid about it. The AT&T store where I bought the phone did not have any cases that did not look completely lame. I have therefore been carrying around a naked iPhone for nearly 2 weeks. I am so worried it is going to get scratched that it is driving me crazy. Trina says I carry it around like it is made from high-grade weapons grade plutonium. I am not quite sure I am comfortable with my wife knowing how high-grade weapons-grade plutonium is handled but that is probably another completely unrelated subject that I should leave for another day. So since iPhone 3G day I have been searching for a case that would protect my iPhone without making it look like some sort of plastic encased brick. I really thought I would get something like the Griffin iClear that I use for my iPod Touch. I like the clear plastic cases as it lets the beauty of the device show through but also provides the needed protection from the elements. It is kind of a hassle to dock since it won't actually fit in the dock but I have gotten used to just using the cable so I can't complain too much. Now that I have the iPhone I want something that is a little more elegant and useful.

While we're talking about Christmas (I am milking every character out of that Hallmark Ornament Premiere post), I thought I would provide a little feedback and perhaps a short product review. Last year Trina asked what I would like as a gift and I immediately blurted out Bose QuietComfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones in my best Ralphie voice from the movie Christmas Story. I was half waiting for Trina to retort with "You'll shoot your eye out!" but she refrained. I currently own a set of Sony MDR-NC20 noise-cancelling headphones but I was really interested in trying out the Bose. I had purchased the MDR-NC20 when they first were released. I was very skeptical of the whole notion of noise cancellation but after making several cross-country flights with the Sony headphones I was sold. They were by far the best travelling gadget I owned. Why then was I looking to change if I was so enamored with my current Sony headphones?

While we were at the Hallmark Ornament Premiere Trina happened to ask me what I might want for Christmas this year so she could start planning. I briefly considered suggesting that she get me a 2008 Corvette or put me on the list for a 2009 Camaro SS when they are released. Trina could see the wheels of my demented mind spinning and before I could even utter a sound she added the qualifier, "Remember, you've been good but you haven't been THAT good." Ouch, that smarts. There is nothing like a reminder from your wife that you haven't quite been the model husband. I have a theory on that. Yeah I know, I have a theory on everything.

When we left Idaho last week I had hoped to stop by the Harley-Davidson dealership in Salt Lake City Utah and also the dealership in Sandy Utah. My goal was two-fold. First I love to see the various dealerships and how they are displaying their bikes and accessories. Second, and more importantly, I was hoping to pick up a dealer pin from each of these dealerships. I am going to attempt to collect the various dealer pins from around the country. When we got to Utah I realized that I didn't have a chance to look up the addresses or get directions to either of these dealerships before leaving Idaho. I attempted to get the information via my iPhone while on the road but driving while surfing seemed like a really bad idea especially during Salt Lake City rush hour traffic. For a second I thought about asking Trina to surf for me while I drove but knowing her technology limitations I figured that was probably well beyond her expertise. I therefore skipped the two Harley dealerships instead making a note to stop there during the next trip I might make.

We returned from our trip to Utah-Idaho on Friday but today is officially the last day of vacation. All of the bags have been unpacked and tomorrow we return to the daily grind. As I woke this morning I just laid in bed staring at the ceiling. Well actually I laid there staring at the ceiling fan that was spinning attempting to keep the house a few degrees cooler sparing his friend the air conditioning unit. Sometimes I feel kind of pathetic to think about what amuses me. I laid there looking up forcing my eyes first to focus on a single ceiling fan blade to see if I could follow it all the way through a single rotation. Then I reached for the remote and changed the speed of the ceiling fan to see if I could still keep track of the ceiling fan blade. Before long Trina woke up and snatched the remote from my hand and switched it back to the slowest speed. As she rolled over to go back to sleep she made some comment about how I needed to get up and quit playing with stuff so she could get some rest. I wasn't quite ready though. I laid there sans-remote wondering if it would be possible for me to somehow automate the ceiling fan and control its speed via the computer. I have no idea why I would do that since I could not think of any possible benefit to being able to control the upstairs ceiling fan from the computer that is located downstairs. Still it would be an interesting experiment. I briefly considered discussing the possibility with Trina but based upon her breathing patterns and the snoring going on she probably was not laying there contemplating the same things I was. Come to think of it, there is probably no one on the planet who is right now lying in bed contemplating the same things I am. Maybe Trina is right, maybe I am one of a kind and not in a good way.

Vacations are great. They give you an opportunity to get away from the daily activities that seem to just drain the life out of you. They replace the mundane with exciting new opportunities to live life differently. No matter what you do on vacation, it is just different from the daily grind and different is always good in my book. In most cases people will take vacation away from home. That is not always the case and this year with the skyrocketing prices of gasoline some people are spending their vacations at home. Even so, your routine is disrupted as you are not getting up and going to work so hence different. In our case we were gone for nearly two weeks and arrived home yesterday afternoon.

My parents have always been an extremely important part of my life. They have been role models that I have looked up to and tried to emulate. They have successfully raised three children and considering our personalities that in itself was a herculean feat. And while they have been devoted to their children and subsequent grand children, they have been even more devoted to each other. Throughout my life I have had people talk to me about my parents and it is always a consistent theme. They obviously love each other deeply and no one has ever seen two people more devoted to each other than they are.

It seems like only yesterday that we had arrived to begin our vacation and yet today marks the beginning of the end. We are to leave Idaho today to begin our trip back to Arizona. It is with mixed feelings that I am leaving. On the one hand it is always difficult to say good-bye to those that you love. My parents and grandmother are not getting any younger (they love when I say that) and I always regret having to leave them not knowing exactly when I may be seeing them again. Likewise Mallorie will be remaining up here for a little while longer as she is not quite done with school. We are leaving our daughter Tiffany as well. She will be staying with Mallorie until school is out then the two of them will be travelling back to Arizona together. Trina's mother and sister also live here and we'll be saying good-by to them as well. The hardest part though is that this is also the final resting place for our daughter Lindsay. She would have been 23 this year but she will always be my baby. I've never quite gotten over losing her even though it happened so long ago. Trina and I don't talk much about it but it is always on my mind. The emotional baggage I bring with me on this trip at times seems larger than the luggage we have with us.

We had multiple reasons for going to Idaho on vacation. We had to, it would take multiple reasons to drag me back in time to be here. It is not that I don't like Idaho, it is just that my lifestyle does not meld well with that of this state. I tend to be someone who is always connected and interested in new and adventurous activities. Unless these adventures take place in the great outdoors, Idaho is definitely not going to be confused with state-of-the-art. So what were the reasons for us being here? Well our daughter Mallorie is going to school at Brigham Young University - Idaho so we did want to make she was surviving (especially since this week is finals week for her). My parents are celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary this week as well so we wanted to be her to wish them well. My mother has been going through chemo-therapy so I also wanted to see her and make sure everything was progressing well (they are). Finally, my grandmother recently celebrated her 90th birthday and I wanted to see her.

On our trip up to Idaho we spent a couple of days in Utah with our daughter Ashley and her husband. While there Ashley sent me over to see the new Timpanogos Harley Davidson dealership. Before that time Harley-Davidson dealers and motorcycles were not even at the forefront of my mind. Since then though all I can think about is my Softail Night Train. Well that and how to stay out of trouble with the Shuttle small form factor computer I just built. While visiting my parents we happened to drive past Grand Teton Harley-Davidson in Idaho Falls. On the way back to Trina's mother's house I decided to stop.

It is as though the Shuttle saga is taking on a life of its own. It was bad enough that I had somehow snuck in a brand new computer but this hole I am digging just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. I keep thinking that if I can shovel dirt from one side of the hole to the other than I can get closer to the top and finally get out of this mess but that doesn't seem to be working. It started when I decided to bring it on vacation. I probably could have gotten away with that but I forgot the monitor and had to buy a new one. Trying to explain why I needed a new 22" LCD monitor while we were on vacation took a serious amount of creative thinking and tap dancing. Unfortunately, that was not quite the end to my needs.

My parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary is this upcoming Friday. It is hard to believe that they have been married half a century. This is obviously a big deal and I have been wracking my brain trying to think of an appropriate gift to commemorate such an occasion. I had drawn a complete blank. At one point I considered going through their photo album and select important photos to commemorate their life together and having Trina make a photo quilt for them. When I suggested this Trina was very excited but when I talked to my parents to ask for their help in deciding which pictures to use I was met with apathy. I decided that perhaps something else may be better and I decided to perhaps go a different direction. The question was, what could I do especially given the short time frame I had before the actual event.

Today is Saturday July 12 and that can mean only one thing, it is the Hallmark Holiday Ornament Premiere. Does the Hallmark Corporation have any idea how strange that sounds? Here we are in the middle of summer. The backyard grill still has the remnants from the Independence Day BBQ and we're still trying to decide if we can get away with one more night of setting off fireworks before the cops come over and confiscate our remaining bottle rockets. In the midst of all that we are supposed to get in the mood to select ornaments for a Christmas Tree that will remain stored in the garage for another 5 months. I was ballistic when I went in Wal-Mart the other day and saw them starting to prepare aisles for Halloween costumes now I am being asked to decide what decorations I want to see on my tree. That just seems really messed up. I'd love to be able to blow off the premiere but I've been down that path before and it is not good. The saddest part is that I have no one to blame for this but myself.

Ever since Apple released the iPhone last year I have been attempting to make a case to justify getting one. No matter what the argument was that I would make there was someone who shot it down leaving me to flounder without a smart phone (does not having a smart phone by definition mean you have a dumb phone?). Finally a couple of months ago I stumbled upon the perfect reason for having an iPhone. I tried it out on Trina and sure enough she accepted my justification. I was in! I would soon be an iPhone carrying geek first-class to be worshipped by all the other geeks who had not come up with the perfect justification. Of course with any plan there may be issues and mine was no different. Now that I had the proper approvals I found that there was not an iPhone to be found on the planet. The rumor was that there would be a new iPhone introduced at the World Wide Apple Developer's Conference. The morning of the keynote address I sat glued to my computer watching along and monitoring every blog and information service I could find. Sure enough the new Apple iPhone 3G was announced. The specifications looked like a dream phone. I could hardly wait to go out at lunch and pick one up. Wait, what was that Steve Jobs just said? I rewound the keynote address and listened again. It won't be available until July? My heart of course sank at this news. I felt a little like Homer Simpson in the episode where he tried to buy a handgun. He went to the gun store to buy a gun because he was made and wanted to shoot someone. The gun dealer explained that there was a 3-day waiting period before he could get a gun. Homer exclaimed, "But I want to shoot somebody now! I don't want to wait!" For the next 3 days Homer sat in his front yard muttering to himself as everyone he hated paraded in front of him making him want the gun even more. Yeah that is exactly how I was feeling about the iPhone. It seemed like everywhere I went there was someone with an iPhone just waving it in front of me.

After the discussions with Trina I had scrapped my plans on bringing several computers on vacation and instead just brought my laptop and the Shuttle small form factor computer. It was a lot less equipment to pack and gave me an excuse to play with this new device to fully review how well it would work as a server. I was feeling pretty good about my decision. Trina had not yet realized that I had a new computer and really how ticked off could she get about a computer the size of a small breadbox? That theory would probably have held water if I had not made one severely large mistake; I forgot to pack a monitor.

We have now lived in Arizona over 14 years. A lot of our family still lives in Idaho and Utah. As a result we find ourselves making the trek from Arizona to Idaho quite often (more often than I would like that's for sure). We have gotten to where we have a fairly well mapped out path from point A to point B and back. This path is the result of trying just about every different roadway that goes between these three states. And what I have learned from all of this is that there really is no good way to get from Arizona to Idaho without subjecting yourself to a lot of small highways or back roads. I don't so much mind driving the back country but it does have its drawbacks. For example there are large stretches of road that have absolutely nothing on them. Driving from Flagstaff Arizona northward for example takes you across Indian Reservations that barely have phone service let alone rest stops or places to get something to eat or drink. Even cellular service is spotty. Digital phone service is impossible and analog roaming is even questionable. This situation remains in effect through part of southern Utah as well at least until you can get near the Interstate when there are at least some cellular towers to give you adequate phone service.

For the last eight days I have been fighting with my web hosting company trying to get them to restore my site connectivity after they had a hardware failure. For the first few days I had absolutely no connectivity whatsoever and was completely dead in the water. I spent nearly every waking hour working with them to try and get someone to take ownership of this problem and resolve it. Finally after several days of being down I requested that they move me to a new server so I could begin restoring things myself. They relented and moved my. Unfortunately they did not properly install the software nor load the PERL modules necessary for me to be up. It has been one of the most frustrating experiences of my life and I had come to the conclusion that I needed to find a new hosting provider.

Today is the first official full day of vacation. I know I should really count yesterday since that is when we left Arizona but since that did not occur until after the baseball game and technically I am classifying going to the Diamondbacks as work (I love my job if that's the case), then today would truly be the first full day of vacation. And since this is my blog and my life I feel like I am empowered to define things however I want to. Wow, that sounded kind of like the time I got a new ball and decided I got to make the rules to the game or else I would take my ball and go home. That didn't work out too well as the ball went flat and we all had to go anyways so hopefully this time that attitude will work better.

We completed our packing and we were finally ready for our vacation. On Diary of a Diehard I discussed a little of what goes into summer vacation at our house. The planning is more representative of a large scale battle plan for a world war than it is for a family to go on vacation. I think a lot of that is as a result of having a house full of women. With just Dakota and me to represent the male population we are quickly outnumbered by the estrogen gang. Discounting the computer equipment for a moment, there is a substantial difference between how women pack for a vacation and how men pack for the same amount of time and same location. Take for example my son Dakota versus my daughter Whitney.

After my computer store excursion I had to go into stealth mode. Trina had returned from out of town and I was already in trouble for the handiwork she did know about. You would think that a wife would be grateful that her husband would do things around the house but not my wife. Of course her ideas for home improvement and mine seem to be diametrically opposed. She sees things such as landscaping, house painting, and minor repairs as at the top of the list. I am more inclined to think of rewiring the house with optical cable, running Ethernet over power line, or adding home automation devices as home improvement. I mean seriously who doesn't want to control their lights from the comfort of the computer or be able to set the thermostat from the Internet? Still I guess she does have a valid point. Our house is filled with technology goodness but my backyard still has not been fully landscaped since we moved in 14 years ago. I blame the electronics industry. If they would come up with cool landscape technology I would be all over it.

Growing up the Fourth of July was the highlight of our summer. We lived in a relatively small town in eastern Idaho. We were a mere 90 minutes from Jackson Hole Wyoming or a little over 2 hours away from Yellowstone Park. Being that close to the Wyoming border is not especially impressive or noteworthy and would normally best be left unsaid. There was a brief time each year that was of importance to us. That time was around the Fourth of July. In Idaho we were allowed to have some types of fireworks but it was limited. We could have sparklers, cones, and ground blossoms. In Idaho we were not permitted to have firecrackers, bottle rockets, roman candles, or anything that went airborne. Wyoming had a much more liberal look on fireworks. I often wondered what it must be like to be in the state legislature in the cowboy state. That had to be kind of like being a sheriff in the wild west. They seemed to pass just enough laws so that the citizens didn't kill themselves but they did not seem to mind arming the people with weapons of mass maiming. As a kid, that makes you just about one of the coolest adults on the planet.

Well it is July 3. It has been 4 days since my shared web host went down leaving my sites down and unavailable. It has been 2 days since a new server was configured partially restoring my web presence. As you know from previous entries the server was misconfigured when it was created and IX Web Hosting failed to load two simple PERL modules for connectivity to MySQL and to SendMail. These are not some obscure module that only I would use; these are standard modules that pretty much everyone on the planet would expect to have loaded. I have been working with the "technical support" personnel for IX Web Hosting to get these modules installed to restore my sites to full working order. There are three ways for you to contact IX Web Hosting technical support. There is phone support, live chat, and by entering a problem ticket.

Yesterday I ranted about IX Web Hosting and how I had been down for days while they attempted to try and resolve a hardware problem they were having. Late last evening after the Diamondbacks game I arrived home to find that the sites were still unavailable. I again reached out to technical support at IX Web Hosting to get a status. I was told that my sites would be restored "very soon". Since "very soon" had encompassed 3 days so far I wasn't real confident that I would be up any time during this millennium. I expressed my frustration and asked if I could please be moved to a different server. Even if I had to recreate all of my sites myself it would be better than looking at an error screen. The technician was shocked that I would want to move servers since this one was being repaired and would be available shortly. Yeah he should come and hang out on my end and see what it is like.

I have previously lamented about my struggles with IX Web Hosting who I am currently using. When I wrote in March I explained that there may be a bit of downtime to my sites due to being moved to a new server. My sites had to be migrated because the server was still using some very dated software and I needed something that was actually published this century. The server migration went fairly well or so I thought. As I started to dig into the configuration I found modules missing that made my blog unavailable. This was a simple problem but it took IX Web Hosting a week to get things straightened out. Finally I was back up and I tried to forget the problems I had had.