indiboi.com

So I’ve been trying to figure out just how to arrange my domains and content. As I continue to age, as I mentioned before, indiboi.com seems like a silly domain. I suppose I could simply migrate indiboi.com over to indigomeridian.com too, as I did with my photography portfolio. The index page would be like a portal, I guess, to choose which area to visit. That seems like the most reasonable solution, but I’m not sure I actually like it. I suppose it’d be like having indigomeridian.com/journal/ as the content you’re seeing here.

It seems I’ve managed to successfully migrate from artlikepornstars.com and its gallery1 installation to indigomeridian.com with a new gallery2 installation. I did manage to aggravate my right wrist’s RSI in the process though.

I’m still working on it, but it’s now open at indigomeridian.com/portfolio/. Conveniently my photo management software, F-Spot, allows for resizing and uploading to Gallery2 rather effortlessly. I might actually keep it updated now. I think I’ll need to setup a Gallery2 install here for more random photographs.

Finally, the duct is actually connected to the fan, after a trip to lowes for an adapter, plenty of duct tape, and a new transition duct.

Yikes… at least it works now, also managed to reattach the dryer ducting; needed clamps and a new transition duct for that too.

I sincerely hope that’s the last time the attic will ever be involved in any home upgrades. I’ve crossed adding recessed lighting to the kitchen off the list… no way would that ever be a worthwhile activity given the confined nature of the attic.

So, here we are now, after enough swearing to last an entire year… with a bathroom fan that still can’t be used, in addition to a dryer that can’t be used.

The exhaust fan’s outlet is on the other side from the old one, there wasn’t enough duct to make it reach. I stole some from the dryer, now there’s not enough to connect it back together. All the while I didn’t actually take enough to make the bathroom exhaust fan both reach and connect properly. Mom just can’t seem to manage to get the ‘easy connector’ to actually connect the exhaust duct work and the fan itself. In the process she managed to push so hard against the fan as to bend the metal box out of shape; even though I was saying almost continuously not to push on the fan box.

I swear, I hate Broan… whomever wrote that this was an easy process really should be executed. The box should say “This will be a horrible installation experience, you’ll not get it done right the first time. You probably should just not purchase/return this right now. Any benefit gained by having a new fan will be offset by the horror of installation.”

Oh, in addition to the box being bent out of shape now, the fan’s installation tabs aren’t in the right place either, they’re way too high. Apparently this house was constructed horribly below building construction standards, as the rafters are 2×4′s, not 2×6′s as necessary for the fan, or even 2×8′s as would have been needed for the original fan we planned to purchase . Of course, you don’t know any of that crucial information until you’re into the process of installation. Just to get the old fan out, because it was nailed, required basically destroying the old one. So, once you’ve started you’re screwed if it doesn’t work out right. Once you’re in the attic, you don’t really want to have to get back out until you’re done; it isn’t exactly an easy process t move around up there… there is no floor after all and the headroom is practically non-existent.

This whole process makes me sound like I’m clueless about this sort of thing, and while I’ve not installed an exhaust fan before, I’m quite good at general maintenance sorts of things. These fans should be made to connect to the wiring, building, and duct work like a light fixture. All this in the attic work is ridiculous.

So, after I woke up from my seemingly endless nap, I found a single 4″x8′ flexible metal duct on the table and a roll of duct tape. Of course we need more than one metal duct now, for both the fan and the dryer. I suppose today will be yet another attempt to connect the fan to the duct that goes outside.

Oh well… I’ll remain dirty and so will my clothes. I will refuse to do anything similar to this in the future, just as I will never do plumbing again. Any money saved by doing it myself will quickly be offset by how horrible the entire process is.

We really should have just bought the cheapest one they had, I’m sure it would have fit perfectly.

The server was ready about this time yesterday morning. I spent a good bit of time doing some basic configurations, tweaking, etc. I did a lot more of that last night too. I’ve moved this account as well as a few select others, so far no problems. I decided to take this as a good opportunity to upgrade a lot of the system software, making the big leaps like Apache1 to Apache2 and PHP4 to PHP5.

cPanel® is driving me nuts, undoing all the work I had done. I still don’t have the hang of the distiller and all that, seems like it’s sort of variable on if it works or not. I really must prefer the old way of hand editing files and not having to worry about the changes vanishing. It also, annoyingly, deletes the main htdocs directory upon every Apache compile. I finally just made the files there, specifically global error pages, immutable.

I’m hoping to move a couple more accounts this evening, but with the bulk being transferred over the weekend.

Oh, and I finally joined the world of up-to-date WordPress users. It turns out the change from 1.2ish to 2.3ish wasn’t nearly as painful as I expected it would be. I dislike the whole template system, another example of my personal desire for old-fashioned things, but I can see how it would be very useful for others. Instead of bucking the system, so to speak, and just using my ordinary index.php file, I broke up my template to fit the system, so far so good there too.

This new server, aside from being a huge financial dent, is so very fast!

There has been a lot of frustration over the past couple of weeks with the server and hosting company in general. The server is, unquestionably, old. A server with approximate specs can now be leased for significantly less than I’m currently paying. The only issue I’ve had with upgrading, aside from the unbelievable amount of work that needs to be done, is that I hadn’t been able to find a significantly better server (i.e. one worth upgrading to) without spending a significant amount of cash.

Well, I finally had enough. I’ll spend more, it’ll alleviate the frustration. My datacenter had a promotion that expired a week ago or so, which was really disappointing as it was supposed to last until mid-January. They started up another, but different, promotion. I didn’t particularly feel the need for 5000GB of data transfer, but to double my HD, RAM, and Bandwidth it was going to only be another $30 over what I was going to pay anyway, which in the grand scheme of things wasn’t bad at all. It’s still probably $30 wasted, as bandwidth usage never even approached the old limit set by the datacenter.

So, here we go… I have a shiny new dual core server with SATA drives and 4GB of ram, and an absolutely ludicrous amount of data transfer… on order. Thanks to the pro-rated billing, this became an affordable reality, not having to make two full server payments the month of the upgrade is extremely helpful.

The rest of my month will be insanity, no doubt, while I prepare it for production use and transfer the hosting accounts. I only hope the addition expense of the new server over the current rate won’t be too much of a burden. I think it’ll be quite squeaky over the next couple of weeks between the pro-rated payment and the full month.