Suggestion One:

Don’t mix your host and your registrar. You might not see your domain again.

For anyone looking to create their own site I urge you, never register your domain with your host. There are too many hosts out there that are priced well and say they have great service but when you find yourself needing to move the domain that they registered for you will tie you down.

This is probably the only suggestion I can give to the majority since the next two are more for the VPS or dedicated server owners.

Suggestion Two:

If you’re planning to run a VPS or Dedicated box don’t roll your own DNS.

There are tons of pros for running your own DNS but when compared to using GoDaddy total DNS they’re few and far between. Especially the reliability and ease for future migrations. First, you wont have to worry about long TTLs on those name-servers when planning to move. You should be able to count on your registrar’s DNS reliability, security and ease of use as well.

I found running DNS on my current VPS hogs ram, and every MB counts on most VPS plans, in this case 40MB to 50MB is a lot.

When migrating all you would need to do is update your records at the registrar in my case GD, I didn’t have to worry about saving configurations, preparing to lower TTLs on the nameservers and A records and then configuring the server on the new machine. Granted that might not take very long but waiting for IPs to propagate is horrible.

I’m also preventing the worst case scenario, which has happened to me recently; having to move hosts without any preparation because your server completely down waiting and you find yourself wanting to move. In that case if I had my own DNS server I would have to spend the time getting the original server up in order to get the root servers the new IP, instead I just opened a new account at a host I wanted and changed the A record at GD and I was back up and running in 20 minutes with a TTL of 30 minutes. Again, waiting for the root servers to find you at your new home can take a day (or two) and then you’re just lost to the world.

And that’s not including the wait for MX records, essentially pausing all of your mail if you’re running you’re own main server too.

Suggestion Three:

Don’t run your own mail-server if your on your own VPS or Dedicated if you can help it.

This is a big one for me because if your server ever goes down or is down because of a migration you will not receive mail for that time period. The message will hang waiting for your server to come back up and will be eventually delivered but if you’re down for an extended period (maybe because of not going with the suggestions above) the result may be a bounced e-mail back to the sender. The perfect solution I’ve found is forwarding all mail through GD forwarding to my gmail accounts, for my main account I actually use Google apps which GD handles the MX records for me.

Overall:
I’ll admit relying on GoDaddy or any other registrar to provide that quality uptime for your DNS and Mail might be harder then relying on your own server; in my case it’s not, since I’ll admit to downtime and not wanting to worry about two more services running on my machine.

In my experience not relying on your own server or even your host will make your life a lot simpler day to day and that day you’re back up against a wall and you want to migrate to a different server, whether you hate your current host or you want to upgrade.

I’ll need to throw my 20 minute migration steps into another post and I’d also like to recommend (mt) dv plans without plesk (& installing webmin).

Day One:

The flights started at Robles Golf Course in Thousand Oaks, just across the street from the TO mall. I hadn’t played there in about 4 years so the GPS Sky Caddie Bergman let me borrow helped out a lot with yardages.  

It was a beautiful day but if you were outside Saturday it was hot. 110 degrees at 10am isn’t good.

Through the first 9 holes I played even par with a birdie on the first, almost an eagle and a bogey on the second. Knowing the back nine was going to be rough I scrapped by with 5 bogies and 1 more birdie.

Overall, I wasn’t pleased with my play. Scoring wise was better then I expected but the way I played wasn’t shown with how many putts I had, a total of 33. Not good at all, especially since I average 29-30 a round. 3 strokes is a lot in a tournament to loose.

Total was a 65 Net and one back of the lead.

Day Two:

Sunday was played at Olivas Links. Olivas just opened and is completely different in comparison to  the old course. 

I extended my good swings through the front side but my putter was completely off. I three putted the first hole and did the same on the third, I missed every chance at birdie and then came the back nine after a front nine of 4 over. Total putts for the day ended up being 36.

Wanting to just stay around 4 over I tried my best to play it “safe”, it didn’t work I was already 6 over through 13. I ended up birding 14, a very tough 600+ yard par 5 and then backing it up with a birdie on 15. I was looking good at that point until I tried to play it safe 16 were I tripled the hole after pulling a inexperienced 3 wood into the water where I didn’t know was reachable.

7 over on 18 I thought a par was perfect. I ended up doubling it after a couple duffs and a penalty from hitting it in the water.

Total score was a net 72.

I had thought I was middle of the pack after that crazy day but it ended up being okay. I was tied to 3rd, hoping to be in the final group I was placed in the second group just in front of the leaders.

Day Three:

The morning at Buena just felt comfortable. No range in the morning, I figured the 3 days of previous golf should have me “dialed” in.

Turns out I was, except my putter failed me again. I missed at least 4 short birdie putts and about 10 15 footers, that should be 70%.

In the beginning I was hitting the ball very well, I just couldn’t convert and going into the 10th with a good swing and a bad putter wasn’t going to end up well. The last six holes was horrible. All I wanted was to shoot a few over par, giving me something like a 65 which would give me a great chance of second place.

I forgot to mention, the reason I didn’t want to play int eh B flight was because of “sand bagger”, people that play better then their handicap. At this point the leader was 10 shots ahead and wasn’t possible to catch.

Back to 13, I started a bogey streak all the way through to the end. On 18 knowing I had to do something to contend in 2-4th place I tried too hard and hit the ball OB. I ended up with a double and my final score was a net 70.

Overall I was 5 under, thanks to the Robles play of day one. When I went into the clubhouse I was the leader, no way. After the last group came in the other players “choked” worse then I did and I ended up tied for second.

Awesome, I actually placed second while not playing to the level I’m accustomed to playing. So I have to be happy, I wanted to just place for prize money* before I Saturday and now that I know I can play better it will just help me next year.

*The prize money will be going to my own Sky Caddie.

Mac fanboys are all trolls, and well, I try not to feed the trolls.

He is obviously feeling insecure about his “Mac faith” so he needs to
attack us to rally the troops so that they can reassure him that his Mac
life style is worth basing his entire self worth around it. The sad part
is I feel sympathy for that poor man, he does not even realize thats
what he is doing. So I say let them spin their own wheels, they aren’t
getting anywhere and it’s fools like him that killed resexcellence.com.
He is the very type of person that nailed that coffin shut.

Thanks anyways man! You rock,

You’ll notice he didn’t understand I was the “fool”ish “troll” that he had “sympathy” for. I had originally wrote it off because it seemed to me he was just lumping me with any mac fanatic and I wasn’t about to defend them. But it turns out that he just lumps any person in the mac community into this description.

I come to this conclusion after digging around at resexcellance and seeing Phill Ryu’s post about Bryan Lund.

I’m going to grab some of my comments form the original post here. The tweet was about how the show has a direct anti-apple stance. And with reading Phill’s post, remembering the marketing ploy and the comments about the issue it’s clear to me that TLAS motivations to keep Apple down is entirely personal.

A little background on that Bryan’s Mac development we are referring to; Phill’s take. And what’s crazy is I remember this specifically…I never correlated LAS Bryan with the crazythis Bryan.

Honestly, with a little history the LA show has lost all credibility for me, maybe not the portions explicitly about Linux but I’ll still be cautious. Thanks to Phill for bringing some perspective because now I share a similar opinion about Brian and Chris and it’s going to be hard to rationally listen to their show now. This might sound a little fanboyish and immature but imagine if it was reverse and replace mac with linux and linux with windows. Shitting on a community that I feel I’m a part of isn’t good. And you can tell they’re still hot after that email.

Now that I’m seeing the whole picture of their experiences with the Mac community and “development” I’d have to say the response in our personal e-mails is rude, it was entirely his honest opinion since he thought I was someone else. Which they could have clearly realized by looking at my name in the email and the name on the comments. I gave him the benefit of the doubt (as you can tell by my response) but as I said after a little perspective I’m taking it completely different.

In response to Jared’s comments.

Phill is a very respected mac developer, one of the best. You must have missed the part about Bryan’s so called mac development, Phill knows more about the situation than anyone becuase he’s not some random guy he clearly involved with the site prior and now and he knows more about Bryan’s development than most as a mac dev and someone he personally knew. I do agree the post was very personal.

But I don’t really care for the personal side bashing, I can recognize that. And the slant didn’t affect my 180 about the show, the issue is that I now know Bryan was a “hack” developer (I can see that by his work, it’s still up) and his “experiences with the mac community”, which was entirely derived from him “ruining” resexcellance and the direct comments he received.

Like I said I don’t care about the personal stuff but it seems to me Bryan’s entire motivation to switching to Linux was personal. He wrote off the Mac community and Apple for all I’m concerned because of personal incidents related to feedback to a site. And the switch was a huge media/marketing ploy, I remember the diggs and related stories about it. So when they say they were ran a huge mac site and Bryan was a mac dev it doesn’t hold water for me.

He wasn’t a very good developer which directly effects his comments about how Apple hates it’s developers.

They both ran resexcellance into the ground and they couldn’t take constructive criticism so they wrote off every person in the mac community including myself because of those comments. And the comment in the e-mail solidifies that for me.

Chris’s reply was rude, as the receiving party I can say that. And it’s rude to me now and not earlier because it’s clear to me he’s basing his opinion on one tragic instance (resexcellance) instead of multiple interactions or at least reading the actual comments and deciding for himself how to approach.

Like I said, I’ll be cautious with the portions of the show were they don’t refer to Apple and when they do their opinion is entirely influenced by this stupid resexcellance situation and Bryan’s lack of development skills on the mac.

YouTube hits Apple TV today, headed for the iPhone as well – Engadget
The wait is over, and you can finally train that Apple Remote of yours on videos of passable karaoke, mind numbing video blog confessions and the genius that is Daxflame. That’s right, YouTube is hitting the Apple TV today, an announcement that is totally overshadowed by a little surprise Apple packed into the press release: YouTube is the iPhone mystery app. Sure, it might not be GPS or anything useful like that, but Apple seems to be aware of our addiction and is happy to oblige. YouTube videos can be viewed through an Apple-built application on the phone, and will be encoded in H.264 by YouTube to improve video quality and battery life on mobile devices. They’ll have 10,000 videos ready by June 29th, and should complete transcoding the collection by this fall. Videos can be viewed over WiFi or EDGE, we don’t want to even imagine the painful load times of the latter.

I’m not too excited about the feature for the iPhone (since I wont be getting one) but I’m just about to check out YouTube on AppleTV and I’ll get a review up soon.

This is just in time for the summer TV blues where the only show some stations has to offer is  horrible contest shows.  But I’m still waiting for a real IPTV solution from Apple, hopefully Joost or Google will help because pay-per-show isn’t cheap, nor good enough quality.

The great news is, I finally have a fully working macbook pro thanks to Apple shipping the replacement overnight for free. I’m clocking about 3 hours of battery life compared to the 1.5-2 spontaneous hours I had just a few days ago. I also ordered another battery which I’ve heard good things about.

This is a prime example of participating in battery recalls instead of just ignoring them. It could have been a lot worse and my lap could have been destroyed or our house burnt down.

Find the best deals on new laptop computers. Get customer ratings and professional price comparison. Check out this great comprehensive guide for buying laptop computers.

And now Martha and I have something else in common. And I don’t know who has it worse; even though I need to have my contraption in at night while she needs it in 24/7 for the next two years I wonder if the nightly thing for the rest of my teeth’s life is going to be a drag. At least for now it doesn’t hurt and I slept great last night. I thought for sure it would give me problems but it seems I only woke up a few times last night compared to the constant tussle.

Here’s a picture of the thing if you were wondering,

Seriously though, the tool is great. 74 templates, built in FTP and image editing. I’m looking forward to tracking all my auctions through it. And controlling the payments, emails and feedback through it too. It’s going to be nice fore Sara when she starts listing a bunch of stuff and with it storing templates it’s going to make her life so much easier.

# Don’t worry about what people think, they don’t do it very often.
# Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than standing in a garage makes you a car.
# Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
# If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you’ve never tried before.
# My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.
# Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
# For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
# If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.
# Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.
# Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.
# Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.
# No man has ever been shot while doing the dishes.
# A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.
# Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.
# Junk is something you’ve kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.
# There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
# Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
# By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
# Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world.
# It ain’t the jeans that make your butt look fat.
# There is a very fine line between “hobby� and “mental illness�.
# People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
# You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.
# You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
# The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above average drivers.

alexking.org: Blog > Quips

Your move Stryker.

What a tragedy not having [Alex] on FL anymore. I really had a lot of respect for the product because [he] knew [was] behind it. I also understand [he does not want] to put [his] name on a product like FL right now because of quality. As all FL users know there are some issues, issues that we probably all just deal with because we love the product so much. And while we can do that I wouldn’t consider that an option in real life.

I wish [him] all the luck and I wish FL all the luck as well, as an avid user.

One question though, why not develop a client version? Something that you can sell for people to install on their own servers. I know a lot of hosting providers don’t like the idea but that’s not your problem so much because people will use it one way or another. Maybe even use the Google API to pull in the feeds while you use FL as the interface. I know the Google Reader API is open enough to do that.

Anyways, best of luck.

Jason says my phone is “plenty cool” and I agree. I just fall into it not being the coolest phone which I know is a problem of mine. But lately I’ve been shedding that away and I’ve been in the mode of simplification. And I guess that’s the point of this post; I’m really in the mood of simplifying everything from furniture to gadgets. No matter what it takes, we just have so much stuff that has accumulating that we don’t either use don’t “need”.

Cool little things we are doing is cancelling our phone bill and using VOIP instead and I’m in the mood of cancelling our cable channels to just basic and the DVR. But we now have Time Warner and I need to research the new plans and prices. We’re going through or garage this week and Sara is doing a lot of spring cleaning. And I’m regretting some of my gadget purchases, even if I could just eBay them.

You might think WTF because I just bought a new phone and a Mac Pro, well let me explain why those count for simplifying my life.

The BB purchase was solely for work. So I didn’t have to carry two phones around and they would eventually pay my cingular bill and not pay the old BB bill which helps both of us in the long run.

The Mac Pro was so I could get rid of all my other computers and have just one tower. Financially it works out because I still have the money from selling my Powerbook, the two towers I’m going to sell, the iMac and I have a bunch of other little things that I’ve either saved or sold in order to pay for the hefty final 3K price tag (after monitor and add-ons) and I still have a lot left over from my recent website projects.

So, you might see me not sell so much stuff on eBay because my plan is to become acquainted to the reality of letting things I use regularly (gadgets) become outdated but still very usable.

The gruesomeness is laughable though. A great quote from JasonB, “gotta be alright since their zombies…”. Cutting heads off, using a mower, a bat, a box, anything and everything you can find in a mall is your weapon. I’ll have to start watching Avery because I don’t want her to figure out what’s really going on other then flashy colors and what-not.

The greatest aspect of the game, other than the nonsensical killing of hundreds of zombies is the camera shots you take. As a “free-lance photographer dropped into a town where zombies are running a muck you’re fighting for your life at the town mall, oh but don’t forget the reason you’re there. Taking shots of attacking zombies, funny scenes you setup, like buckets on a bunch of zombies heads is just fun.

Right on capcom. I give it a buy*.

My new game rating scale (low to high):
youtube – just watch a youtube clip of it
demo and delete – sucked so bad I couldn’t keep it on the HDD
demo it – download a demo and keep it to play later (only counts for 360 games though)
eBay – wait till eBay has a good deal, buy it and then a month later sell it on eBay (cheaper then blockbuster, trust me)
buy it – considering to keep it until you forget you had it.

Hope you have a great day.

I agree that BOOKS are regarded too high, almost as if they are the great tool of knowledge. In the past, books were the mainstay for increasing knowledge, fair perceptions of life and the world. Now it’s different and with many new media streams people can be very knowledgeable, still increase imagination and find avenues of philosophy without even touching a paper book.

Similar to what Nathan said, smart people have convinced the majority that books are for smart people and if you want to be smart you do what smart people do, which is read books. I really don’t see smart people reading because they’ve decided it’s the smart thing to do, I see them reading books because most are introverts and that’s a way of expression. Now I am generalizing a lot and I’m assuming that smart people are smart not because they’ve read a few books but rather they’re smart from the begining. Because it can’t mean that if I read Chomsky (never had) my scope logic is comparable to a genius.

Here’s where I flip-flop a lot.

As I said there are a lot of media streams rather then just books and IMHO these new inlets are ruining us. Since most aren’t calming and thought provoking we turn into fast passed media whores. TV, film, mags, music and the web I read only makes me only knowledgeable in the present rather then the future or the past; decreasing thought and imagination.

Unless we can consciously be aware of the numbing effects of this new media and are retroactively increasing thought through these forms we’ve essentially created a worse replacement to the books that brought us here in the first place.

So, I’m for books but personally I just can’t bring myself to complete a book maybe it’s because of childhood and just in case that’s why I’m going to take an effort in reading to Avery (or making sure Sara does) and limiting mind-numbing media from her.

My other problem; I’ve become a whore to tech, since it’s my hobby I want to broaden myself by reading a lot on the internet but the scary thing, I don’t see an end in sight. With no point of reflection, contemplation and thought in order to create something of my own it’s useless. And IMHO that’s true knowledge, when you’ve created or solved something for others that’s beneficial to all.

I’ve closed the comments so you’d go here instead.

Slashdot | Gates’ Replacement says Microsoft Must Simplify
“…Bill Gates’ replacement as chief architect at Microsoft. The creator of Lotus Notes, he’s a high-calibre technologist. From the article: ‘Ray’s a programmer’s programmer .. He’s much closer to an uber-engineer, whereas Bill hasn’t been a programmer for a number of years.’ Ozzie is also driving Microsoft to simplify its software: ‘Complexity kills .. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.’ He’s not the only brilliant programmer in the world, but he does have Microsoft’s resources behind him.”

Looks like they’ve finally figured it out but why wait for Ozzie to say it, does Gates understand simplification is key.

Not to encroach on your fun/debate/conversation I’m hoping for Google to just buy up all the dark fiber across the US and create their own backbone to the internet, a backbone that they would never be charged to used by the telcos. Maybe that’s just were the entire internet will go, Google, M$, Yahoo! and others will just be their own internet providers sub-leasing from the telcos and supporting the cost by ads. I would love free internet as long as the “adsâ€? are done in a semi-transparent way like GMail. Then the real QOS for the “innovationâ€? that Nate talks about would be paid directly through the telcos. But then what about the start-ups?
I’d have to say I wish I knew more about net neutrality but from what I understand I’d have to agree with a “neutralityâ€?. I’d love to see all the future dreams that QOS would bring without NN but who’s to say it wouldn’t come without it. Look at Verizon FEOS, it’s quality internet service that you pay more for, the user pays for it not the user and the companies that profit from the user using the internet.
And I thought that is what this was all about. The ISPs charging internet companies for QOS. In my opinion this is horrible. Putting QOS in the hands of corporations that can afford it only monopolizes the internet. And for Google to stand up and say they want NN is commendable in my eyes because corporate greed would have them say no to NN so then they could push the competition out. Other online application providers would fail because if you could use GMail with great speed and QOS the start-up that pushes a “betterâ€? product with poor QOS because they can’t afford it would break all start-ups.
No NN = no progress. To me.
The way I see the internet going would greatly suffer if there were no NN. I want start-ups to create great online apps that change our life, like what 37 signals has done.
Another topic barely associated with NN is the fact we paid for the internet through our tax dollars. All that fiber we paid for and it not being used or being provided to us is something we should also petition. Instead we have cable internet being the fastest ISP which is not near what was promised to my parents or my younger ignorant self.

Media Center

This feature alone makes up for the purchase because the not only does it work beautiful with the 360 but I can get rid of hardware and use unused hardware. The “out with the old” falls on the AverLink player, now listed on eBay. The hardware that just was newly dusted was “Yellow”, my big yellow PC that I made a while back that cost me a pretty penny when the AMD64 first came out. Now it’s a mid-high end PC that I just loaded Media Center addition on and it’s feeling fresh.

One thing Media Center lacks which I hate is XVid and DivX support. I installed this though and it works pretty good, I just wish it was supported like the Averlink especially since I can’t get HD now. But it’s still early and we might see a better workaround.

A couple other things the media center does which I love is Podcasting through newsgator. It limits you to three feeds but an awesome workaround is to create an Odeo account to splice all the feeds together. Then the other two feeds can be used for video feeds. Which reminds me Media Center hates codecs other then windows media, I wish if the computer played a codec thn MC would play the damn thing and stream it.

Everyone saying I should just get frontrow running downstairs or MythTV: I rather not. I don’t want a box downstairs that wouldn’t integrate nice (MythTV) and I want to stream the content without having to buy anything more (Mac).

Games

I have G.R.A.W, which is a masterpiece of graphics and game play and I’ve only played it for an hour.

Burnout is the same but better because I can just pick it up and play for 10-15 minutes if I want and it’s been a long time since I’ve laughed or smiled ALONE playing a game, the crashes are great.

PGR, I haven’t even played (it came in the kit from Costco).

And the best for last, Geometry Wars. The first game i bought from XBox Live marketplace (below), it was about $4-5 and it’s so fun. I can only describe it as a 80s space shooter in high-def. The visuals are illuminating and distracting with how cool it looks. Avery likes watching it and it reminds me of fireworks.

Live

Playing games online is the best. And how the dashboard makes it easy to see and connect with friends it only makes it better.

Dashboard

It’s true the MS guys that made the dashboard for the 360 seriously need to go get their hands on Vista before it’s released. Or is that why it was pushed back AGAIN.

Marketplace

Buy old Sega games (I think it’s coming since I haven’t seen any yet), smaller games like Geometry wars, download movie trailers, and the best ever download demos of released and future games.

My habits of a gamer are short and sweat. Demos work out for my benefit perfectly. I just want to play a little anyways and their free, perfect. Boxing was cool, full auto was cool, Online Battle field felt like I was stealing since it was so good and free.

Conclusion

It consolidates my old hardware, brings to life unused computers, gives me free games, dazzles my eyes with high-def goodness, streams music, video, and pics. What else? Nothing other then make Windows MC work like it should.