Digg Goes Ape over Scientology

I admit that I've laughed at my fair-share of Digg stories bashing Scientology... it is, afterall, a religion for complete and utter fruit-cakes, alone. However, I wonder if Diggers aren't bypassing quality news items for the pursuit of Scientology. There were 124 hits to a recent search I did on Digg for "scientology". Wow. 124? Why so much attention to such a loony bunch?

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When Updates Go Wrong

This Friday evening, lastnight, I had some time to myself and decided to do some care and feeding of my various personal servers: a Windows Server 2003 box, a Mac OS X box, and my beloved Cisco ASA 5505. Only one of the boxes made it out of the OS updates unscathed: the ASA. The reward for my dilligence is that I've driven 130 miles this evening to go to where the boxes are physically housed to do what I can to resurrect them. The best part comes when I'm pulling off of the Interstate and pull onto Main Street and see literally a dozen firetrucks parked in front of the building where the boxes are hosted. Oh you can imagine my panic.

After I got over the initial shock of seeing the firetrucks, and realized that they were fighting a house fire across the street from my hosting facility, I took on the OS X server. When the display came up it was sitting at a text-based Darwin login prompt. That's new territory for me. Being an old *nix jockey though, I wasn't daunted until it wouldn't take my input from the keyboard. I rebooted and it came back VERY VERY slowly, but never finished booting. I'm resigned to the fact that this soldier may be down for the count. I can't even get into the OpenFirmware... I see the display flash, and it chimes (POST), but no love. :-( I'll see if the local Mac Doctors can do anything to save this poor chunk of silicon.

Next up: the Windows Server 2003 box. This box SEEMS to be operating correctly, but Terminal Services won't respond on it. Its like its not even listening on tcp/3389. Being a Windows box, I gave it another reboot and after a bit it came back and Terminal Services appears to be running JUST FINE. Damn Windows boxes. I swear. It wouldn't be so awful except this behemoth takes a day to reboot!!! Grr... SO even a second reboot, to verify that the first was in fact the resolution, took me about an hour. I'm not kidding, this thing is a dog. All is well now.

...so, the NEXT time I plan on doing updates, I'm probably going to be more than a little gun-shy.

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So long Register.com

In the mid 1990's when I registered my first domain there were very few choices. It was basically InterNIC or someone you had never heard of. The thing is, these "guys you'd never heard of" actually provided value-added service that InterNIC didn't, which meant people like me didn't have to have a secondary DNS server and the like! SO, I began registering my domains with one of these "other guys", Register.COM. Back then, I couldn't have been happier.

We're ten years on from when I registered my first domain, and the Internet has changed A LOT. There are now dozens of value-added registrars, all vying for your business and all trying to squeeze in as much value as possible for the lowest price... except Register.com. Register.com has not added any significant changes to their basic services but yet has kept their price the same. At $35 a pop, Register.COM is pretty-much the WORST possible registrar. I've been using GoDaddy for a couple of years and REALLY like their management tools. SO, today I decided it was the last day I had domains with Register.com and submitted the necessary transfer papers. Hooray!

Now its just a matter of time before I haven't got any crappy register.com domains to manage.

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Migration Aid & Taxonomy

One of the things I'm struggling with in my Migration from Word Press (aside from the fact that my Server took a poop on itself this afternoon when I rebooted it) is the notion of the taxonomy. WP uses "categories", which are essentially the Web2.0 "tags", but I haven't any idea how they'll come into Blogger.

I've found a lovely bit of software from James E. Robinson, III which, despite its profound lack of documentation, promises to be quite utilitous in migrating my WordPress blog. The gist of it is you drop a couple of PHP files on your server, tweak them to point at your WordPress install, and hit them from a web-interface... the whole thing should be pretty smooth. Unfortunately, I can't test it right now because my server is presently down. :-(

Aside from the sheer act of getting the content over to Blogger, I'm considering the taxonomy of my new blog. My previous blog had a very simple, yet effective, set of tags: "soapbox", "faith", "family", "geekery", "travel" and "food". Initially, I expect I'll keep that same set of tags with the intention of elaborating on them at some point in the future.

I'm also looking for ways to integrate various other bits of my gLife (all my Google bits) into my blog. I suspect that shouldn't be too difficult, but I haven't yet explored that.

More to come.

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Transition

So begins the auspicious transition from my WordPress blog at intertrusion.com to this blog. I have a number of reasons for transitioning from WordPress, not least of which is that I have grown weary of having to maintain the WordPress environment. In the coming days I'm hoping to get my WordPress blog pulled over to Blogger, even if that means some manual transfer (though I can hope it doesn't.)

My hope, by transitioning to Blogger, is that the wider support for Blogger will facilitate my more regular blogging. That said, I'm going to keep the focus I had on my blog at intertrusion.com: my faith, my family, geekery and gastronomy with an occasional blog on my travels.

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