Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

I have not been a Generally Positive Person over the last few days, so I will take a moment to look on the bright side.

• I had less than a minute, total, of any type of sighting or contact today with any of the neighborhood jagoffs that I hate. Let’s hope for more days like this, and try and get that less than a minute down below 10 seconds.
• It was a beautiful sunny day, though slightly chilly for this time of year, otherwise known as “Rottweiler weather.”
• The very lovely Miss Jules, Axel’s grandma’s French Bulldog, got her first two points towards her AKC Championship this weekend in Kokomo, IN! Yay, Jules!
• I went in to work today for a little while to change everyone’s email settings (due to the domain move that I’ve talked about for the last couple of days) so I won’t have to go in early to do it tomorrow morning. It took only about an hour and since I am not a morning person it was well worth it.
• Rottweilers are extremely quiet and well-behaved as long as they believe you are going to eventually feed them some Spam.
• TV shows Dollhouse and Chuck have been renewed for next season! I am a big fan of Dollhouse although it did take several episodes for it to grow on me. Chuck really hasn’t grown on me, but I have friends who love it, so am happy for them that it was renewed.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 17 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 113 of 274)

Good stuff: Switching over DNS for the domains on the new VPS went well. I remain impressed with WiredTree. I may not have mentioned yesterday that they are local to me. Downtown Chicago location, local tech support, not outsourced. Life is good.

Next week I will be moving most of the personal domains, and strangely enough, that is going to probably be more complicated than moving the company domain. The personal domains have things like guestbooks (I know, I know. I don’t do guestbooks for my own domains, but some people still want and like them. Not me personally, but I don’t judge) and photo galleries. I have this blog and a couple of others. So there are quite a few MySQL databases to move. The company website doesn’t currently include a blog or forum, so there was no MySQL to deal with yesterday or today. I don’t think I’m going to have an issue with PHP versions (maybe on one domain) but you never know.

Bad stuff: Spammers finally found this blog. It was sporadic up until the last couple of weeks, but since then it’s been a daily occurrence. No real comments here in a day or so, but the spam from jagoff spammers from foreign countries continues. Screw you all, foreign spammers, and yay for Akismet, without which the issues of keeping up with spam killing would be much more onerous.

More bad stuff: Some of the jagoffs who live in this neighborhood truly make me sick. I really do like some of my neighbors. I won’t say I actively wish harm upon the others. There is that Clarence Darrow quote I’ve always liked, though:

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

There ya go!

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 16 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 112 of 274)

I keep falling asleep while attempting to tag and categorize. Maybe my blog is even more boring than I originally thought.

I want to take a moment to say a good word for WiredTree. I am moving my company’s domain to a VPS at WiredTree. This move started late Friday afternoon in order to minimize website, FTP site and particularly email downtime during business hours. I ordered the server online at about 4:30PM. I received a phone call to confirm my order about 40 minutes later, shortly before I left work.

The sales rep estimated that the server would be provisioned in a “couple of hours.” It was! I received the welcome email around 7:00PM. After supper, I uploaded website files and created email accounts prior to switching over DNS. The introductory documentation and knowledge base provided were great. My only issue was self-inflicted because I didn’t read the entire introductory document first.

I still had one question and just put in a support ticket a little while ago. Note the time of the post. I got a response in about 10 minutes, while I was writing this. Very impressed so far with what seems to truly be 24/7 support!

Tomorrow I switch over DNS and hopefully I don’t screw that up. This VPS will have only two domains on it initially (our company’s domain and that of a partner’s family member) so if I manage to screw that up I should probably look for another type of work.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 15 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 111 of 274)

Things look a bit messed-up here, don’t they?

I said a couple of weeks ago (okay, fine, almost three weeks ago) that I needed to rework the categories and tags here at Rottweilers Ate My Laptop. And I have! Unfortunately, I underestimated how screwed-up my original system was, and am spending much more time than I anticipated recategorizing and retagging.

I’m also about to undertake another project that was put off for a while, which is a web host move for some of my domains, including this one.

So if I disappear completely, please don’t give up on me! I will be back!

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 14 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 110 of 274)

Wow. I wrote on Monday about two separate incidents in Chicago where a pet dog went into Lake Michigan, followed by its owner, followed by emergency workers and a successful rescue:

These stories won’t be cute little human interest pieces any longer once they result in serious injury or death of any of the involved parties, or what to me would be even worse, injury or death to a police officer, firefighter or emergency medical personnel who was involved in rescuing someone from an incident probably of their own making.

When I wrote that, I hadn’t yet seen a story from the UK in which the parents of a seven-month-old baby girl drowned while attempting to save their two dogs from an undertow in the River Garnock. Very sad and very possibly preventable, as were the incidents in Chicago.

I think we dog owners, especially city dog owners, get caught up in wanting our dogs to be able to run free now and then, and lose sight of what could happen, not only to them but to us.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 13 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 109 of 274)

Most days I am a Generally Positive Person. But no one can do that every day. Okay, maybe you can, but I can’t. I’m tired of people today. So what’s new, some of you ask? Yeah, you’re right. Not much is new on that front. Most days I am better at pretending, though.

Today I have decided that the internet is like high school, and I don’t mean that in a happy memories of happy fun times, best years of your life kind of way. I mean the exclusive little cliques that claim not to be cliques. The “communities” that are just bigger collections of cliques. A venue that’s supposed to break down barriers just puts up the same ones, only now you can’t actually see them.

If you are, and have always been one of the “cool kids”… right here (please imagine the accompanying extremely rude gesture). For then, and for now. And for later, too.

I feel better now. And if I offended anyone, this time I’m not sorry. Thanks for listening.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 12 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 108 of 274)

Last week, Jess Craigie jumped into Lake Michigan to rescue her dog Moxie, who had gone off the pier while chasing seagulls.

Today, a woman jumped into Belmont Harbor to rescue her dog, who had gone into the water while chasing a duck. Woman and dog were not named in the article.

I really hope this is not a trend. Lake Michigan is still extremely cold at this time of year and hypothermia is a real danger. These stories won’t be cute little human interest pieces any longer once they result in serious injury or death of any of the involved parties, or what to me would be even worse, injury or death to a police officer, firefighter or emergency medical personnel who was involved in rescuing someone from an incident probably of their own making.

(NaBloPoMo | May ‘09: 11 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 107 of 274)