Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Tomorrow… hope or procrastination?

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Another month, another NaBloPoMo! The August 2009 theme is “tomorrow” and since I’ve already used up (wasted? I did get a few things done, but not as many as I’d hoped) most of today, the thought of tomorrow is a promising one right now.

Tomorrow is about hope and promise. That’s a very positive way to look forward to a new day. That new day might bring new opportunities, or at least a chance for a do-over. Tomorrow is also about procrastination. Those things I didn’t get done today? Pushed off until tomorrow, just because I could, assuming that there will always be a tomorrow. Not quite so positive.

I admit to falling into procrastination mode far more often than I should, and using up that limited supply of tomorrows that has been alloted to me. Something to think about as I figure out how to spend tomorrow.

(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 1 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 189 of 274)

Still in need of a more effective routine

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Here we are at the end of NaBloPoMo for July 2009. I didn’t write much on the month’s theme of “routine” although the struggle to establish an effective routine is an ongoing concern.

At the beginning of the month, I had hoped to establish some better routines for blogging, dog training and computer maintenance. I think I succeeded in one area only, that of computer maintenance, and particularly if success is equal to having current backups of everything important.

NaBloPoMo has gotten me into the habit of writing daily, but unfortunately I’m having difficulty shifting my writing time from extremely late night to early evening. Early morning was considered and rejected as a good time to write. One must be awake and alert to write. That is not me in the morning.

The dog training routine is now high priority. Freya and Axel both need to be ready for rally obedience trials in October or November. I’ll be training very few totally new exercises to either dog, so the challenge is to keep them (and myself!) from getting bored and sloppy.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 31 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 188 of 274)

Things I want to talk about

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I’m running on empty for no apparent reason, so I’m just going to make a few notes about some topics I want to talk about, before I forget about them entirely.

  • I got my invite for Google Voice last week. I did set it up, but haven’t had a chance to play around with it much, nor have I tried to set up its BlackBerry client. I’m sure at least a couple of you out there might like to hear about it!
  • I wrote a little bit about WordPress for BlackBerry when it first came out, but I should probably do a more complete review. There have been six updates since then, over the space of less than a month, so the developers really are working hard on bug fixes and enhancements.
  • As you all know, Freya is working on her rally obedience titles. When Axel goes back out with Julia this fall, he will also be working on rally obedience titles along with his AKC championship. That is, if I make sure he knows all of the Novice stations before he leaves. With about two and half months to go, we should definitely be able to do that, and get some training posts out of it, too!

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 30 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 187 of 274)

Exceeding expectations

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A virtual chat world where I was once an active member has had quite a bit of downtime lately. I don’t spend much, if any, time there any longer. In fact, the only reason I’ve been checking their forum this week to see if they are back in service is so I can close out my presence and my account there.

One thing that has always annoyed me is how people talk about “withdrawal” when just one of their online places goes down. Unless your internet has completely gone down, and even if it has, aren’t there a bazillion other online and offline things to do? Sorry, pet peeve there.

Another conversation I noted on their forum was someone speculating about price increases since hardware repairs and upgrades were involved. I know nothing about that, but that brings me to my next, and real, topic: have I mentioned how much WiredTree rocks?

I hope I haven’t lost you there, because we both know the answer to that is that yes, I have mentioned it quite a few times since switching VPS providers in May. And like the virtual world I am about to leave, WiredTree has also done some recent hardware upgrades. So will there be a price increase for my VPS? The answer is… NO!

Not only has there not been a price increase, my plan has been upgraded a step and the price remains the same as the old one. Last week I got an email notifying me of the upcoming changes. Here’s an excerpt:

We are pleased to announce we are upgrading VPS resources for all existing customers! We will be phasing out our VPS384 plan and we will be introducing a VPS1024 plan as our new high-end VPS plan. Every VPS plan will be shifted up a step from the plan it is on currently. For example, if you have a VPS384 currently, you will be upgraded to our new VPS512. If you have a VPS768 you will be upgraded to our VPS1024. This “level up” will be occurring for all current VPS customers, and the best part? Your rates will remain the same!

It is so nice to see an improvement or price break given to current clients, not only as a incentive to attract new business.

Today I got the email saying that the change to my server had actually taken place. Here’s an excerpt:

[my_server_name] has been upgraded from a Virtual Private Server 384 to a Virtual Private Server 512 !
Your guaranteed memory has been increased from 384MB to 512MB!
Your bandwidth allocation has been increased from 600GB to 1000GB!
It looks like you used a coupon which gave you a discount on your current plan rate, and we are passing this onto your new plan for you!

Thank You for being a WiredTree client!

Is that great, or what? With several blogs and galleries on this server, I am so, so grateful to have the extra memory and bandwidth and thus, some extra time before a paid upgrade to the next step is needed. A big thanks to WiredTree for taking care of their existing customers.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 29 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 186 of 274)

Searching for an answer

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You know what we do here whenever we’re lost for a topic, don’t you? That’s right, the search stats page!

wiredtree provisioned in: I moved my VPS servers to WiredTree in May, and so far my experience has been overwhelmingly positive (see the related blog posts if you’d like). My first VPS server was provisioned in 2.5 hours from time of order to receipt of welcome e-mail with login instructions. My second VPS server’s provisioning was not quite so speedy, but the delay was primarily due to a screw-up on my part regarding the number to contact me for the required telephone verification. I have no experience with dedicated or hybrid servers and do not know how long those would take to be set up.

mary wild: I’m a bit surprised at the number of searches that still come here on that name. Unfortunately, I have no new updates to supply. The most recent article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was on July 6, and I’ve seen nothing since then regarding sentencing for the handler who caused heat-related deaths of seven of the eight show dogs she chose to leave in a poorly-ventilated cargo van overnight in late June. I do have alerts set up for this topic and others that I follow, and I will post should new information come in.

did michael jackson have a rottweiler: In the 15 years I’ve owned Rottweilers, I have never heard that Michael Jackson was ever a Rottweiler owner. Honestly. Does he really seem like a Rottweiler person? Jackson’s name does not come up on any searches for “celebrity +Rottweiler” or similar, so I’m guessing that the answer is “no.”

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 28 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 185 of 274)