This morning my wife Amanda Molesa and I got up bright and early at 5:30 am to head over to Smoot Park. The occasion was Honey Day at the Farmers Market. Back in the spring I took some classes on bee keeping from the Wilkes Bee Keepers Club. I plan on starting my hives in the Spring of 2008. Master Bee Keeper Howard Blackburn sent some of his honey with us so that we could try and sell some. The variation that he sent was buckwheat. I liked the taste of it a lot. It’s a bit darker in color. Everyone that came out really wanted the more golden color of sour wood honey. I tried three different sour wood’s and personally I still prefer the buck wheat honey. There was also a fellow who had a poplar honey. It was similar to the buckwheat. Overall we only sold two one quart jars that day. We learned some valuable lessons from those that were selling. When the time comes for us to sell some of our own honey we’ll have a jump on what works and what doesn’t. Still yet, we had a real good time. I look forward to more trips to the farmers market, and spending time with the Bee Keepers of Wilkes County.

On July 27th, 2007 our server was taken off-line in preparation for a pysical move across the great state of Florida. We were part of the data center consolidation of ValueWeb and Hostway. I’ve been a customer of ValueWeb for over 3 years now and I’ve never had any problems of any kind. But this, this….the result of what happened is the worst thing imaginable to anyone with a website, email, dns, search engine rankings. I’ll tell you the story.

They (ValueWeb) had sent out an email at the beginning of the month stating that they were consolidating their data centers. They expected the move to take no longer that 15 hours. We were to go down sometime after 8pm EDT July 27th, 2007 and 15 hours later, if everything went well we’d be back up. But, as most things planned for, it didn’t happen as planned. We were down and offline for over a week. It wasn’t until August 3rd, 2007 did a server on our old IP address respond to us. However, there were no websites, no DNS zones, no email accounts, no customized config files, no cron jobs…you get the idea. The server no responding at our old address was a freshly installed server.

So I called and they informed me that our server had suffered severe hardware damages. They said it was the hard drive and offered to send it to me, at their cost. I agreed. It’s what I was calling for anyway. Only by this time they had been through this several times, people yelling and demanding things. I however didn’t need to. I was prepared to, but they offered to send the hd over night to me at no cost. Great, Thanks!

It came and I couldn’t be sure until I hooked it up if it was in fact my hd or if it was just a pacifier. I hooked it up and it was in fact my old hd. And yes it was damaged. Real bad in fact. I did what I could to recover the data, and I managed to recover the critical aspects. Now this failed hd was a Maxtor. I’ve seen a ton of failed drives lately. Mostly Maxtors and Western Digitals. I’m getting real sick of cheap drives. I mean really. I have completely had it with cheap junkie hd’s. If you care anything about your data, do yourself a huge favor and but Seagate’s. They just don’t get any better than that.

So, I was able to recover most everything and have been uploading it all on to the newly rebuilt server. During our down time I also setup a second server on the west coast with a completely separate company. So we now have 1 east coast server and 1 west coast server. This should help out on many fronts. It’s still not an ideal situation, but it’s closer than before.

I’d like to publicly thank all of our customers as they were very patient and understanding during this time.

Technorati Tags: ValueWeb, Hostway, Migration, Downtime

I can be a bit slow sometimes. I used to think that I had no right linking to sites that I visited often or had subscribed to in my feed reader. You see…I’m a noob and I figured much of the stuff I’m reading are from very knowledgeable people. Many of which are considered experts in their chosen fields. So here’s little me trying to capture an ounce of their hard won knowledge and apply any new bits that I pick up. Are you with my mind set so far? So Big Them - little me. I was sure that little me shouldn’t be linking to Big Them. I was even surer that Big Them didn’t want little me linking to them. Until I read a post on John Andrew’s Blog where in an excerpt he asked the readers of his blog to be added to their Blog Rolls. So I quickly added him. What can I say? I’m a tard. There are some things, that no matter how obvious they are, I just can’t see them until they smack me in the face. Thanks John Andrews. I’ll be adding more blog authors that I enjoy reading to my blog roll in the weeks to come. And for the record. Of course they want the links. Website owners, authors, bloggers, etc… want links from just about anywhere. There are exceptions, but the more the merrier.

Technorati Tags: seo blog roll education

Even though the title of my blog is rather new, It’s not exactly relevant anymore. I quit smoking in January, and even though I do still drink coffee no so much. So if anyone has any suggestions please leave me a comment. I’d be interested in hearing any thoughts.

Recently had someone exploiting the gallery software I had installed to send out load of phish. Rather that edit the code of that package, which is no longer maintained andymore anyway, I just disabled it. So the pics link to the right no longer works. Oh well. I’ll get something up and working sometime.

Dispite the rain, which we’ve needed for a while now, Vacation Bible School at Rock Creek Baptist Church of North Wilkesboro is going great. The adults seem to be having more fun than the kids are. I have to admit that it’s a good time just watching the fun everyone is having. The songs we’re working on are pretty cool too. If you haven’t been come check us out.

I’ve been carrying FF around on a pendrive for a few years now. I used to just download the zip file and run it from a folder on the pendrive. It worked nicely. Lately though I’ve been using FirefoxPortable from Portableapps which is real nice too. The other day I got to thinking that I could really bennifit from running different profiles for different purposes. That way I could have a profile for surfing and junk. One to view my bank accounts. One for development work and so on. This could really smooth out some of my flow and keep google from knowing everything about me. So I set out to find the command line options to ff. I cobbled together a batch script that’ll launch firefox with my different profiles using this:

start firefox.exe -profile f:\firefox\profiles\rjmolesa -no-remote`

Actually the f:\ portion is determined dynamically. But what ever. What I’m wondering is: Can I somehow launch the profile-manager with a list of profiles that I specify? Effectively allowing me to see a list of profiles to choose from, on a path I specify. The -profile lets me choose a specific profile on any path, and the -no-remote allows multiple profiles to run at the same time. But I have a single entry as above for each profile I want to run. A slight pain, and not very easy to manage, but it’s not all that complicated. I really would just like a way to run all my profiles from an install independent location that I choose. What I have is actually not a pendrive. It’s a 5 Gig laptop hard drive that is in an enclosure that provides a USB cable. It’s a bit bulky but has several advantages over the typical pendrive:

• Greater Capacity
• Faster Read Write Times
• A little harder to loose

This way I can carry everything I need back and forth to work and where ever, and I’m rarely stranded with the files, apps, manuals that I need for the job at hand. If it ever gets full I could always upgrade to something larger. It has worked out quite well. Now, throw in Google Browser SyncGoogle Browser Sync and I’m in business I can now log into any of my working environments and pick up right where I left of. However, all of this has left me a little paranoid of Google and I now want to restrict their knowledge of some of my goings on. Hence the different profiles. It’ll also be nice when some wacky plugin hoses up a particular profile and prevents me from accessing certain things. Such as my stored passwords. Oh, one other place it could be beneficial are on these social networking sites. If you’ve got multiple profiles with them, you can now be logged in under each name with an associated ff profile.

Technorati Tags: firefox portable profiles

I’ll be at CarolinaCon this weekend. If you can make it, it’d be awesome to see a huge number turn out. If you’ll be there and want to meetup, get in touch with me. I’m looking to make some new friends. For ever body else, I’ll be taking some pictures and I’ll have them posted middle of next week along with some reviews. Hope to see some of ya’ll down there.

Technorati Tags: CarolinaCon

Network Security Journal has a nice collection of security tools for both the beginner and professional.

Technorati Tags: 105 Security tools for beginners and professionals

Don’t you just love the way in which God works? My friends have posted a bit of writing from an unknown author. It’s a great way to view our relationship with our Lord Christ. Thanks guys.