Majcher.com

Just for the record, this latest crash has made me pretty skittish about the whole "hosting at home" thing. I did everything right - kept my server on battery backup and all, made fairly regular backups, all the usual, and still - boned. Backups fail. UPS batteries fail. Servers fail. Sometimes, they all fail at the same time, creating a perfect storm of suckiness. And then, you realize that you're three years behind the linux state of the art, such as it is, and even if you hadn't forgotten all the little things you did to make your server feel like home, you'd still have a learning curve to get all the new stuff (SELinux... grrrrrr.) set up correctly. I really hate the sysadmin hat these days. Sure, it was all kinds of fun when it was a big new thing, and I was young and had all sorts of free time to waste groveling around the internals of some obscure subsystem, but, you know, I got shit to do now. I just want to drive the car - I don't want to spend all weekend futzing around with the engine. Moreover, I don't want to spend a couple weeks rebuilding the garage because it burned down.

So, the upshot is, I'm cutting back my stuff at home and moving a bunch of stuff to Dreamhost. I've been looking around for a while, and I have a bunch of good recommendations from some pretty reliable nerds that this is the way to go, hosting-wise. They've got all the tools I want, I hear they've got badass tech support, and it's a pretty decent deal for what they're offering - they just bumped up their disk space and bandwidth for all their hosting thingers by like eight times, so, I'm sold. Oh yeah, and they've got a solid backup plan, so nont of this screwage should happen again. (Or, if it does, it totally won't be my fault...) Hopefully, over the next couple of weeks, I'll get most of the high-usage stuff moved over there, and just keep majcher.com here as a dev machine and mail server and whatnot. In all that spare time I've got.

Speaking of, one of the things that's been soaking up available hours is the improv theater classes I've been taking at the Hideout here. It's pretty much the most fun that I get to have these days, and I've been hooking up with a bunch of new folks to do stuff with. Anyway, if you're in town, and you want to see a bunch of idiots make asses out of themselves on stage, for free, come on down to the Hideout at 8pm next Monday (3/6) and check out our graduation show. A few of us have gotten together for regular rehearsals in the last couple of weeks, and we've scored ourself a great coach, so there's a pretty good chance that we'll be performing as a troupe for real come May or so. Whoo.

Lots of other stuff, as usual: my ACC programming class, Austin Game Developer stuff, trying to squeeze in some gaming and game design with the RRA and the Austin Stink here, slowly chipping away at my own personal projects, alternately helping and staying out of the way of Bernie getting our office at home ripped apart and remodeled (we have no floor at the moment - they ripped it out, to re-level stuff and put in some more foundation thingies)... oh, yeah, and my regular full-time job making with the Qt/C++ programmy at frog design. Also, I just ate way too many donuts, and I think I should push the Big List of Crap To Do away and take my fat ass for a walk or something.

Yeah, good idea. It's nice outside, I hear.

Yes, I get a few bucks if you click on that Dreamhost link up there and sign up. Give a brother a break, willya?