Two nights ago, Leslie and I were driving home late at night from St. Paul. As we headed north on 44th Ave near 33rd Street, we stopped the car in it’s tracks as an eerie sound surrounded us. A loud chirping from all directions came in through the windows. We turned off the engine and listened. We were quite puzzled by this mysterious sound. Was it birds? Insects? Mice?
The vast and limitless net provided me with an introduction to a punk band from Brooklyn, NY called “Tiny Masters of Today“. Their raw chunky beats and distorted guitar gave my gooseflesh! Then, the vocals come in like a some nursery rhyme - teasing playground chant. I wish music had been this cool when I was a kid! Click the play button below to hear a track called “Bushy” that rips the president’s credibility to shreads like only a schoolkid could do it.
Did you notice my website has been dormant for many months now? I’ve had technical problems with my hosting company. I’m writing this down mostly for my own benefit, so I can remember what the hell happened. If you’re not interested in this kind of technical minutia stop reading now, otherwise let me explain.
Back in December of 2005, I signed up for a web hosting plan with an outfit called NukeCode Hosting. I was really pleased with the ease of setting up websites using the MySQL database and Wordpress. They charged me just $5.95/mo and I had the ability to add all kinds of bells and whistles without having to know how the software gets configured on the server. It was fun, like being able to drive a locomotive without having to be an engineer.
For 12 months I was a satisfied customer, then things started to go wrong. I received an email in December 2006 from NukeCode Hosting advising all their customers to back up their data because of a pending move to new servers. I had attempted to use a backup utility provided through their webserver, but apparently it failed. Their email claimed that it was just a precaution, and they weren’t expecting to lose any data.
Around February 2007 my website was mysteriously redirected to another site. Apparently the NukeCode DNS got corrupted and was pointing requests for my site to http://www.addictionsearch.com. Right away I sent an email to Nuke tech support and they fixed it. I presumed it had something to do with the server move.
Then in early March 2007, my site was down for about three weeks. Requests to my sites would just time out with no response. I received another email from NukeCode apologizing for the problems they were experiencing, and explaining that all monthly fees were being refunded as they worked to retrieve customers data from the “datacenter“. Eventually the site came back to life, but it was intermittently down every week a few times a day. The worst thing though was that my password no longer worked. I couldn’t log in to administer my files on the server! I sent several emails to tech support but no longer got any response. Strangely, the website for NukeCode hosting vanished around this time. They contuinued to bill me through PayPal, but I could not find any contact info despite my greatest efforts.
Feeling cheated and scammed, I tried “WhoIs” searching, to figure out what server was hosting my site, but it was an endless digital trail from one hosting company to another. I finally got on the phone with someone at NukeDomains.com (the original registrar for donnelly-sater.com) They were the company I used to register the domain name, and they offered me a combo hosting package with NukeCode at the time of registration. The customer service rep I spoke to was useless. He claimed that he could not find any contact info for me at NukeCode Hosting even though he acknowledged that they were part of the same company! Later on in our converstaion he retreated from that statement, claiming that NukeCode hosting was just a reseller of hosting services that they were marketing.
I finally gave up on this fight, and realized that there was no hope of recovering my data, and that I just needed to cut the cord with this company forever. I used a firefox plugin called “SpiderZilla” that allows you to crawl through any website and save all the files locally to your harddrive, including images. This was the best I could do in order to back up my site. I would loose all the MySQL database tables that underly Wordpress, but I could reconstruct it at least.
And that’s what I had to do in the end. My personal, one man “GeekSquad”, at www.wurdock.com provided me all the help needed to set up my own webserver, so now I’m hosting all these sites on a Fedora Linux machine sitting in my basement. It’s great to be alive again, with no hosting company to pay and highspeed internet for the entire household. If anything goes wrong now, I only have myself to blame.
Our email system at work is flooded with spam, and our filtering system, (GWENIVERE) seems unable to block more than 15% of it. Mostly it’s erection pills, fat burning miracle drugs, stock tips and offers from widowed millionaire expatriates hoping to deposit huge sums of cash into my accounts.
Today however, perhaps the strangest one of all so far. I cant seem to figure out what I’m being encouraged to do. No links to click, no product to purchase. For some reason however, I feel compelled to act!
This fantastic spider spun a web two feet across, hung between the roof of my car and the powerline overhead. I was very creeped out and impressed at the same time. You can see a few more pictures if you look in my photo album titled “Conor’s Eyes”.
Last week we accepted an offer in writing for our house in NE Minneapolis. Looks like our plan to buy my grandpa’s place on the southside might work out after all. We’ve had serious doubts that it would be possible to sell in this market saturated with listings, and dwindling buyers as the summer comes to a close. Although we got much less than we were hoping for at the begining of the summer, we’ll still be able to close a deal due to the flexibility and understanding on the part of my Grandpa and his ten wise children who realized this was still a good deal for everyone involved. Also, our realtor Brandon Hedges was a phenonemal professional. I can’t begin to express how helpful he was to us in getting our sale. If you ever need a realtor referral, I will tell you all about how this guy went above and beyond our expectations for service.
So, we expect to close on both houses by the 20th 23rd of October. I’ll get some updated pictures of the place up here soon as I can. As long as it’s okay with my cousin Maddie, who’s been holding down the fort over there, and keeping our cats fed and watered for the past couple months. Any one who wants to help move boxes and boxes of books and spare computer parts, drop me a line.
Five days ago I first heard the “Fiery Funrnaces” on 89.3 at suppertime. I was eating rice, and had to pause to let the frantic scales of the electronical organ soak in, along with odd lyrics refering to choir directors and friendly priests, and St. Paul to the north woods on the Canadian Pacific to nowhere specific. You will either love this or hate it I said opening a fortune cookie. Now go to Cheapo and buy it. So I did, and I’ve been unable to stop listening to Blueberry Boat ever since. It’s so sonically rich, and unfolds like mixed up chapters torn out of five different novels about the ocean and india and fratricide and typewriter menders. These songs will shift out of thin air, like you’re suddenly driving down the road backwards at 70mph, turning left into a pile of marshmallows. You don’t see it coming, and it takes nine times of replaying then the phrases reconnect between thirteen different tracks and give you chills. Pirates overtake your ship and you feel like you’ve been there and done all that eventually, how come I feel nostalgic for the sea?
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