Month: October 2010

I’ve got this domain, rtpinbox.com and I really want to do something with it but I haven’t figured out what.  I was thinking of a technology project blog but don’t know if I have time to post about a lot of things I’m working on.  Web based mail is already available from gmail…. I really don’t have any ideas but open to suggestions.

It will cost about $50 in advanced ride coupons, $16 in advanced admission tickets and $60 for games and food.  So I’m projecting $126 this year for the NC State Fair.  It will be amazing if that works out.

I think we’re going to catch the CAT bus at the intersection of Six Forks and Wake Forest Rd. and get dropped off at the main gate.  It would probably save on parking.  If not I’m going to try to get into Chuck Booth and Mike Franklin’s lot where Stay-Right Tank company used to be.  I don’t want to pay and walk forever.  If I pay to park I want to be close.

Pensioner = Entitlement Receiver

Yet astoundingly these older, mostly white men and women who worked in various levels of government tend to back Republicans and even Teabaggers who scream against entitlements with every breath.  Let’s remove the hypocritical pensioners, Medicaid recipients and those receiving unemployment benefits from the ranks of those who support the conservative call to end entitlement programs and see how much support remains.

Pensions are draining this country on every level of municipal, state and federal government.  Even when former elected representatives are convicted of committing fraud against their constituency we continue to shell over their pension money without legal recourse.  The funny thing is that to change this the legislators, elected representatives themselves, must vote to forgo their promise land pension if they commit fraud or a felony.  Another clear case of the fox watching the hen house.  I believe any representative who would vote against such a bill is one who questions his or her ability to remain clean.  It could also be claimed they’re already corrupt and don’t want to lose their pension if caught.

America is grid locked until we give up the pipe dream that legislative officials will police themselves with morality and diligence.  Much the same way we are doomed if we do not remove the misconception that corporations will police themselves in the best interest of consumers over shareholder returns.

On Sept. 13, 2010 my e-machine web server died after 7 years of service and it was a solid death.  The motherboard fried.  I was real busy and didn’t have time to make an emergency out of getting this site back on-line.  I did my homework for web hosts supporting WordPress, MySQL with phpmyadmin and found webfusion.com.  They provided all the components to host this site for $2.99 per month.  Deal.

Now I don’t have to support a system at home running Apache, MySQL etc.   I created a new WordPress blog at Webfusion, exported my database using phpmyadmin and imported it to the new database at Webfusion.   Then all I had to do was replace the WordPress files via FTP and change a few config files for database locations and passwords.   Hopefully the 99.9% uptime claimed by Webfusion is accurate.   This site has been down a lot because I have servers I’m paid to attend.  I really don’t want to work to keep this site up on a DSL line and 7 year old PC anymore.

Whew!  Last month I had a catastrophe befall the server that hosted this site for almost seven years.  I had to recover the data from the hard drive, mount it to a new PC, load MySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin and then export the blog’s MySQL database for import to a Webfusion hosted database.

It was a painfully long recovery made much worse by my being lazy.   I am happier than hell now that this blog is hosted somewhere other than my own machine.  Uptime will no longer be a problem and the kids can destroy and computer they see fit to lay hands on without interrupting my damn blog!

This downtime cost me some serious search engine rankings.  No worries though.  If blogging stops being more than just fun I better be making some serious money off it.