I was listening to one of the local talk radio stations on the way home this evening (I only recently lifted a boycott of their show I initiated after they fired their 3PM to 6PM talk host last Dec.). A guy named Dave Elswick does the afternoon show now, and he is a huge concealed handgun advocate. I’m not going to fault him for that, because I share his belief that the right to keep and bare arms is granted to the American people by the 2nd Amendment. I have even considered getting a concealed weapon permit myself. This is where my beliefs diverge from those of Mr Elswick.
His thoughts are that teachers in public schools who have a carry permit should be able to take a gun to the classrom in order to defend themselves and their students. Hogwash! We should be making sure no guns get into the schools not bringing more into the schools!
I would not oppose the possesion non-lethal items such as pepper spray or stun guns by school staff, but firearms? Are you nuts?
The really disturbing thing is how many idiots were calling in to the show supporting the concept of teachers with guns. While I do support the right of people to keep and bare arms, I do not believe that guns are always the answer. In fact, I think guns are very seldom the answer, and certainly not in our schools.
I switched to a new web host a couple weeks ago, but it just didn’t work out. I’d still recommend this host to someone looking to host a static web site, or a site that doesn’t require heavy processor/memory usage on the server, but they failed miserably yesterday when I tried uploading a bunch of pictures from iPhoto to Coppermine gallery on my web site.
The iPhoto->Coppermine plugin I use uploads the photos to the web site, then tells Coppermine to resize the them into thumbnails and intermediate sized images. This is a fairly server-intensive task, but worked fine when I was running this on my own server. It seems that Bluehost either doesn’t allocate enough processor time or memory to each user for this type of activity, or is throttling somehow to prevent over utilization. Either way, I only managed to get 30 of the 60 photos uploaded after letting the upload run for over an hour, so I gave up and started migrating back to my old server. After migrating back to my old server, I was able to upload the remaining 30 images in less than 5 minutes.
On the bright side, Bluehost offers a 100% money back guarantee within the 1st 30 days (you can get a pro-rated refund after 30 days), so it didn’t cost anything but my time to find out it didn’t meet my needs. I called their always friendly customer support #, and they promptly refunded my credit card. One thing I can say about these guys is they have the best customer support I’ve ever encountered in any industry.
I got to go to the Big Cruise Fest in the Rock yesterday morning and it was a day to remember!
This event was much more than a typical car show - tv and movie “Star Cars” were also featured, including the cars from “Dukes of Hazzard“, Knight Rider, A-Team, and Starsky and Hutch. In addition to several General Lee replicas, four of the actors from the original Dukes tv series were there signing autographs.
John Schneider (Bo Duke) (also Jonathan Kent of the WB’s Smallville), James Best (Sheriff Rosco), Sonny Shroyer (Deputy Enos Strate), and Rick Hurst (Deputy Cletus Hogg) were all there and I had all of them sign my 1981 Dukes of Hazzard board game.
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The autograph lines for the James, Sonny, and Rick were all pretty short (10 minutes or less), but I waited in line for about an hour and a half for John’s autograph. It was well worth the wait! John not only signed my game, but also posed for a picture with me! I have been a huge fan of that show since I was 2 years old, so getting to meet the actor who played my hero was a pretty big deal.
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Also present at the event was Batman, Spiderman, Darth Vader and several Storm Troopers.
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Visit my photo gallery for more pictures.
After thinking it over for about a year, I finally decided to move my website from this extra computer sitting on my porch to a real web host. The logical choice for my new hosting provider: www.bluehost.com.
I’ve known about this company for a couple years now. After a great deal of investigation, I setup hosting at BlueHost for a client last year, and was really impressed with the features and the customer service. When you call them with a question, you get to talk to a real, live person without much if any time on hold.
As for the features, here’s a short list:
- 50 GB storage
- 999 GB Transfer/Month
- Host 6 top level domains on one account
- Host up to 20 sub-domains
- 2500 email addresses
- 50 MySQL Databases
- An impressive list of programming languages: PHP 4 or 5, Perl, Python, and Ruby On Rails
- SSH Shell Access
I’m a do-it-yourself-er, but for those of you who aren’t programmers, there’s also an extensive list of click-to-install applications ranging from bulletin boards to content management systems.
These are the features I’m most interested in, but there are more. See their site for more details.
I finished migrating my website to bluehost on my lunch break today, and am now waiting for DNS to propagate so joshmoody.com will resolve to the new server.
To those friends and family whose sites I have been hosting for the past several years:
Your websites will be taken offline and all files deleted immediately! Ok, just kidding! I’ll be moving your sites to the new server over the next week or so. You probably won’t notice any changes, except maybe faster uploads/downloads to/from your sites.
UPDATE: I had to switch back to my old web server. Read this post to see why.
