Day In The Life of Baz

I’m sure that you’ve noticed. I have, and it drives me crazy everyday. But Dreamhost has been having some major speed issues over the past several days. I frequently check their status page, but everything listed there says that it’s been resolved.

I finally contacted support a few times and I was told they got a server, that’s causing issues. It’s the server that I’m on, go figure. So they are in the process of moving everyone’s account off of that guy and onto any server. Who knows how long that’s supposed to take.

In the meanwhile, I thank you for baring with me during this time. It’s funny that this is all happening during my first month of being on Dreamhost. I remember sitting and longing for that day that my old host’s subscription would expire and that I could move. I remember not being able to wait any longer and moving anyway.

Was all of this in vain? Would I have to go back to 1and1 with my tail between my legs? I think not. I’ve gotten too many good reports about Dreamhost to nix them after just one month. And come it, it’s a shared host; there’s no account for what the next idiot on your server is doing.

There is a process that we run on a particular client (our largest) every week. It runs at 7:00 PM on Sunday evening and another process is supposed to pick up and complete on Monday at 1:00 AM.

We recently made some changes to the process and we are using this week as a sort of test run. So I just decided to pop in a have a look see to make sure that everything was running smoothly. Well, it wasn’t.

Phew! It’s a good thing I decided to pop in and look it over. I knew what was wrong and could fix it. Still trying to figure out why, but that could wait till tomorrow. But then something strange happened. Now keep in mind this was at 10:35 PM on Sunday night. While I was Remote Desktoped into my computer at work, I noticed an email pop up. I thought it might have been some residual message that didn’t pop up in Outlook for whatever reason. But no, it was a current email sent out seconds ago.

Here’s another classic example of how Bank of America needs to get some people with brains to programming their Online Banking website.

As you know, I have a Bank of America credit card. This isn’t by choice, by the way. I started out fine with the MBNA guys. Everything was good, then they got bought by BoA and here I am.

I recently stumbled onto Bankaholic’s website and saw a promotion for the Bank of America checking account for their current credit card customers. Now since I’ve moved, I haven’t gotten a local checking account yet, so I figure why not get $75.00 for free? It’s a free checking account, there’s no monthly maintenance fee when you sing up online, so it’s a win win. Once again, I was dead wrong.

This morning I tried to log into my credit card account. It’s the beginning of the month so I’m trying to organize finances and pay some bills. I was greeted by the screen above. They need me to enter my new ATM/Check card number and my PIN. Well, there’s only one problem, I filled out this form online and I haven’t received anything in the mail yet.

I must say, I’m impressed. I truly am. I’d never imagine that Microsoft would have made such a stride to create such a generic blogging application. The power of this program surpasses everything that I’ve seen before in a desktop blogging client. Windows Live Writer is definitely a winner in my book, but…

Why I Like It

First of all, there’s nothing that can beat the speed of offline editing. There’s not waiting for www.myblog.com/wp-admin. There’s no clicking and waiting for the post page to load. It’s just pure editing, quick and easy. It’s great.

One of the best features I’ve seen is that it has the ability to pull over your blogs CSS style so that you can see exactly what the post looks like like. Hit F12 and there’s a live preview of what the post looks like, as if posted on your blog. That’s cool.

Images Are Awesome

Inserting images into a post is the most insane thing I’ve seen. Of course you can drag an image into your post from your desktop and there you go. There’s a built in drop shadow feature that I’ve come to love. It actually edits the image and sets the drop shadow on the image itself. It’s not an after-market style that’s applied; I guess there are pros and cons to this, but all I can see are pros.

Popularity: 34%

One thing that I’ve found especially hard since I’ve move up here is keeping in touch with friends and family back home in Dominica. Yes, there’s always email and there’s alway instant messaging, but sometimes you just need to hear there person’s voice on the other line.

The best solution that I’ve found, so far, was Skype. When I went home on vacation for Christmas of 2005, I decided to hook my Mom up with Skype on her computer. I purchased some credits and even subscribed to a SkypeIN account for her so that I could call her whenever I needed to. This has worked great until yesterday.

I got a call from my mother saying that she’s lost her internet connection for an indefinite amount of time. As such, it’s time to resort back to the old faithful phone cards. The one thing you need to remember about phone cards is that there is always a connection fee when calling internationally. The cards that do say no connection fee simply mean that the card does not charge an additional connection fee. The number of minutes on these cards assume that you use the entire card in one shot. Making multiple calls in the easiest way to kill your card quicker than you intended.