Different from the "extremely questionable" web host I once worked for, the "old fashioned" web host that interviewed me for a system administrator job and decided that they wanted a PHP developer instead, and the "slightly less questionable" web host I ran, these companies are run by smart people.

How smart? They're leveraging virtual hosting, hardware clustering, and reliable open source software with smart developers writing custom backends that glue these systems together to produce elegant, robust, scalable hosting for people that can't be assed to do these things themselves. This shit is exciting to me. This shit makes me want to go back to school and get educated enough to get in on it.

These companies are slowly chipping into the very foundation of the old ways: fading away is the assumption that simply throwing an Apache httpd server up on some linux or bsd machines, overloading it with virtualhosts, overselling your capacity on the assumption that 80% of your users will only use 20% of your resources, and slapping a third-party commercial control panel up to gloss over the fact that your infrastructure is unreliable and brutish in its approach will make you "some of that inner-net money".

These people are showing you that how you host web sites isn't good enough for the 21st century.

If Oxygen had their shit together and didn't seem like Lifetime's bitchy younger sister who won't even jerk you off in the back seat of your car, then maybe they'd have been able to get some better ratings and keep this on the air in America.

While I've got some template and .htaccess tweaking to do, the provided "Horizon" template suits my needs and tastes well enough. Just wish I knew how to get the damned thing to cache generated pages. Maybe a crawl of the add-on archive will turn up some gold.

So, photos over there from here on out, mentioned here only when really, really awesome.

I didn't mind that administration design at all, finding it much more usable than the one that existed before it. I'm told that nowadays that means I have no sense of taste, no refinement, no aesthetic discernment. Psht, whatever. Medium-gray on white background is the new high-bandwidth, full-page Flash layout.

Of note recently is that I have finally taken a week to myself and caught up on some of the more pleasant but time-consuming things this year that I've missed out on, like:

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

  Easily the most musical fun I've had in 40 minutes this year, even with the now cliched Joss Whedon ending, which previous to this I had no idea has actually come to be known as "being Joss'ed".

• No Country for Old Men

  Unusual for an American film, in that it doesn't go out of its way to pander to the audience. No happy ending, no moral victories, and no neat, tidy, spoon-fed ending.

• Slumdog Millionaire

  Despite the hype around this movie (and my hatred of all things hyped), this was a fun, enjoyable, warm two hours of entertainment. Award-winning? Probably, for all the wrong reasons. But absolutely something I'd watch again.

• Mega-Man 9

  A game so hard it caused me to throw the $40 controller for the system across the room like a frustrated 10 year old, a habit I haven't had since I was a frustrated 10 year old.

--

Ryan McKern: i need to find a name for my new car.
Jon Yu: you name your cars?
Ryan McKern: you don't name yours?
Jon Yu: why would i name my car?
Jon Yu: it's called "my car"

As seen across the street from my apartment when walking to the local 7 Eleven.

Witticisms? Nothing lined up this month. The funniest thing that comes to mind right now (which is about as funny as Dane Cook when he's not allowed to move like a retard) is that today I watched someone dismiss Ruby (as a language) offhand while flipping through The Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly) as there was no one page disclaimer regarding Ruby and SOAP; It would likely have read "Don't bother" if it was in there. I suppose one should save something for the second edition.

This may or may not be of relevance to anyone but me and Colin, but the debut LP (See You In Magic, Swami/Vagrant Records) from The Night Marchers feels like the logical culmination of a musical evolution stemming from Rocket From The Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, and The Sultans. Not so much Pitchfork. Overall I give it a solid B+ as a rating. It's no "The State of Art is on Fire" but not many records are these days.

--

Collin: yeah it's a bit vanilla
Ryan: i am aiming for vanilla
Ryan: i am aiming for one step above plaintext and three steps below "fancy"
Collin: ok thats frozen milk with a drop of vanilla

My friends, always so supportive.

Bye bye car…

Front passenger side, close up

Front drivers side

I hope they can fix it; I have three payments left on it and I'd really like to enjoy a few months without car payments.

Update

Megan2K has been declared a total loss as of Friday, April 11th. Memorial services will be held this following Monday the 14th at a car dealership to be named later.

Until I found that I’d be paying an additional $20/month for their services on top of the $20/month hosting costs.

Cue tears of grief and anguish. Their services are so appealing but at the total price point for what I need, it’s just not worth it for me. So I’ve purged the post and scrapped the email I was about to send to the few people I still host.

I wouldn’t be nearly so pissed off about all of this if I hadn’t noticed this after I’d paid for the first month. For less than an hour of use, maybe they’ll refund my first month… But I doubt it.

–

To be honest, I’m not unhappy with TekTonic but now that I no longer run a DIY web-host (and I don’t put much time into my own domains as it is), I just don’t need this level of finesse and control anymore. I’m genuinely sick of worrying about OS updates, security patches, software versions, and security on a hobby box now that my professional livelihood is made from worrying about OS updates, security patches, software versions, and security on hardware I get paid to maintain.

MediaTemple had edged out an account from Segment Publishing based on pricing and reputation (as MT is something of a shared-hosting darling right now), though I admit SegPub came highly recommended. I had really looked forward to not having to manage my own DNS server, IMAP server or SMTP server anymore.

In other modestly related news, the girl and I are moving yet again (five months after the last move). Our upstairs neighbor and apathetic landlord have gotten the better of us, and we are conceding defeat in the form of a 17-foot UHaul moving truck. Apparently they are the only local moving truck provider who bothers keeping up on their insurance policy.

Having already trashed one U-Haul truck in the original move to Massachusetts, I am wary of renting a truck without insurance, even if it is from the worst possible moving company in America right now.

Photos to follow.

12:32:34 AM Jonathan Yu: ryanmckern.com is junk
12:32:40 AM Jonathan Yu: it’s a neglected child
12:32:44 AM Jonathan Yu: it’s homeless

12:39:45 AM Ryan McKern: how i let a dude who lives at home with his parents make me feel bad about shit that happens on the internet i’ll never know
12:39:56 AM Jonathan Yu: hahaha

I now define it in terms of how much time I have to spend in laundromats.

Every time I go to the laundromat it is another trip amongst the masses, a bonding experience with my fellow prole… and I am counting the weeks until I can stop rubbing shoulders with the every-man.

While his distasteful tendency to overfill the dryer, hoping to save quarters, because he understands neither thermodynamics 101 nor the economies of scale regarding the endless wallet of quarters he drops into the overstuffed dryer that "just don't work" is amusing, his taste for $5.00 scratch-off tickets to pass the time between repeated drying cycles has finally gotten to me.