Life of Brian

Had a big ol’ post lamenting my web hosting search, but with all the Mozilla browser tab openings and closings I somehow dumped into the bit bucket – POOF – gone.

Without the time and energy to recreate it, you’ll just have to take my word for it, it was of absolutely no use to no one who wasn’t, like me, search for a web host.

Donna has suggested that I just chuck it all and go cold turkey, give up the whole blogging thing.

Well, the first half of the migration process is complete, a new domain name has been chosen: mr-miata.net I got it through Yahoo! they have a deal where it is a $1 for a year (first year and new names only), so for $21 I have that domain registered for the next 3 years.

Now comes the hard part, finding a host. I want one that is cheap, less than $10 a month, that is reliable and meets some not to demanding requirements: UNIX hosting, 5G storage, 25G transfer, 5 MySQL dbs, FTP and the latest PHP & Pearl. If they are giving a domain name it better get registered to me, not them and then they better offer to host that name and my new dot net one on the same site. Yahoo is just a little over the limit at $12 a month. Right now I’m leaning towards BlueHost for $6.95. Their CEO even has a WordPress blog: MattHeaton.com.

They are right proud of their gas up there. My brother was all excited because the price of regular gas had just dropped under $3 a gallon to $2.98. I filled up the Miata tonight and if I could get away with regular it would have cost me $2.28 per.

The Marriott Hartford/Farmington is still living in the past. No Wi-Fi. High speed internet was available…for $10 a day! And just 12 channels on the TV, four different ESPNs, the big 4 networks, Weather, Golf, HBO and USA were the TV options. I can sort of understand it, the place is smack in the middle of an office park, so the traveling business guy lets his company pick up the 10 bucks for internet and could not care at all if HGTV is on the TV line-up. Wouldn’t matter anyway because there was no way to concentrate on anything because they were the host hotel for a soccer tournament and the joint was crawling with hyper active kids with zero parental supervision. The only pluses were the weekend rate wasn’t to bad and it was only 10 minutes from my mom’s house.

Speaking of family, mine definitely puts the dys in dysfunctional. I’m not sure anyone cooks at home up there, we ate out nearly every meal. Trying to get everyone to agree on where to go was like herding wildcats. And it is not like we are dealing with a lot of people here either, Donna & I, two; sister and husband, four; plus brother and mother equals six. We hadn’t visited in 2 years and after these 2 day I think we are set for another couple years before we need/want to go back.

The flying wasn’t so bad and the security wasn’t to intrusive. The whole liquid thing is weird, you have to put lotions, toothpaste, etc. in your checked luggage, no carry on. Of course once you get past the security checks into the terminals you can walk into most of those newsstand places and get small size lotions and stuff, the clerk will remind you that you can’t carry it on, but who’s to know if you put it in your pocket or purse. They don’t recheck your carry-ons again before boarding.

We rented a Sebring and it worked out pretty good. Saturday was mostly a washout, but we did get the top down quite a bit over the weekend. Including both the ride from the airport on Friday night and back to it on Monday morning. The car only had 6400 miles on it and it made a squeal and a thunk when starting off each morning. More disconcerting was the fact that a section of the top near the edge at a fold was already showing big-time wear.

Donna and I are on our way to CT for the weekend and in order to avoid changing planes anywhere we drove up to Charlotte, NC to catch a plane. We got here early just to be sure (having never flown out of here before) that we could find our way alright. On top of that our flight scheduled to leave at 9.55pm has been delayed at least an hour. It is coming in from San Francisco and must have taken a wrong turn in Albuquerque.

We have spent the last couple of hours sitting at various spots in the airport watching the people go by. Boy, you can tell we don’t get out much by the way we are amazed at how many different shapes and sizes there are.

Watching is fun, but listening is even more entertaining. Seems as if 75% of the people in the airport have a cell phone and they are all using them. My favorite are still the bluetooth earbud user who look like they are talking to themselves.