That made my day.

Since you’re still reading, I’m assuming you want all the nitty-gritty details.  All in all, it went remarkably well, much better than I expected.  WordPress just required a few variable changes in a config file to point to my new database and user on Cortana.  Gallery required pretty much the exact same thing settings wise, but migrating files is where Gallery really took forever.  We’ve amassed quite a photo collection, and moving roughly 5 GB from Site5 to Cortana took most of the night.

Other than the file downloading, nothing else really took much time at all.  In fact, if it didn’t take a day or so for DNS changes to propagate to all the master servers, I think I only would have been off-line for about an hour.  Pretty good for my first big migration .  Did any of you even hit my ‘joshandmeg.net is currently offline’ page?

If you’ve got some time, click around and make sure everything still works, I’m sure I probably missed something.  One thing I did leave out purposely is the photo blog.  It hasn’t seen much activity recently, and with the upgrade to Gallery 3 I’m thinking I’ll probably just retire it.  Everything else should be fully functional though.  Let me know if you see anything broken and how the speed is in comparison to before.

Now, on to the second phase of the joshandmeg.net 3.0 project, Graphic Design (that’s you Meg ).

The new design is going to be a pretty drastic change from the way the site has looked and felt for the past five years (I know I can’t believe I’ve been keeping a web site going for five years either).  Ever since I first launched joshandmeg.net, it’s been a black and orange theme with the fairly typical web site layout of some sort of header, a sidebar, and a main content area.  The biggest change coming is a switch from the dark background, white text color scheme to a white background, dark text color choice.  Two sites I’ve recently done in this manner are badhippodesign.com and joshkephart.net, and both of those are a good preview of what the new design will look like.  I’m also hoping to layout the site in a simplistic style, with very little clutter and a focus on the posts and of course the photos on the site.  We’ll see how that goes .

Along with the visual refresh that we have planned, there are also some other improvements in store:

• an upgrade from Gallery 2 to the brand new Gallery 3
• the ability to comment on photos in the gallery
• threaded comments on blog posts
• the long awaited addition of video clips of the kids

and behind the scenes there will be a migration from the Site5 servers to my very own server up and running in my utility room .

I tend to never be able to stay on top of anything I start unless I have some sort of organized schedule and plan in place, so I whipped up a little project and a flexible schedule.  You can check it out here and follow up on the progress if you’d like.

Stay tuned.

The process is going pretty well so far, I got all the data copied over and the drive installed; but I hit a snag when I realized I didn’t have any more SATA cables.  So now I need to pick up a few of those, and then continue by installing/setting up Ubuntu Server.

Man, I totally called this a while back.  I hope those people get the death sentence.

Ryan – Let me know if you decide to upgrade yours, I can help you through it if you want.

As you can see, up until the first of the year we lived in relative anonymity from the spammers, and were only receiving a few posts a day.  However, something happened at the turn of the year that put us on the radar, and we started receiving several hundred a day during that high point which lasted for several months.

On a related note, it was around this same time frame that Megan’s email started getting spammed so much that she had to abandon Outlook altogether because of its worthless junk mail filters, so I set her up with Thunderbird so it would at least be a bit more manageable.  But during that time she was receiving over 400 junk emails a day.

So what happened?  The chart shows our spam comments have dwindled significantly, and my junk email has dropped from around 40 to 50 a day down to virtually 0.  I maybe get 2 a week now.  I hope a spam warehouse was raided and people are rotting in jail for it, but I’m sure that’s not the case.  Maybe they are just taking a break for some reason.

Here’s to hoping it stays that way.

There really is a good excuse for the lack of posts and pictures lately.  I dropped our camera onto our kitchen tile right after we got back from our Ohio Christmas trip.  After it happened I messed around with it for awhile and eventually determined that it was still mostly functional, but the screen was showing all grey.

So at this point I had to decide whether it was worth it to try and repair it or just buy a new one.   I took it apart and after a little bit of googling I came across the Canon replacement parts phone number and found out that the replacement screen was only about $40.  Figuring $40 was better than about $140 for a new equivalent camera, I ordered one.  The picture is of the old LCD after I got it out and put the new one in.  All in all, it was a pretty easy fix, just a few screws holding the camera together and a bunch of little snaps holding the screen in place.  The hardest part was probably plugging in the little ribbon cables and folding them behind the screen.

It had been killing us not being able to take pictures of Ali and Xavier for nearly two months, so I’m very thankful we finally got the camera functioning again.  Stay posted for new pictures!

So, we decided we would break down and buy some computer upgrades with some of our tax return.  I’ve been using this really great financial software (GnuCash) for the past year or so, and since I had all of the information I needed to file my taxes in this software, I was able to get them filed pretty much as soon as the IRS began accepting returns (January 16th).  So, about a week after filing, I had my money back from the government and in our bank account.

The first order of business was a laptop for Megan.  She has always wanted one, and after shopping around for a bit, I found a great deal on a Dell at Best Buy.  It’s a small (14″), lime-green inspiron 1420, and so far Megan loves it.  She’s definitely the type of person that doesn’t like to be confined to the desk, she likes to be able to use her computer wherever she happens to be.  I don’t know how she got through college with a desktop!

For me, I came across an excellent deal on a 3 year old computer that a friend at work was getting rid of.  It’s also a Dell (an XPS 600), and was a top of the line computer a couple years ago.  It works perfectly for what I need and I couldn’t pass up the price.  Right now it has two NVIDIA 7800 GTX cards in SLI (geek-speak for two graphics cards put together to be more efficient and better performing), 3 GBs of RAM, and two 250GB HDDs in a RAID 1 mirror (geek speak for two drives exactly mirrored giving me kind of a built in backup if one of them fails).

I went through a really annoying week trying to figure out what OS/OSs I wanted to run on it, and after having Vista, Ubuntu, and Windows 7 all on it multiple different times, I finally settled on the beta release of Windows 7.  I was really torn for awhile and didn’t want to give up on Ubuntu entirely, but since Windows 7 is currently free and such a huge improvement over Vista, I decided I’d go with it for awhile.  I’d also really like to start getting all of our home videos onto the computers and start doing some editing, and Ubuntu unfortunately doesn’t have a good video editing program.

And finally, completing our computer upgrades is my absolute favorite, my hp mini 1000.  I’ve been dieing to get a netbook for a long time, and finally settled on the hp.  Dell also had the really appealing Mini 9 at the time, but after playing with the hp in person and seeing hp’s MIE (Mobile Internet Experience, basically a nice looking theme for Ubuntu) in action, I decided to go with it.  It is so tiny it’s almost ridiculous.  My hand is literally like an inch shy of being able to span the entire thing diagonally (I’ll post some better photos after I fix our camera, but that’s a topic for another post).  It has a 10.1″ screen, built in web cam and mic, and only weighs a pound and a half.  It is pretty crazy picking it up and moving it around for the first time.  Even Megan likes how light and portable it is, even if she doesn’t like the tiny screen and keyboard.

All in all, we’re now up-to-date in the computer world, and all of that for a total of about $1100.  I think we did pretty good.  Now to get our camera fixed so we can get back to taking pictures of the little ones!

I was just like every other middle class graduating senior, I received my fair share of graduation cards and checks and presents, and with my graduation money I decided to purchase ze5170.  It was a great day for both of us.  I took him from the lonely shelf of a local Best Buy, away from the torturous salesmen who were too busy dreaming up new ways to rip off unsuspecting customers with one of those “premium protection plans”.  ze5170 and I went home and started our time together.

At first it was the typical computer to person relationship, I’d power him on when I needed him and leave him be when I wasn’t surfing the net.  But things soon changed as I started classes at OU that fall.  ze5170 was no longer just for my entertainment, him and I wrote countless papers and completed hours of engineering projects; so much typing that his keys are shiny smooth from wear to this day.  Before long I just started bringing him with me to class since I always seemed to need him.

Throughout our time at college, ze5170 went through the usual aging process, and he required repairs and got some upgrades on more than one occasion:

• early on, while he was still under warranty, his optical drive failed, so I fixed him up with a new one
• after my first year with him he got a RAM upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
• in his second year we replaced his battery with a newer high capacity one
• shortly after ze5170′s third birthday his original hard-drive failed, so he got another similar one (same 40GB capacity)
• after a solid two years with no problems, ze5170 and I were out of college and out in the workforce when his graphics card fan came loose and started flopping around inside of him – this prompted his first major surgery to get to the fan, but in the end just required snapping it back into place
• finally in his sixth year of life him and I had our first major battle – he lost his second hard-drive and took with it about a month’s worth of code, web designs, financial data, and who knows what else – luckily for him a ridiculous trick of putting the hard-drive in the freezer actually worked and allowed me to get all my data back
• after the hard-drive debacle we replaced his drive with a tiny 20GB drive from a Creative mp3 player about the same age has ze5170

So we’ve had quite a good six years together, and I was kind of content just to keep on going and see how long it would last, but suddenly a couple of days ago ze5170 just shut down right in the middle of some normal budget work.

With the cryptic last words “System Restarted – CRC Error,” ze5170 passed on.  After a bit of Googling, I attempted rudimentary CPR by running a memtest on him, and sure enough there were failures all over the place.  With ze5170 bleeding out, I order a 512MB stick of RAM to hold him over, but when it arrived I got the same results.  It seems his motherboard has stopped mother-boarding.

Time of death: 9:34 p.m. 11/7/2008

May ze5170 rest in peace.

Please leave your condolences in the comments.

An excellent insight into the Comcast debacle.

Anyway, not really too many changes you guys will notice in 2.6.  The biggest thing is post revisions, but not sure how useful that will really be to you.  As always, let me know if you run into any problems.