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Laralee doesn’t think I can go a day without working. Of course it’s hard when I have so many things to do, and a day when nothing else is really happening. So I succumbed (a little) today, and my schedule looked something like this:

* work for an hour, configuring a new web server
* play Warzone with Alex
* lunch
* play Mario Kart with Kyra
* read book
* nap
* Thanksgiving dinner with friends
* play Warzone again
* make hot fudge with Laralee and have ice cream
* watch the latest episode of “V”

All in all a good day. Dinner was especially fun– we went over to our neighbors’ house and spent about four hours eating and talking. Good food, good friends, good fun.

Happy Thanksgiving.

One of my clients is working on moving their web application and several server applications to a single hosting provider. I’ve been asked to help with this transition (since I’m the “technical guy”) and as part of that process I’m evaluating proposals from various web hosting providers around the country.

What’s breathtaking to me is how much some of these companies charge for simple things. For example, in the proposal I’m reading right now, they’re charging $60 per month for an additional 512MB of memory in the server. There are two things amazing about this: first, you can’t even buy memory in 512MB pieces any more– the smallest server-class RAM comes in 1GB; second, that 1GB memory chip costs about $20. Once. To charge $60 every month for something that cost the equivalent of $10 and then had to be plugged into the server motherboard is astounding.

Then there’s disk space. You can find a nice 1TB hard drive just about anywhere for around $100. A server-class drive– which tends to have higher spin rates and lower failure specs– might cost $200. And this proposal lists a 750GB drive (which is only three-fourths of that 1TB drive) at $320 per month. Per month! In other words, over the course of a year for that money you could walk down to your local Best Buy and pick up 38 1TB drives– roughly fifty times the storage. And by the end of the year that $100 price tag is going to drop to $75 anyway. Technology gets cheaper by the day.

How do these guys sleep at night, charging these outrageous fees?

Actually, maybe I should look at it a little differently. I own a hosting company, after all… maybe I should be charging exorbitant rates for the memory and disks on my servers! (Cue evil laughter…)

I was reading an article about a startup company and at the end the author wrote about how his company was working to– and I quote– “swallow the red pill, stuff the Tauntaun, and hack the Kobayashi Maru.”

I don’t know exactly what “stuffing the Tauntaun” means in this context, but I thought it was simply awesome to reference those three things. And bonus points to Laralee for knowing what all of them are.

I just walked past the dining room and saw this interesting tabletop arrangement:

Apparently Alex and Kyra are making their lunch, and they want it to “seem like we’re eating in a nice restaurant”.

They’re having Annie’s Mac and Cheese.

“With focus, dedication and steroids, men can achieve impossible dreams. Like breaking a world record. Or growing their own breasts.”

— From a de-motivational poster

“When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it’s really a meteorite hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you’re pretty much hosed no matter what you wish for. Unless it’s death by meteor.”

— Another de-motivational poster

Mmm… the triple monitor setup!

I have a few spare LCD displays gathering dust on a shelf, so I figured I’d drop $30 on a video card so I could use them. I set these up last night and we’ll see what happens. I actually had four monitors going at once, but one of them has apparently been gathering dust a little too long because it wasn’t working reliably. So it looks like three’s going to be enough.

Switching to two screens was a huge boost many years ago; how will three be?

“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”

— Mitch Hedberg

I just finished reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

This was the ninth time. Although I’ve read a ton of books throughout my life, there are only a handful I’ve read more than once. And this is the only one I’ve read nine times. Truly the greatest epic book ever: action and romance and history and depth and a grand scale unlike anything else in fiction. I love it.

On a related note, Alex has started reading it. I guess some of the themes in the books have been discussed in his classes at school, so he decided he should find out what all of it means. He read The Hobbit a few years ago, but as we all know that’s really just a children’s tale and only a lighthearted introduction into the real story. It’ll be interesting to see if he enjoys it.

I sat down this afternoon and put together a diagram of my hosting company. I manage 29 servers– mostly mine, but some for clients– and at times it’s hard to remember what goes where. Does everything have a hot failover ready to jump in if a server goes down? Am I backing up files correctly so I always have multiple copies of everything? Are the services balanced so my clients get the best performance?

Since the servers I own are all named for atomic elements (props to Thom) I figured the diagram should look sort of periodic-table-like. Yes, that makes me even geekier: combining system administration with chemistry.

The good news (well, sort of) is that I found a few things that could be beefed up a bit. So that’ll require a few upgrades over the coming days and weeks. It’s funny that when I tell some of my clients that in addition to doing web programming I can also host everything for them, their first question is “are you running these web sites in your basement or something?” No, not quite. I pay more per month for co-location than I do for my house.

Around 2001 I bought an HP 4550 color laser printer. This thing was the bomb. It was mammoth– tipping the scales at around 150 pounds– and it had all the bells and whistles you could want. It cost something like $2,500 and I invested another $400 in a duplexer. It was a real workhorse, serving me well for many years. But over time technology progressed and it became a bit of a dinosaur. The biggest problem was the consumables: toner cartridges (there are four) cost about a hundred bucks apiece, and the drum (which finally gave out) is another two hundred.

So instead of spending $600 to renew all of the guts of the HP, I ended up buying another color laser printer from Samsung. I think it cost $300.

Anyway, for about five years this behemoth has sat in my office, completely unused.

I finally decided it’s time to part company, so I listed it on Craigslist: free to anyone willing to come over here and help me haul it out of the basement. I don’t know if I’ll get any takers, and if I don’t I’m going to switch to Plan B, which is to launch it out of my second-story bedroom window onto the driveway just to see what happens.

Actually that was Plan A, but Laralee said it would be wasteful and setting a bad example for the kids. So I’ll see if I can pass it off to someone who wants it first…