Richard’s Personal Blog

As hastily planned, Anna arrived late on Saturday night; so hastily, in fact, that Advocate for Orphans International, the agency coordinating the temporary exchange on this side of the ocean, forgot to collect any of our paperwork — application, legal agreements, etc.

A quick synopsis of events so far: Began with shopping for new clothes on Sunday. Bought lots of essentials such as undergarments, shoes, shirts, toiletries. I think she still needs a better fitting sweater, but that will probably happen soon. She likes the American teen exports (like the Olsen twins and Hilary Duff) so she watched a few movies before we all headed out to the pumpkin patch run by Spina Farms in Morgan Hill. Carved pumpkins yesterday. I’m not done with mine yet; I’m really hoping it turns out as well as the version in my mind’s eye. After a visit to the mall and lunch, followed by an afternoon of various games, we all went out to a birthday dinner (her 13th!) for Anna at the Olive Garden. Unfortunately, she was too exhausted to really enjoy it.

Anna is quiet, reserved, and somewhat shy, but has a great laugh and smile. She is also smart, polite, helpful, and eager to learn. I wish her luck in finding a new family in advance (we are not in the position to fill that role, a fact we regrettably knew and agreed upon in advance, as requested by the adoption program director), and I already know I will miss her greatly when she leaves to go back home.

On Wednesday, through a colleague at work, I heard about a local orphan hosting program that needed hosting homes for an almost spontaneous visit from seven Ukrainian children. A few home chats and a few phone calls later, we were visited last night by one of the program directors so he could do an on-site home inspection. Tomorrow night, 12-year-old Anna will be dropped off at our house for a two-week stay. Lightning speed!

How cool will this be?!

Victory! Or at least a partial one. Managed to get the lecour.net domain moved from Spry over to DreamHost, including the 160+ email addresses and the few subdomains reconfigured to point to the A Small Orange host — but only after a mishap of completely forgetting about the subdomains and having them unavailable for a few days. Yes, I have far too many hosts!

Why am I leaving Spry Networks (not that anyone’s actually asked)? First, I’m paying $70 a month for what once was a really good VPS plan, but now is overpriced: 100GB of bandwidth (which I sometimes peak at about 20MB an hour, or about 15GB per month) and 10GB of disk space. Heck, I noticed yesterday that my mail logs for the last 30 days took up about 3GB of disk space. Not the mail itself. Just the logs. And that doesn’t include all the other stuff I on there. So 10GB of storage just doesn’t cut it. Not only that but the server response time has been abysmal whether retrieving email, FTPing files up or down, or just accessing the websites. Timeouts left and right.

DreamHost, on the other hand, costs me $10 a month for 5TB of bandwidth and 500GB of storage. Not bad. It’s not VPS, but I’m not really sure I ever really needed the overhead and headache that comes with one. Server seems quite responsive, too, although I still haven’t finished loading it up yet. We’ll see.

In a perfect world, spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with men who have enlarged their pënìšëš, taken Viagra, and are looking for a new relationship.

Nothing better on a blustery autumn Sunday morning than a nice homemade breakfast: pumpkin pie pancakes with maple syrup. Only improvement I can think of would have been to throw some pecans into the batter, or serve topped with some sort of spiced or candied pecans. It’s been about an hour since breakfast and the lingering smell of pumpkin has slowly invaded the entire house. Mmmmmm…

Lazy weekend. Did nothing productive yesterday unless you count the Websites Gone Bad video. Kind of disappointed about the resampling that YouTube did on it as the quality is nowhere near as good as I expected. Today I’m sorting through some more of the domain transferring. A Small Orange is a great host — I emailed them a question on how to add a DNS record for a new subdomain I wanted to host on a different server. Seventeen minutes later, I received a reply email, and the configuration change had already been done and was active.

On a side note, I wish my main character on UrbanDead would stay alive more than a day. Ðámn zombies!