Jeff Blogs

I'm developing a rather healthy love/hate relationship with my Nintendo Wii Fit. Ever since we got the thing I have tried to give it a fair trial. I know I am not getting any younger and my life seems to be in complete turmoil making it nearly impossible for me to find time to go to an actual gym. So anything that I can find that will get me a little more active I am all for. I initially attempted to use Wii Fit and was completely miserable. According to the documentation that came with this torture device, it is built to help you with strength and balance. Really all it did was confirm my worst fears. I am old, out of shape, and have all the balance of a yak with an inner ear problem.

Today marks another episode in what is quickly becoming the never ending InvisibleSHIELD saga. When we last left our hero he was anxiously awaiting the conclusion of his wife's InvisibleSHIELD installation training. I was anxiously looking forward to having an iPhone that had been sealed for my protection. And although I had no intention of ever running my keys across the iPhone it would be good to know that I could without having to worry about whether it would be scratched. As Trina finished installing the film she brought the iPhone to me to make sure everything was cool. She was carrying it as if it contained nitro glycerin. I was really hoping that the instructions did not include that I had to carry my phone in that manner. Being a typical guy, I just reached out to grab the device and begin messing with it.

From an early age I was told I was not quite normal. That seems like kind of a harsh thing to tell a kid especially if you are that kid's parents. The thing was, I thought that was a good thing so I grew up thinking that not being normal was actually a good trait to have. I can't really explain why but I just seem to have the ability of piecing things together slightly different than other people. In some ways this has been a great thing. I have a knack of looking at something from a different perspective and providing an observation that might otherwise go unnoticed. On the other hand this can sometimes get me in trouble or at least into an area that is uncharted and pretty weird. The invention of the computer and more specifically the Internet hasn't helped at all; in fact it has made matters worse. Now I have a lot more information at my disposal I tend to put it together in rather unique ways. Take e-mail for example. Like many of you I get up each day and check my email and find out that more than half of my in-box has been filled with SPAM. Usually at this moment I take a severe detour to begin trying to understand why unwanted email was named after a canned meat product but I'll spare you from that and try to get right to the point. Unlike most people, I don't just immediately start deleting these unwanted messages. Instead I read each one. I blame my mother for this. She always said that if someone is willing to take the time to send you a letter you should at least have the common courtesy of reading it and acknowledging them. So for some unknown reason I started replying to SPAM and what I found is that those people really don't want you to reply because they never respond back or if they do it is usually to ask me to quit emailing them. That seems a little messed up don't you think? Today I got an email and I thought maybe I would share it with you.

It seems like every year the summer gets shorter and shorter at least as far as the kids are concerned. I seem to remember back in the dark ages when I was a kid that we didn't actually go to school until after Labor Day. We always got out the week before Memorial Day. So I have no idea what happened. Now the school year starts for our kids on August 4. They still get out of school the later part of May but somehow we just moved the calendar up a whole month. You would think that with an entire extra month of school that we would be churning out some kind of kid super geniuses. I have been around my kids and their friends enough that I can assure you that is not the case. If anything we are raising an entire generation of idiots. Ok, that's not exactly right, some of these kids are pretty smart. They have to be, they are dealing with parents like us.

Recently I wrote about the InvisibleSHIELD over for the iPhone 3G. I spoke at length about how cool I thought it was and how well it would protect my iPhone. I bought on-line because I could not find one of the covers locally. After reviewing the web site and watching the installation videos I figured that I could handle the installation myself. I'm a college graduate; I mean how hard could it be? I looked at the package and reviewed the graphics and the instructions. By about the second paragraph I figured there was no way I was ever going to be able to do this. Not because it was hard but because I have absolutely no patience for stuff like this. So I did what I always do in times like this, I asked Trina for help. She told me she had time. That was Thursday.

Ever since our return from vacation, I've noticed that my son Dakota seems to be obsessed with the mail. Usually it is like pulling teeth to get one of the kids to go down to the mailbox and retrieve the mail. You would think that I was asking them to do battle with Big Foot or try and cure cancer instead of going down to a community mail box and get envelopes from a small metal box. Oh sure their reluctance may have something to do with the concrete being fairly close to the temperatures of the sun. But it's not like I am asking them to walk down there in their bare feet. As I said, for the last week Dakota has not only volunteered to go down and "get the mail" he have actually taken it upon himself to go down to the box and check the mail several times per day. One or two days of that and as a parent I begin to get suspicious. If I didn't know any better I would think he was trying to get to something before his parents had a chance to see it. Perhaps I am just being paranoid. Still my parent spider sense was definitely tingling.

I truly thought that after I posted that my hosting services had finally been restored that this would be an end to this never ending saga. I expected that the servers had to be bullet proof and I would not be seeing any more outages. I was of course temporarily delusional as I expected that IX Web Hosting would be about to maintain their hardware. On Monday of this week my sites again incurred an outage of nearly an hour. I went back to the problem ticket center and entered a ticket and followed up with a visit to the online chat. I was told that the server was having communications issues and that the administrators were aware of it. I asked for an estimated time this would be resolved but the chat host never returned to answer my question. I can only assume that he fell over dead and was laying there waiting for medical personnel to appear to remove the body. After the outage and services were restored I noticed strange behavior with regards to my blogs. Prior to the outage I was able to post entries and have those entries broadcast to several of the micro-blogging services including Twitter and Plurk. Now though that functionality was not working. After a quick troubleshooting session I realized that IX Web Hosting had somehow removed or uninstalled two PERL modules. I went back out to the web and opened yet another problem ticket requesting that these modules be added back to the server. That request occurred on Tuesday. Here it is Friday and the modules are still not installed and there is no timeline of when these might be completed. This is pretty much the end of my patience and I decided that I need to finally change hosting providers.