Private Thoughts Made Public

I’ve not disappeared off the face of the planet, I’m still here It’s been an eventful week, that’s for sure. On Monday I learned that my great aunt Ann had passed away at the age of 79. I didn’t know her that well as she’d lived in Bouremouth on the south coast for most of her life, moving back to Manchester after her husband passed away a couple of years ago. Although I didn’t get to go to the funeral, I went to the evening “shiva” (prayer meeting) to offer my condolences to the family, and catch up with various cousins I hadn’t seen for years and years.
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I had a call from my ex on Tuesday evening to say that she didn’t think there’d be a lot for our son to do in Edinburgh, so she was thinking of taking him to Legoland in Windsor instead. She suggested that we spent two days in Legoland, and one day in London taking in some of the sights there. She wants to take him onto the London Eye, and also to the Natural History Museum (he’s very much into dinosaurs!) and maybe the Planetarium as well. I’m sure that we can fill a day out in London without any problem. All that sounded pretty good to me, as I wouldn’t mind visiting all these places as well. I called her back on Thursday to find out if the new bomb scare in London had put her off going there with the lad, and she said “God, no.” So she’s booked the hotel (two rooms, of course) and I’ve booked Legoland and the London Eye. I’m really looking forward to it (surprisingly enough!)
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In addition to this site, I have another domain which I have hosted somewhere else. I use this other domain for testing out databases, scripts, online shopping carts, bulletin boards and so on. Just so I’m familiar with the concepts of how to set up and administer them, really. Anyway, looking at the stats for the blog last week I noticed that quite a few were being referred from www.drupal.org, and I thought “what’s this then?” I took a peek and found out it was a content management system you can download and install. “Cool,” I thought. “I’ll have a play around with that, it might be useful for work.” So I set it up during my lunch break one day and had a quick look around. The plan was to spend some time in the evening and at the weekend learning how it was put together and whether it would actually do what I wanted it to do. That evening I tried to access it from home, but all I got was a “document returned no data” error message. I got the same thing when I tried to access the web hosting company’s main page. I could ping the sites, I could trace the route to the sites, I just couldn’t call them up in my browser. This happened from Firefox and IE6 in Windows, and also when I tried to use the Konqueror browser from my linux partition. Taking my firewall out of the equation didn’t make any difference, either.
My cousin and my brother could access the sites from their machines, and I could access them from work, but that didn’t do me a lot of good when I wanted to get to them from my home PC. So then I thought, stuff this for a game of soldiers, my brother has a hosting reseller account, I’ll give him some money and he can host the site for me (I insisted on paying him for the hosting, he spent money getting the reseller account and all he’s doing is hosting sites for friends at vastly reduced rates, and not getting his investment back. The least I could do is throw some money his way instead of to two other hosting companies on the other side of the Atlantic.)
I called him, he set it all up and within the hour I was uploading my blog to the new web host. It took a little bit of tweaking to get it all set up and working again, and I’ve also set up this drupal system to have a play with that. I’m extremely impressed with how quickly everything got set up, although remembering at the last minute to download a backup of my site was rather fortunate – I’d have been stuffed if I’d decided to wait another 10 minutes before backing it all up!