email fixed

Back in June, I realized that my mailserver wasn't delivering mail to @jakevil.com addresses anymore. They weren't getting bounced -- they were just being blackholed somewhere.

In the fine tradition of "who gives a rats ass", I ignored the problem for about 3 months.

I'm happy to say that emails are now being delivered again. Rather than fight with my own internal server, or pay someone to do it for me, I've switched the MX records for jakevil.com to point to google, and I'm going to let them handle it. I administer servers all day at work, and have better things to do with my free time.

So.. if you want to send me an email... I probably still won't read it. But it will be delivered, at least.

War Driving and Automatic Transmission

Currently stuck in traffic on the way into work. For the first time since I got my new car, I was reminded of just how handy an automatic transmission *is* when you're stuck in traffic.

On a somewhat related note, I'd like to thank the owners of the wireless access point with SSID "Board Room", which is located close enough to I-285 for me to get a signal. It was very kind of you to just let me grab an IP via DHCP. Also, you may wish to consider utilizing WEP. It's better than nothing...

Of course, it could be some jerkass like me updating their blog that *caused* the accident in the first place. That would be ironic. Of course, my car is in "park", and has been for close to 10 minutes, whereas people in parked cars usually don't cause accidents. Unless they open their door into a bicycle or something...

(editor's note : sadly, it was at this point that traffic started moving again, and I lost my connection. I was able to grab these pictures, however, from www.georgia-navigator.com)

You may have noticed an outage...

Apparently, my IP changed, which is unfortunate, as I didn't realize it for a few days. Thus, DNS records were pointing to the wrong IP. All that's fixed now (as can be demonstrated by the fact that you're reading this), and I apologize to my faithful reader(s) who may have been inconvenienced.

Also, I should mention that the dog was claimed by his rightful owner (the guy across the street) that evening. I figured someone would claim him. And I planted some grass and stained my deck and my deep fryer is broken, which has forced me to cut back on my daily chicken strips and fries lunch. And... I think that's about it. For another month or so.

new server location for www.jakevil.com

After a lot of headaches with the place that was previously serving my website, I made the decision to move it elsewhere. Unfortunately, I'm pretty cheap, and my options are limited.So I moved it to my house. What this means to you is that things may be slower than they used to be. What it means to me is a huge headache; trying to get apache to not crash proved difficult. In the end, it wasn't the software, but my configuration, that was the problem, but it took me a few days to figure that out. With all the other things one should do to secure a public-facing server, this cutover has pretty much consumed a couple weeks, off and on. But I think it should be all set, at least for now.

PC update (not that you'd care)

I went home after work, and the PC booted up just fine. I'm still not sure what was wrong, but I figured everyone who had read my previous post would be so excited that I don't have to buy anything new. Though I should.. the computer is old.

so I got a Mac this past weekend...

and, coincidentally, my main PC blew up this afternoon.



About the Mac : it's a blue and white G3 tower, with a 400 MHz
processor. It had 256 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive. I picked it up
for the astonishingly low price of $200. If, due to the magic of time
lapse, you're reading this in the year 2010, please don't laugh at how
pitiful of a computer this is in the future, and how much I paid for
it. Know that at this time (January, 2003), it was a very good deal.
That's about all I have to say about how it *was*. It now has another
10 GB drive, and another 256 MB of RAM I had laying around. Hopefully I
can get the 40 GB drive I have laying around installed, and mess around
with some video editing, assuming someone loans me a video camera.



Not surprisingly, 4 days after bringing the Mac home, my PC just
stopped working. I'm not sure if it's a power supply problem, or the
motherboard, or what, as it just happened this afternoon before I left
for work. Perhaps I'll become a "switcher" faster than I had imagined. We'll see.