November so far...

A few days were spent on some car work. The RX-7 had a few issues that developed over the summer:

• Passenger side wiper kept popping out of the motor arm.
• Headlights started randomly cutting out at night for a second or two at a time (always exciting in the "I hope I don't die" sort of way).
• Starter was on it's way out - started working intermittently and often needed a whack to get it going.

Getting the wiper going again was fun. These things weren't designed to last 30 years. The motors never die - it's always wear that causes the arm to pop off of the wiper base. I'd already gone though 4 of them, and this was the last one.

Since you can't find them new anywhere, I ended up having to weld a washer to keep things in place. Surprisingly enough, it worked quite well.

Moving on to the headlights, spraying some contact cleaner in the switch just killed it altogether. I'll never understand why car manufacturers ever thought it was a good idea to run headlight current through the switch - do you really want all that current running through a small set of contact points until they inevitably burn out? Is the voltage drop really acceptable? Would a relay really add that much cost to the car?

Originally I was just going to clean the switch and wire in a relay. Since the switch just died completely though, I swapped another in. I'll wire a couple relays on another day to make sure the replacement switch lasts, and to remove as much voltage drop as possible.

For the starter, opening it up and giving it a quick visual inspection showed that the brushes were worn (which was in-line with the symptoms). I really considered buying a remanufactured one. A new brush set turned out to be only 8 dollars though. I couldn't justify buying a new one without at least trying to replace the brushes on my own first.

I guess there's a reason that a rebuilt starter costs a fair chunk of change - replacing those brushes can't be done with a soldering iron - it needed a torch which of course wanted to melt more than the solder. It's also a 2-person job if you're doing it on your own. It's done, and I'd do it again the next time, but only because it saves well over a hundred dollars.

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Computer stuff...

Kaspersky (mentioned last time), did eventually come through with a fix. Still not thrilled about the activation issues and the time it took though.

I decided to try installing Snow Leopard on my machine. The "new" way involves having a Retail Snow Leopard disc (which I have). This is fine - really, if people are running SL, Apple should be at least getting the money for it. The downside is that it's a royal pain to get everything going - bootloader packages have replaced distros, but it can be much more difficult to get everything installed and set up. I feel for the guy who buys Snow Leopard and then can't figure out how to install it.

With Snow Leopard up and running, I decided to see how PC games fare on the new versions of Parallels and Fusion and do a write-up about it. Parallels came out ahead this time around. I'd really love to see both VM's step it up a lot in the gaming area in the future - it would be nice not to have to dual-boot every time I get a few minutes to play a game.

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On the other side of things, purchase reviews for the EGRR site have been coming in rather steadily (I'll be having no issues meeting the 1-per-month quota I've set for myself). The videos seem to get very few views though - enough that they've gotta be helping a few people, but those few amount to less than 1% of the site's traffic. Seems like pictures and a write-up are enough for most people. That's fine, but a bit of a shame that I spent all that money on those video-editing programs. I'm sure I'll use them here and there (and will still do video reviews for EGRR), but at this point I'm just going to be creating simple videos - something that Windows Movie Maker or iMovie would certainly be fine for.

The rest of October

Well, the web host transition mentioned last did finish. So far things seem to be going well.

Couple recent issues...

First is Kaspersky (the famed anti-virus program). Spent over $100 a couple months back for a 5-user license. We've only used 4, and for whatever reason it's decided we've gone over the limit, and disabled itself on one of the computers. No, not just disabled updates, but disabled the entire program.

Really classy behavior from something I dished out over a hundred bones for. It's been 5 days without an answer from them. Oh, except I did get a message on Monday acknowledging that they received the response, and I did get some of their spam just now (yes I know, I opted in, but it seems a little more like a slap in the face just now).

They've got until the end of the week. If they fix it, fine. If they don't (or I don't hear back from them by then), I'm uninstalling Kaspersky from the remaining machines and they'll get to deal with a credit card chargeback.

Either way I'm not renewing the subscription next year. Going free next time. Probably AVG or Avast. If a company's looking for an AV program, I'd suggest staying away from Kaspersky due to potential licensing issues (imagine if the AV failed on all the machines throughout a corporation). As bloated as Norton is, you have to give them credit - their corporate version doesn't require activation or anything, so it's immune to those problems. Then again, I've got my own set of Norton grievances. But I digress...


Next issue is/was CyberLink PowerDirector (which I actually mentioned last time). It was buggy and crashed sometimes - not the end of the world. Most recent issue now is that it won't start up at all - it crashes on start. Reinstalling, and manually cleaning the registry (then installing) didn't work. Neither did multiple restarts - it's boned. I have to conclude it's probably a conflict with something else on the system, but I have no idea what, since everything else is working fine.

Really, I haven't experienced a conflict with anything since Windows 95 came out and I had IRQ conflicts. I could reinstall Windows 7, and it would probably work, but seriously... a reinstall in under 3 months? And then hours to set up all the programs again? For one program that's fallen apart? No thanks. Besides, I'm sure Kaspersky would start flipping out on this machine too.

Since I've got another video that needs some editing, I looked around again:

• Adobe Premiere is just too involved. It doesn't have the same text or video effects as PowerDirector. Actually that's not entirely true - you can manually do both text and video effects that looks really amazing, but they're just so involved to set up. For a movie, definitely they'd be the way to go. For short 5-minute clips where you want something simple and eye-catching that only takes a minute to put together, it's not as consumer-friendly. Maybe Elements has some 1-click solutions built in, but I already took hours downloading the Pro demo. Don't have the time or bandwidth to grab Elements and see.
  
  In retrospect I probably should have grabbed Elements - I grabbed Pro because I generally get the highest version I can, put something together, and THEN see if I used any of the "pro/ultimate/etc" features. If I did, then I see what I can do without and step down to a lower/cheaper version. Really though, there's no way I could justify plunking down the money for Pro, so I should have just grabbed the Elements demo. Maybe next time.
  
• Corel Digital Studio 2010 on the other hand is too simple. It takes the 1-click part to the extreme. You plunk your images and videos in, choose whether or not you want background music, and it puts it all together. Nothing in the way of editing features (not that I could find anyway), and the interface is alarmingly simple.
  
  I think Corel Digital Studio is oriented towards the computer-illiterate. I mean, to be honest it would be an amazing program for a lot of people who just want to pull the home videos off their video camera and have them automatically arranged into a nice little video to share with their friends/family. It's obviously not what I'm looking for though.
  
• Pinnacle Studio 14 is the next I tried, and the one I settled on. It's very similar to PowerDirector, except things seem much smoother. I tried a few things that I thought might crash it, but it didn't. It seems to be very stable. It's also got some really cool effects available in the "Ultimate Collection" version (even the "Ultimate" edition has some neat stuff beyond what PowerDirector does).
  
  The issue was the cost justification. I've already blown the money on PowerDirector, and this is what the breakdown looked like for Pinnacle Studio 14:
  -Ultimate is $100 on the web from their store (so download + bandwidth also)
  -Ultimate is $70 from Future Shop (no bandwidth to worry about)
  -Ultimate Collection is $130 from the web-store and includes a content pack.
  
  Kinda a big jump to go from the $70 at Future Shop (where I get the actual discs) to $130 for the Collection on the web store. That's almost double the price for a few cool features, but as they say... "in for a penny, in for a pound". I went for it (saved $10 with a coupon code though) and it's downloading now. The Ult demo was 2GB, and the Ult Collection download is 3GB. Yum, 5GB in under 24 hours. There goes 10% of our monthly bandwidth.

So that's about it for now.

Oh, except that Coastal Contacts (information page link) was added to the EyeglassRetailerReviews.com website. I've bought contacts from ClearlyContacts in the past (the Canadian version), and their popularity seems to have shot up by about 1000% since they started offering glasses, so it's up on the site now.

Okay, now that's it for now :p

Time to catch up...

I know, I know... I should really change the name of the blog to "What I've been up to this year".

In any case, I'll sum up the last couple months as well as the last week. I'd go back further than that but I'd have trouble matching up the "what's" to the "when's".


A storm is coming.... (a nice little Warcraft III quote)

August 13th, big storm, big lightning, internet and computers all fried here. That really sums up August quite nicely, and it took a while to recover. The websites didn't get any updates during this time - I only had periodic internet access, so as long as they stayed up and running I was happy, and they did.

The downtime here gave me the opportunity to simply sit and brainstorm a little, and I came up with a few ideas for the sites. The most major was the implementation of videos. If a picture's worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a thousand pictures, right? Digital camcorders have dropped continuously in price, and YouTube hosts videos for free, so I picked up a basic camcorder and used it for a couple basic reviews, a how-to, and a couple glasses purchase reviews.


Videos

The first video was created with Windows Movie Maker. Pretty simple program, and pretty easy to use. I wanted a little more flexibility for the next video though, and after testing just about every single program out there that has a trial, I plunked money down on CyberLink PowerDirector. It's a decent-ish program, but looking back on everything I probably should have looked at them all again.

The problem is I was looking for something that would be easy to use, allow for nice transitions, and spit out H.264/x264 MP4's in the 720p format. It's the recommended format for YouTube, and what I wanted to use. Yes, just about every program has an "Upload to YouTube" option, but half seem to throw WMV files at it, and most seem to decide for themselves what quality/filesize to use. This is bad - YouTube already re-encodes content to an incredibly small file-size, so you definitely want to throw as high quality an original as you can at it (within reasonable file-sizes) when you upload.

For some reason I was under the (mistaken) impression that CyberLink PowerDirector would let me configure and spit out an h.264 MP4 however I pleased. It didn't. In the end I ended up generating massive MPEG2's (which were very configurable) and then using Handbrake to re-encode them to rather large, nice-quality x264 MP4's. Not to say that PowerDirector isn't good - I do like the way it works, although it has a tendency to freeze up periodically for a few seconds at a time. It's also crashed on me once (right near the end of the editing and I hadn't saved!). Looking back, I really should have tried all the trials again and simply chosen a video editing program solely on the merit of it's funcitonality and ease of use. Just about everything will let you spit out configurable MPEG2's, and if I'm using Handbrake for the final encode anyway, the lack of 720p x264 output isn't a big deal.

Handbrake is awesome btw.


Scrunching down the websites

I'm past the notion that every idea should have it's own website. I had between 15-20 domains registered, and as it turns out it's not worth it. To fully develop them all takes too much time. Since most ran on Joomla, I also had a pile of MySQL databases. Updating each site every time a patch came out was annoying, and renewing a domain every month is yet another hassle I can do without. When 10% of your sites generate 90% of your revenue, it's better to focus on that 10%.

It also turns out that Google doesn't put much added weight to a site if it's on it's own domain - I've tested this with a static page that did well by moving it to it's own site. It's performing exactly the same after a year.

In any case, I converted just about all of those Joomla sites to static pages, threw up some redirects, and they're all under the umbrella of one site now. I can now get back to focusing on the 10%.


The web-host moving truck has come by yet again

Here's the deal, and a bit of a recap:

The websites all started out back in 2006 on ASmallOrange.com (technically they were on GoDaddy for a couple days first, but we won't count that). Great little shared webhost, and for $25 (may have been $30), I got a full year of webhosting. Not a lot of space, not a lot of bandwidth, but unlimited domains, and when I started out it was all I needed.

As time went by, the sites started growing. Actually it didn't take much time at all - a benefit when you hit a niche destined to be popular and you're the only one in it. I jumped up to a $5/month plan, then a $10/month plan, then a $20/month plan with an extra $5 tacked on for reselling (mainly to keep other sites separate). At that point, the sites started to get noticably slow, and went down somewhat often - the price you pay for being on a shared host. The sites were big enough, and it was time to move.

Enter early 2009, and I hopped to a VPS at VPSLink.com . Learning all the Linux admin stuff needed to set up an unmanaged VPS was daunting - particularly because it was all learned over a short time period. It was certainly worth it though - not only did I learn a lot, but the VPS was speedy.

Fast forward to August and the lightning, and I had a very real concern... what if the VPS hung, what if the websites got hacked, or what if I needed to do a full re-install for some reason. Not only might I not find out for a few days, but I'd have to head somewhere and borrow a computer and internet connection to reset the VPS and frantically re-upload everything from the backups here. This itself didn't spark the end result, but it contributed to it.

Move up a little further to the middle of September, and while browsing through WebHostingTalk.com, I came across the notion of "Cloud" web-services. In particular, VPS.net came up quite a few times. I took a look, and for about the same price as my VPS, I could get one on the "cloud", and could back up a provisioned VPS at any time as a template, then restore it after.

Not bad I thought. If a VPS hosted on VPS.net were ever rendered inoperable, I could simply restore from a template. It would also allow me to scale up the VPS as time goes on (and the sites grow). They also let you scale up the VPS for a short time period if you need - a couple of days for example if you're hit with a large traffic spike.

They mentioned that they'd be opening a datacenter in Chicago soon, which is arguably a good location. Chicago doesn't get hit by hurricanes or earthquakes and is relatively safe from the "potential natural disaster" standpoint. It's also got great connectivity as a central hub - well positioned for Canada/US traffic, and not as far away from Europe as my current west-coast datacenter.

VPS.net was to be up in the new datacenter at "the end of the week". The end of the week came by, and nothing. I asked about a time-frame, and was told 2-3 days. Again, it didn't happen. Not that I'd fault them - it's better to make sure things are working smoothly than to rush an opening.

The delays probably turned out to be for the best anyway. During the waiting period, I came across a lot of comments for a managed host called "WiredTree". I'd seen the site before, but the site looked a little plain and I didn't think much of it. There were a lot of outstanding comments about them though, so I did a little research, found out the datacenter was in Chicago hooked up to a bunch of Tier-1 providers, and decided that "managed" might not be such a bad idea.

WiredTree is no cloud host, but they use server-grade hardware, they do their own daily backups, and they set up your VPS entirely. They offer WHM/CPanel for free, and Litespeed at a slightly discounted price. They then monitor your VPS - if it stops responding for some reason, they fix it.

Eventually, I decided to bite. They had a coupon up on WHT, so I used it for a VPS. I have to say, so far it seems to be the right decision. It did take a couple days before it started getting set-up, but that's likely because I ordered it late Friday afternoon (sales are closed over the weekend). Regardless I had sent an inquiry over the weekend and they set it up on Sunday. Everything was installed and configured. I checked out the MySQL my.cnf file, and it was already tuned to 95% of the way I would have set it up. They installed and configured Litespeed. I received friendly e-mails along the way informing me of what was happening and when it was completed.

One issue I had was getting myself blocked by the firewall. Evidently, having a pile of FireFox tabs open pointed at various pages/ports on the VPS (a few WHM, few CPanel, few MyPHP, and then a lot of sites hosted on the server), then closing/reopening Firefox (opening all those tabs at the same time), then bombarding the server with a bunch of browser-based tests gets you blocked by the firewall :p A ticket quickly got a friendly response, and the block removed.

The WiredTree support is incredibly friendly/helpful, and quick too. I have to say, having the server all set-up, hardened, and pre-configured saved me a bunch of time. Sure, they use scripts to set everything up, but it's complete and has all been well thought-out. I can configure which services they'll montior, and if the VPS ever hangs, crashes, or goes down, I have the peace-of-mind in that they'll be there to get things working again. No, the server hasn't become an impenetrable fortress, but they apparently run critical updates on their own, and in short, I can spend less time working on the server, and more time on the websites.

I'll still be keeping backups though... just in case.


And finally... the other web stuff

So, what else have I been up to? Since much of my traffic is spread out across the world, I went with a CDN for the website images, and a paid DNS service for the DNS. The DNS stuff didn't take much time (although it was fun finding a provider that's had years without downtime, but at a low cost). The CDN stuff did take a while. Rewriting templates and hunting down/moving images wasn't a quick process, but it's finally done.

I also grabbed shared hosting from HostGator for some of the smaller stuff, and downloads that I offer/provide. The big reason for using HostGator was the "unlimited bandwidth". Often-times, "unlimited" really means "we just don't tell you how much you're allowed", but an old blog post by the HostGator owner mentions that because of the sheer number of servers they have, they pretty much get unlimited bandwidth. If people get out of hand with resources they're all thrown on the same server as other high-resource users. Presumably if my bandwidth usage spirals out of control I'll be thrown with some high-resource users, which is fine for the 90% static stuff I'm serving from the HostGator site anyway.

Why use HostGator if I already get a lot of bandwidth? Well in the unlikely event that I unknowingly get an insance traffic spike, bandwidth overages are always expensive. Yes, I've heard of people getting bills in the thousands of dollars. With HostGator, if things really do get out of control, at most I'll end up with a suspended site - so the downloads (and a couple small sites) will be down for a day or two... not the end of the world.

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So, that pretty much sums up the last couple months. The last 2 weeks in particular have been very busy, but once I finalize the minor remaining parts of the transition tomorrow, hopefully I can take a break for a few days before getting back to work - next up is adding a couple more retailer reviews to EGRR, placing the October EGRR order, and hopefully updating or adding some maps to the Warcraft-Maps.com website.

Another GPS site - yeah I've been busy

As I mentioned in the previous post, a TomTom was also obtained - more specifically, the XL330S model. It's got text-to-speech and all that plain sorta jazz. Anyway I got to use it a fair bit, did hours of writing, and the site for it is now up. Everything's done and ready to go, pages just have to be published over time.

Coming up at some point will be a GPS comparison of sorts (much of which has been written already), but I may take a few days break first. Working non-stop is just plain wearing me out.

One thing I've learned in the few years of web writing/development I've been doing is you need a balance - it's good to work on stuff when it's fresh in your mind (particularly review-ish stuff that you've looked at first-hand from the consumer-perspective). At the same time though, go too long on it and everything starts to blend in just the way it shouldn't - suddenly you don't focus as heavily on the stuff that really wow'ed or disappointed you because the initial importance of things gets buried away in your mind. After long enough it starts to look like you're writing page after page of the same thing with different words.

Balance is key.

Feel free to check out the new TomTom XL 330S GPS site.  (old link was: www.tomtom-xl-330s.com). Pages will be added in the days ahead.

Holy Smokers it's been awhile!

It really has. The rest of February consisted of a lot of vehicle work, and hence some additions to the rx7help.com website. Tax stuff, and many other random things managed to take up some time.

However, the last few days slowed down a little. I'm waiting on a couple minor projects which means the last week or so has been a little slow. Heck I even got the chance to try out Spore (although I can't stand the game!).

The last couple days (and all of today) have been all about GPS's. Yes, they sparked my interest, and I did a pile of reading. I was a little dismayed at the lack of information on a lot of the models though, so I bought a couple and have been putting together sites for them.

The first site is https://free-info-pages.com/garmin-nuvi-255w.htm (old site was www.garmin-nuvi-255w.com). I spent hours testing, playing around, and have started putting together a lot of information on the Nuvi 255W, and over the course of the next couple weeks it should appear on the site (most of it's written already).

Naturally, once the Garmin GPS site is done (including a couple more days of usage-testing), the next will be underway - a TomTom I got at the same time. Most of the information gathering on the TomTom has been done - now it's a matter of actually using it to see what I've missed.

The rest of the month looks to be fairly busy. It's warming up outside which means more vehicle work can be done (which will translate to more rx7help.com updates). I'm waiting on a glasses purchase to come in which will kill a day in writing up a review for eyeglassretailerreviews.com. Combine that with the GPS stuff, and if I'm lucky I'll get to relax a bit when April hits.

We'll see :p

Minor security stuff today...

Not a lot going on this morning. Today's focus was to be finishing up some security stuff on the server, which I did. Today was simple stuff like accounts/passwords that needed to be changed for added security.

Not that everything's done by any means - security's an ongoing process. It's all about trying to keep things as secure as you can make them, and keeping constant local backups archived for the times you find out it wasn't enough.

Wow. Blogger's not so bad!

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away....

Well, just a long time ago. I used to have a blog here, and ended up moving to self-hosted Wordpress for multiple reasons. I don't regret it - Wordpress is pretty sweet.

But coming back and creating this new blog, things looked to be very much the same.

It's easy to pick a template, and start up a blog. What I didn't realize until just now is what's changed.... customization.

See, after my last post, I popped open the blog and noticed the links in my posts were light grey and hard to see. I thought "I may as well pop open the template and change it", something I'm familiar with doing in both Joomla and Wordpress. I noticed the entries I was looking for referenced other fields though. "Hmmm...." I thought. Must be an option from within the blog.

In a matter of seconds I was at the page that lets you customize every single color extremely easily.

I then went on to the adsense stuff. The ads were as dull as the other links. Sure enough, you can customize there too.

Short version of this post: Blogger has improved. I like it.