• Brrrrrr, it is cold. http://twitpic.com/sjy58 #
• so cold today. it's hailing! #
• Can't tell what this is a pic of?koda and I are out for a walk in the near freezing dark after my last conf call. http://twitpic.com/sn7ex #
• Is the dog trying to eat the boy or is the boy trying to be a dog? http://twitpic.com/sok6i #
• Currently in 1st place in my fantasy leagues. It is the home stretch & I *still* have Matt Forte on my roster despite his lackluster season. #
• Listening to a panel about virtual goods and how to make money with them. #vlabdec09 http://twitpic.com/sr56u #
• Would rather be with my baby boy. http://twitpic.com/sr5pw #
• The holiday fairy visited our office and decorated our cubes! http://twitpic.com/sy1xq #
• Kyden's first hockey game at the shark tank. http://twitpic.com/t580x #

my mom is like any other gushing grandmother who dotes on her first grandchild. as silly as it sounds, she brags to her friends about how well-behaved he is (she clearly doesn’t spend enough time with him to see his fussy side) and smart he is.

for her birthday, i wanted to get her something that she would really appreciate, but she is a woman of few wants. it’s not because she has everything that she ever wanted, it’s more that she just doesn’t want a whole lot of anything.

this year, i decided that i would get her a digital photo frame and load it up with pictures of kyden. at first glance it seemed like a good idea, but then my mind started to wander. wouldn’t it be cooler if the digital photo frame could be updated by me remotely so that i can load new photos into the frame? how would i do that?

being a software engineer is a blessing and a curse. it’s cool because i can write web pages. i can make them do things. that’s sort of neat. it’s a curse because along with that comes the power to make web pages that do things.

i considered briefly buying a netbook and writing an app that will pull images and rotate them so that my mom can see the latest photos at any time. i thought about what i would need to run it and it started to feel a little overwhelming.

then i came across the D-Link DSM-210 10″ Wireless Internet Photo Frame. it seemed to have everything that I wanted. a digital photo frame that i can remotely update through the internet. how perfect is that?

the digital frame has integration with facebook, picasa, flickr, etc. that’s nice and originally, i was just going to make a Picasa account for this, but then my mind started to wander again. what is christi and i both wanted to update the photo frame? does that mean that we would have to logout of our google account, log in to the picasa account, upload the photo, and then it would work? it seemed like there should be a better solution.

we already have an image gallery that we upload photos to. we should be able to upload photos to this image gallery and then have those images shared to the digital photo frame. this is where the DSM-210 really shines. it accepts custom image RSS feeds.

so i went about writing an RSS feed that will take all of christi’s photos and all of my photos of kyden and then share it to the frame. it took a little while to figure out the format of the RSS feed, but i think that i finally got it all figured out.

i’m pretty excited about the digital photo frame. wireless internet access, auto-updating, and pretty good quality screen. perfect for the non-techy grandma who just wants to see pictures of her grandson.

RSVPs seem to be all the rage now. i just finished writing an RSVP web page for kyden’s upcoming party. i think it has been pretty well established that whenever i work on any kind of HTML layout stuff, i should not be allowed to have creative control over it because it’s going to get veto’d at the end of the day.

so the next time i have to write web pages for something christi and i are going to be working on, i’m going to make sure to make christi deliver me wireframes. i was joking with her that i should require pixel-perfect mock ups. now that’s an idea…

now that i have officially canceled the web hosting service, i wanted to write my experiences with midphase hosting. i have been using them for the past several years and we’ve had our ups and downs, but for the most part my experiences with them have been positive until now.

every so often my web site would not be accessible. i would have to email them to look into it before anything happened. that was always annoying. eventually, it got so bad that i emailed them threatening to leave and they finally moved me to another server.

they offer cheap web hosting (the plan i was on was about $8 a month. it offered unlimited domains, space, email, ftp, log analysis, and an shell account. perfect, i thought! and it was for a while.

the reason i left them is because one day when i tried to send email to a @cisco.com address, it got bounced back. the reason? cisco was blocking the IP address of my email server because they had identified it as a spamming address.

i contacted support and through many email exchanges, their resolution was that i should upgrade to a dedicated IP to not have these issues again. they did not even try to get the IP address off cisco’s blacklist. their solution of paying more for a service that they already included in their package seemed outrageous to me.

if they had tried to get the IP off the blacklist, that would have been great. if they had moved me to a different server whose IP address wasn’t blocked, that would have been fine too. but instead, they didn’t do anything. for such a basic service as email, i was upset that they couldn’t resolve my problem. it’s not like @cisco.com is some no name tiny domain. that’s ridiculous.

i moved my email hosting to the google apps platform and haven’t looked back since. all of my web hosting has been moved over as well, and i am now happily done with giving my business to midphase. i used to recommend them in the past, but now i won’t be able to do so.

• got DJ Hero for christi's bday. she was mixing up old jams from the 80s. #
• Happy 2 month birthday, Kyden! #
• Even though you woke me up super early this morning, how can I be mad at this face? http://twitpic.com/rv2rg #

i’ve been salivating over a new laptop. the one that i’m looking at in particular is the dell studio xps 16 w/ an intel i7 cpu. as i was doing some research about it, i came across a thread that says that the dell studio xps 16 has power issues. this kills me because the laptop seemed to be so perfect.

oh well, i guess i’ll let dell deal with their quality issues for a while before i pull the trigger and buy a new laptop.

pity.

it has been over 10 years since i first registered the ocliw.com domain name. 10 years! in that time, i think the domain has been hosted on about half a dozen servers, the last two have been at a hosting company.

over the years, i’ve had my share of email, web, and other issues. it’s been a long road, but finally, i think that i’ve learned a little something from all of this. the business of web hosting is cutthroat and the margins must be pretty small.

i’m in the process of migrating over all of my web properties back to one machine that is under my full control. here’s what i’ve finally decided on:

DNS registration – godaddy.com
it is really hard to beat godaddy’s prices. they have a cluttered UI, but it works and i haven’t had any issues with them.

DNS management/hosting – everydns.net
they’ve had a few hiccups here and there, but for the most part, this free DNS hosting provider has been great. what i love about them is that their interface is spartan, but gets the job done.

email hosting – google apps
google to the rescue. built on the gmail platform, they can host your domains for free! there are some limits on how many email accounts you can have for free, but it’s well within my uses. POP and IMAP access, too. it’s fantastic.

web hosting – find a friend with a fast connection
if i had fiber at my house, i’d probably host my own server, but since i don’t, i’ve found a friend. it’s fantastic and i don’t seem to really be putting a dent in his pipe.

once all of the DNS has propagated, i’m going to cancel my account with the hosting provider. i’ll write more about why i’m canceling my services with them.

i’ve decided to move the blog. it’s been a long time coming, but the hosting company that i am using has not been able to resolve my email issues. email hosting was the primary reason why i decided to use a paid service, but now that i have email issues that cannot be resolved with them, i’ve moved my email hosting to google. it’s been great so far.

now i need to move my web properties over, so the big first move is the blog. i’ve moved the database, and now i’m just testing the software to make sure it all works.