Tone Parsons

As I just can’t seem to leave well enough alone, I’ve done a little modification to the title graphic of the site.

This captures my essence more truely than the previous one.

When you look at it, just think to yourself “Repeat until dead” and you’ll understand. 🙂

Anyone who knows anything about me will attest, I’m a geek.

This isn’t just a superficial label, I’m geek down to the bone. I get off on things like bus speed, pixel per second fill rates, fpu, etc.. Building computers, designing websites, and tracking down the latest news and information that’s technically related… that’s what I do for fun.

So I’m sure it was a surprise to some when I made the decision to shut down the web server I have at home and move to a hosting company. Let me explain the reasons for the change:

1. I no longer have to deal with the server end or those bastard Brazilian script kiddies constantly making attempts (sometimes quite successfully) at owning my server.
2. My hobby of maintaining my own server has become like a second job, taking away many hours per week.
3. I want my bandwidth back at Casa de Parsons (all that damn spam is killing my Battlefield2 ping!)

So, I’ve began the great migration the new hosting service (dreamhost). So far, I’ve only moved a few of my domains (this one, whitewomanblackdog.com, damagedpeople.com, shitdanish.com, and purpleshirtfriday.com.. the last 3 of which are currently awaiting DNS propagation). Things have been going fairly smoothly so far, but I do have a couple of challenges ahead.

Email is the big one.

With all the sub-domains running off of pixelthugs.com, and all the users on that domain, setting it all back up while making sure not to lose any of the mail on the server is going to be all kinds of special to say the least. Because of the security measures we put into place on the old box, pop isn’t working quite right (you can actually pop, but you can’t send). I’m having a similar issue with angieland.com. There’s a lot of email there too.

There are also a lot of other domains on my box that I don’t own. I’ve set a few of them up over at dreamhost and am waiting for their owners to change the dns with their registrars.

Good times!

Today, let’s talk about how I am going to die.

We have a “Health and Wellness” fair going on here at work. The atrium in our building has been taken over by other companies, each in a booth, and they are giving out gifts in exchange for our listening to them.

One of the activities is a “wellness checkup”. They draw a little blood, take a few measurements, and determine how healthy you are.

I’m a dead man walking.

My blood pressure is a little high, my bone density is a little low, cholesterol is right at the point where I need to manage it, and apparently, I’m a fat fuck.

Did I mention that I smoke?

So… if I never update again, it’s because I died.

I’ve been running the latest version of the insanely popular blog, WordPress, for a few days now, and I thought I’d toss out to my audience of 2 people (yeah… I’m all popular and stuff) what I thought of it.

Turn ons:

• The backend is pretty. Far more so than wp1.5, but pretty doesn’t mean squat on the back end.
• They put the “upload” screen on the “write” screen. Thank you!!
• Long walks on the sand with that special “someone”
• The fact that you can resize things like the post and edit screen’s text boxes to the size of your liking by simply grabbing the corner and dragging it down (this rocks!)
• Post preview!!!! OMFG!!! It shows you what things are going to look like with your theme before you publish it (so if you goofed up on how a bullet list looks in your CSS, you’ll know before the rest of the world does!)
• It has bells and whistles galore! Of course, I never used 90% of them before, but hell… now I can say I don’t use 98% of them

Turn offs:

• I’m not wild about the WYSIWYG “write post” screen. Occasionally hitting the delete or backspace key will send me to the top of the post I’m writing, and I’ll have to scroll down to get to the end (but there is a work around for it).
• Mean people.

And there you go. One highly critical review from yours truely, sutable for framing. As you can see, I really do like it… but then I’ve been a serious fan-boy of wordpress after the horror that was MovableType (well… it wasn’t that bad).

<bows>

Oh… oh my!

<bows again>