Playing with Google Maps

Link to the spot where I lost my jeep for about four days in 1979:

http://g.co/maps/q5fru

For lack of a $20 comealong, I almost lost the jeep for good. We got it out a day or two before the creek rose ten feet.

What, I'm still here?

Today while waiting for the legendary Michael Torres to come train with me, I ran a mile in under eight minutes without trying very hard. For an old timer like me, I hope that's not bad.

I hereby submit that the "Proof of Nines" does not instill a fascination with numbers in children of any age. And that's all I have to say about that.

Changing web hosts is hard to do

Isn't that an old song title? Anyway, just needed to vent about the terrible customer service I've been receiving from aplus.com. They've hosted my www.statonr.org site (and personal e-mail) for well over a decade, but this year when the autorenew messages started arriving, I began wondering why I was still paying them twice what godaddy would charge. Checked their site and they had lowered their prices to be more competitive--except it appeared that they were going to keep charging "legacy" customers like me the same old rate: double! So I e-mailed their billing department and asked them to confirm what my rate would be. When they did not respond in 24 hours as promised, I e-mailed them again. After a couple more days without a response, I decided that was it and I was switching to godaddy. E-mailed aplus technical support for an authorization code to switch the domain. Two days later, I finally got a response telling me to e-mail or call their DNS department. What? Does one department there not even speak to another? Finally I called and got the auth code, but now I'm still stuck because I don't know how to "accept" the transfer and have to wait five days.. Meanwhile, aplus billed me for another year of domain registration. Of course I e-mail billing again, and have gotten no response, which shouldn't surprise me since they haven't responded to the first e-mails sent over a week ago.

Aplus has the worst customer service I've ever encountered. I should have left them years ago!

The Good Life

As difficult as technology can be, I have to admit that for the most part these computers work pretty well on my behalf these days. Business at PC Liferaft is good, the job at UTC is smoothing out as I adapt to its boundaries, and despite weeks of rainy weather I can see clear skies ahead.

Doggone Flash driving me nuts.

Thought I had my little Flash intro playing nicely on the PC Liferaft website, and then it started getting weird on me, working sometimes, not others. Had to take out some cool code I had snagged that paused the timeline, and that fixed most of the issues, but there's still something wrong with the swobject.js (I'm guessing) that won't allow Firefox to play my little video. It works in I.E. and Chrome.

No time left to struggle with it tonight!

PC Liferaft is the new thing

First I was too busy fixing computers to work on the website. Then I was busy working on the website but broke because there were no computers to fix. Now, on the advice of my spouse, I am officially announcing the birth of www.pcliferaft.com. I still want to do a lot of work on the site to make it look prettier, but I suppose it's good enough for tonight.

To be honest, the humble venture known as pcLiferaft LLC is the most exciting thing I've done since we got back from our cruise. As a small business owner (ahem!), I now have a new perspective on big government, bailouts, and taxes! I'm happy to pay them, of course! (applause from crowd.) But seriously, folks, it costs a bit to set up a new business, so when you encounter people with broken computers, send 'em my way. We'll fix 'em and keep 'em smiling, as they used to say.