Jay, who is the only contact I have at the new grander IdeaBank sends me an e-mail this morning:

If I insert a new row into the quote table is there anything I have to 
do to make it work in queries??

INSERT INTO quote VALUES (
'Kazoo',
'kazoo:dino:barney:slate:wilma:fred:betty',
(SELECT MAX(id)+1 FROM quote),
'kazoo dino barney slate',
'kazoo
dino
barney
slate
wilma
fred
betty' );


We ran this, and when we do a search (from the web site) on kazoo or 
slate it isn't found.

To which I responded with... well actually I didn’t respond, and in case anyone else is wondering: no I won’t do your homework for you either. This guy is getting paid to do this, but if I saw this on a newsgroup I would strongly suspect the guy was trying to get someone to do his homework for him. That is how good his SQL is.

Also, maybe you shouldn’t be tinkering with a production server that you know nothing about? Definitely feeling the Schadenfreude when I connected to the website and the dynamic content was broken due to a server configuration error. But then, that is what you get when you buy custom software and hire some hack with no experience in the languages it was written in to run it instead of the original author who knows it better than anyone.

If it were Chuck still in charge, I would probably give Jay some pointers (I actually know why it isn’t working from the snippet he provided), but I have no loyalty to (or compensation from) this company, and definitely not to Jay.

I came by this T-Shirt on the Internet today:

http://www.bustedtees.com/product.php?name=dysentery

which probably doesn't mean much to you if you didn't go through the American education system in the late 80s early 90s like Tyler and I did, but we both found it hilarious. I then proceeded to download the latest version of The Oregon Trail, which they are still apparently making, but of course the new version left something to be desired, namely the nostalgia, which only the original could provide. This is really the only thing that it has going for it.

I've been mucking about with nameservers... I was still using belmont as my DNS server, and I'm only now starting to do the switchover to nullray (DNS is/was the last service on belmont). Some of my websites may be temporarily mucked up. I will be doing nullray soon. For those of you who logon, you may want to remember that the IP address is 64.38.18.2 or add it to your hosts file. Shouldn't need it, but just in case.

I told Chuck that I was moving a couple of months ago. We agreed that nothing had to change, that I could do my job running the server as easily from down under as anywhere. I was nervous that he'd freak that I was leaving, but when he didn't it was one less thing that I had to worry about in the move. Then New Year's day I get this phone call from him and an e-mail telling me, more than asking, that the server billing needs to be transferred him, and that I need to show Jay how to do the few several tasks which are required to be done manually. Apparently he sent me a snail mail asking about it just before I went to Salt Lake for Christmas, but I never got it. I felt blindsided by this whole thing.

Anyway, I suppose I should have expected it. When I originally started the account with RackSpace (who have been wonderful, btw-), Chuck would insist that he get the bill and I'd say, "but that is not what we agreed to." Then a couple of weeks later he'd be back at it. It died down for a while. It hadn't come up for years.

So I've decided to get my own server. Everyone with belmont accounts (there are like four of you out there) will get an account on the new machine instead: nullray. The downside is that I have to configure the system to support all of the services that belmont currently takes care of. The upside to this thing is that the new machine will be much faster (2.4GHz), have more memory (1GB), larger hard drives (2x160GB) and newer operating system (Fedora 4).

For those of you with email or shell accounts I will let you know more when there is more to know. I expect the transition to be largely transparent, but you will at least have to remember to ssh nullray instead of ssh belmont during the switchover.