All better now....

Well.... my swollen gland in my neck has gone down, Im still on antibiotics but only because they told me I should finish them all. I'd forgotten how much a few drinks can knock one around when on antibiotics. 2 beers, and it's like you've had 10. Well almost.

Im enrolling for Tafe tomorrow, semester 2 of my Diploma in E-Business. If I wasn't doing it for a job I don't know how I'd do it. I really have to hand it to people with a full time job, and then doing university degrees or nightschool after work, in a subject not related to what they do during the day. I knew a guy who's dad was a practising doctor, and was doing a part time degree in law. That would be incredible.

Our state government headed by Bob Carr has decided to push up Tafe fees (Along with many other things they have put in place to make NSW a worse place to live). $1000 this semester instead of $350 as before. If my employer wasn't good enough to pay it for me I doubt I could afford it.

I had to bring up Bob Carr's government in this blog somewhere. We need to vote these people out before they do any more damage to this state. PLEASE lets not give them another term.

It's been a while....

I haven't been here for a while, been flatout. The new year has really gone into overdrive straightaway.

It turn out our U.S. hosting company experienced total equipment failure due to lightning strikes and blackouts. When I heard this, I felt silly for getting so annoyed:) I know what it's like to be faced with a massive catastraphie and be working through the night to restore services. They had basic services running within a few hours, and everything else (sub domains, email, DNS admin etc.) was up and running the next working day. I went to being pissed off to being slightly impressed, and I guess their email was down aswell, because we didn't recieve the email until basic services were restored.

I woke up yesterday with a lump in my neck...(later found out to be a swollen gland) hate stuff like that.... it doen't happen too often so it scares the shit out of me when it does. It hadn't gone today, so I took the day off and went to the doctor. Got some antibiotics and hopefully all should be sweet. I'm on 1/2 as many cigarettes as normal, smoking just doesn't seem right when u got a lump in your neck:S The wierd thing it, it's only on one side, and I don't feel sick, don't have the flu, don't even have a sore throt. Normally when they swell up, it's both of them, and I've got a temperature, fever and everything. Hopefully it will be gone soon. It's more annoying than anything. I can't turn my head to look right when I'm driving without pain:(

Damn hosting company

I woke up today to find that all of our US hosted sites are down. I don't know what the problem is, but all files were deleted from the FTP folders, and the permissions on the control panel don't let me do anything. I assume they are doing an update of some kind. It's bloody annoying, as they haven't said anything. All my domains were deleted, but they were recreated again over the last couple of hours. Hopefully they will bring it all back to normal again. I think we will be changing hosts if this happens again. It's incredibly frustrating to put work into a site, slowly growing traffic, and then it's down for some reason.

At least our main site is still up. Everyone take note: spread your sites around different hosts. That way, if one goes down, you can still eat.:)

Some interesting quotes

I came across these quotes today, from the days when I used to recieve jokes and things on email. Now the novelty has worn off for my friends, so I just get spam.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?- T.S. Elliot

The telephone wire, as we know it, has become too slow and too small to handle Internet traffic. It took 75 years for telephones to be used by 50 million customers, but it took only four years for the Internet to reach that many users. - Lori Valigra

640K ought to be enough for anybody. - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, 1981

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B. F. Skinner

There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians. - George Pompidou

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. - Anonymous

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. - Andy Rooney

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. - IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943

If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done.- Scott Adams

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it. - Anonymous

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee. That will do them in. - Bradley's Bromide

The Internet is the Viagra of big business. - Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO, General Electric

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. - Jeremy S. Anderson

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. - Elbert Hubbard

Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be. - David Thornburg

Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software. - Anonymous

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. - Carl Sagan

If you tried to read every document on the web, then for each day's effort you would be a year further behind in your goal. - Anonymous

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them. - Margaret Thatcher

The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon. - Jerry Olson

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little. - Porterfield

Everything that can be invented has been invented. - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding. - Louis Gerstner, CEO, IBM

GARBAGE IN---GOSPEL OUT - Fairchild Research and Development, 1969

Any science or technology which is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

Never let a computer know you're in a hurry. - Anonymous

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. - Alan J. Perlis

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. - Thomas Edison

Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we're not going to buy your product. - Joe Keenan, President of Atari, in 1976 responding to Steve Jobs' offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak developed

The Internet is a great way to get on the net. - Senator Bob Dole

Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons. - Popular Mechanics, 1949

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it. - Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, US Navy

Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes. - Andrew Heller, IBM

AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive. - Jan Horsfall, VP of marketing for Lycos

How could this be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft? - Al Gore on Y2K

The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent. - Sydney Brenner in 1927

The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it. - Linus Torvalds

Windows is just DOS in drag. - Anonymous

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. - Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. - Al Gore describing his 1986 legislation to interconnect five supercomputer centers (17 years after the first Internet servers hooked up)

If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check. - Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle

The day I made that statement, I was tired because I'd been up all night inventing the Camcorder.- Al Gore attempting damage control

Day 2 of the new year and things are looking good

I've just noticed the Google has done a Google-bar Pagerank update, and has given a couple of my sites a PR of 3, which is a great start. One of the sites had been on PR1 since it went up over 3 years ago, although I've only been on the job for two months. Another one that I started a couple of months ago also got the same rank, up from zero.
The secret is good content, that people want to read. Learn how the search engine works, so you know how to tell it that your specific type content is on your site (a complex art-form), and if everything is correct, it will send you your visitors. A search engine's survival depends on providing searchers with sites they are looking for, and there are plenty of sites, so learn how the engines pick them, and make yours pickable. Sounds easy. But by plenty of sites, I mean 10, 000, or more competing for the same keywords, depending on the sector you are in.