CenterLeft.net

Some happy news this week, our friends Heather Schroeder and Bryan Hays have joined forces to become Mr and Mrs Bryan and Heather Hays. They had their wedding in Hood River, OR, this Friday and it was lovely. The weather was perfect and the ceremony was held in a beautiful little garden. Congratulations to both of you and best of luck.

Coming home there is lots of fun work to do as always. The newest project is a 15 foot long, 2 foot wide, and 4 feet deep hole. For those in the know, or just recently out of the marines, this might also be called a trench. My parent’s house has had long problems with drainage and flooding in their back yard. Being in the North West, we tend to get a bit of rain during the winter, and their lawn turns into a muddy mess with the dogs. We’re hoping that by digging out all the clay from this big hole and replacing it with drain rock that the water will have somewhere to go rather than just hanging out in the grass.

Finally, Saturday night we got out to see a neat event in the town next to ours. There is a dance troupe in town called A-WOL who does a neat mixture of modern dance, ballet, and gymnastics. They put on a late night interpretation of Allice in Wonderland. It was a really neat show. The lighting and costumes were great, and the dancing was amazing. There was a stage erected in the park and rigging hanging from the trees. It was quite the surreal event with the beating music and the mid air theatrics. If I hear of another event that this troupe is putting on, I’ll definitely make a point of going.

Beth’s family threw a bbq this Saturday. We went across the border into Washington to her cousin’s house. It was a very nice time laughing, eating, drinking and relaxing.

While I had been expecting all of the above, what I wasn’t expecting was the quantity of high explosives that her other cousin kindly brought over. It certainly made for a louder evening. Besides, we all know what a good combination alcohol and fireworks are. I was forced by the end of the evening to break out my “Fire Safety” hat. The irony of that title didn’t occur to me till much later in the evening when I realized that my hat was made of straw and so was probably highly flammable.

Instead of driving home afterwards we camped out in the back yard. Beth and I have just bought a new tent and this was our first chance to check it out. It was a great improvement over our last tent and was super easy to setup. Any tent that is large enough, stays warm, and can be setup for the first time in the middle of the night while you’re half drunk is just right for me.

Work has me at Portland State University this week. We’re down there doing a source change on one of the Physic’s departments microscopes. This is my first chance to do a tip change on one of our 200kV scopes and it is turning out to be quite an experience. Everything is going well, more or less, but with all the work involved I’m beginning to really understand why a service contract is worth $90k for a year.

Thanks to a little prompting by Betsy I’ve come back and updated the website a little more. There are always little things to change to make things better. If you look further down you might notice that I changed the linking of the Journal entry as well as added a link to the comments that have been posted on that entry.

I like the backend that I’ve added to this site now. All these changes are really minor and easy to make now that everything is stored in a database. Some of the pages are still generated from static pages, but I don’t need to update them much. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll do something about it though. Right now I’m playing with scripts to auto-generate all the backend folders, but I’m having some troubles sorting out the file permissions so that everything works afterwards.

My job is going well here. I’m learning lots of great stuff and I’m already getting a bit of a chance to travel. Austin, TX, was really warm, but Holland in March should be a little cooler.

A full sized bed is large enough for two people, or perhaps one person and a cat, but certainly not two people and a cat. To this day, I’m still amazed at how much space a tinny ball of fuzz can take up.

I had a terrible nights sleep because I kept bumping into Beth who was sleeping on my side since the cat had hers. But as I took a shower this morning and contemplated starting a fight over it I noticed the shower curtain. I don’t think I’m going to get far in any struggle for my own comfort, at the price of a cat’s, with a woman who uses a shower curtain that is covered in cats and little pink hearts. It’s just not a battle I’m going to win.

My apologies to anyone who tried to connect to my website today and was offered the chance to renew or purchase my domain name. My domain expired a couple days ago and there have been a few hiccups in the re-registration and dns change over. Good news is that I have the domain registered now for another 9 years.

I registered centerleft.net 5 years ago for the whopping price of $7 per year. I was latter informed by my friends that I got ripped off and could have gotten the registration much cheaper. Since then the price of domain names has become much more expensive. When you look around now, it’s not hard to find places that will sell you a domain name for $20, $30, or even $40 per year.

I was hoping to get away with not having to pay nearly that much to re-register my domain when the expiration came up. Along with the space that I am renting for this website comes a certain number of free domain names. When I noticed that my registration was coming due I tried to transfer my domain to my hosting company so that I could use one of my free domains to pay for it. Unfortunately, the company does not support transferring of domain names, so my only option was to wait until the domain expired and was released to the public again.

I didn’t find out until today that there is a 45 day grace period after a domain expires before the name is released. That means that my website would have to be off line for a minimum of 45 days before I could purchase the name back through the new company and re-establish my presence.

That is not a good option for me. There is too much going on here to have the site down for nearly 2 months.

In the end, it was an interesting series of phone calls to figure out how I was going to renew my domain name. At first we thought it would be possible to transfer the domain to another company that had better rates. But it turns out that there are some regulations about that and there is a freeze period just after a domain is registered, renewed or expires before a domain can be transfered to a new company. The cheapest option was to renew the domain with my current company at a pretty high rate and then transfer it later when that was allowed.

I called up register.com and explained my situation to them. I needed to renew my domain because I couldn’t have it unreachable; but I was disappointed that they were so expensive and that I would have to move my domain somewhere else to get a better value. The representative was very helpful and intent on keeping my business though. We went back and forth a few times and eventually they offered me a discount package that was very reasonable. It was still more expensive than I could have gotten elsewhere, but I was very impressed with the service and it saved me a lot of hassle.