Asymptomatic

Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

I've gotten a flood of new people following me on Twitter over the past couple days. If you had done this a week ago, you would already know all about how hectic my work has been this week, how I missed my train into the city to meet up with that work this morning, and how I plowed into the back of a BMW on 202 as a result of missing my train.

If you had signed up a month or two ago, you would have been able to follow my Habari tour from Philly down to BlogOrlando up to Columbus and back. In fact, I told Berta- Don't expect me to call, you will be more informed about what I'm up to if you look at my Twitter page.

So what's so great about Twitter? If you had asked me this or why I signed up back when I first heard about it, I would have told you, seriously, I haven't the foggiest clue. Today, I have very specific reasons why Twitter, as simple and stupid-seeming as it is, is one of the best ideas to land on the web in a while, and would confess to being unable to do a ton of stuff I've done over the last few months without it....

On Tuesday, work had scheduled an after-work happy hour, so I decided to take this opportunity to venture down into Philly for the day and check out the new digs at Independents Hall. Independents Hall, to describe it in my own words, is a group of independent workers who, rather than working alone individually, have decided to work together in the same space ("coworking") to achieve that camaraderie that you usually get at a workplace with others but wouldn't get by yourself at home. It's a neat idea, and works for people like me who, although I work with other people, I don't work in the same physical space with them.

After fighting with traffic for far too long (several accidents on the "expressway" led to a two-hour commute in - I don't know how people do this on a regular basis) I did finally arrive downtown. I parked in a lot for the day near the space, which cost $17, but there was on-street parking to be found for people who wouldn't be ticketed for their inspired inspection stickers. The walk from the lot to the Indy Hall space was short.

One remarkable thing about the space is that it's literally right around the corner from the actual Independence Hall and Liberty Bell. If you're going to woo clients who aren't from the area, being within walking distance of these places could be a nice asset. This doesn't even scratch the surface of all of the options nearby for food and such, which as odd a feature it may seem to tout, is a luxury we don't have out in the 'burbs. But what about the space itself?...

Over this past weekend, Berta and I trekked through the snow to the March WordPress Meetup at the Ten Stone Bar and Restaurant on South Street in Philly. We entered into an interesting conversation with Johnathan, who works on the blog section of philly.com.

Johnathan was concerned with getting readership to the blogs. He asked many questions about what it would take to get any of us as a reader. The general answer among the group in the conversation was "a minor miracle". Our conversation has me questioning why news media is failing to do its job, on both the front of reporting actual news and evolving with the advent of blogs and user-generated content.

There are different kinds of news - newspaper, TV, radio. I find all of them lacking somehow. TV and radio news are the most sensationalist pieces of crap reporting out there. They've devolved from any merit they might have had into fluffy soundbites from celebrities. Just like MTV no longer plays music (if it really ever did), TV news no longer reports news (if it really ever did)....

One thing I always liked about Bob's house is that they have family photos everywhere. Pictures of the kids, pictures of Bob and his wife, and pictures of people I don't recognize all adorn the walls in his home.

Solid artwork made by the kids is here and there on shelves and hanging on walls. It's mostly not the paper kind, but physical things, decorations made by the kids and put in places of prominence to decorate the rooms.

Our first apartment was a box of cinder blocks and a thin layer of sheetrock. We bought a box of nails, but never used them for anything. The one thing we did hang was the large mirror over the livingroom couch so that we could see the TV from the dining room table, and we ate there maybe twice while we were living there....