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....

Today was an interesting day for both Riley and me. Nana has vacation this week, and so she's not at the house to watch Riley during the day when I'm working. Normally, Berta would take off these days, but she's been taking off so many days on these occasions - from times that Nana needs off to times when I've got to be somewhere at the end of the day when Abby comes home from school - that it's becoming a burden to her work. So to ease that burden, I told her that I would watch Riley on the two days this week that he didn't have preschool.

I had originally thought that I would keep Riley at home and take the day off myself. I had mentioned to Nate that I might need a couple of days this week to be home with Riley, as I've described, and he suggested that I could bring Riley over to his house and his wife, Mary, would keep an eye on Riley while I got some work done. Riley would be able to play with his kids and it would be a good work day.

So that didn't work out exactly as planned....

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....

I've been hosting my own content on the web since, oh, 1995. I've been on many hosts over that time, moving sites from host to host. During that time, I've been on some good hosts and some really awful hosts, and I have really yet to find the ultimate host that I can recommend unreservedly.

Perhaps you have been having sites hosted long enough to have acquired some horror stories. A while back, I had my sites hosted with a company called A World Wide Mall. AWWM was pretty reasonably priced, but as with most hosts, the customer service was pretty lousy. And one day, the guy who ran the service decided to fold up the company and move on without notifying any customers. He just took his datacenter and left. With all of my data. Lovely.

I'm sure that folks have similar (or worse) stories. I have had service where I thought I was getting protected backup and redundant storage, when really it was all on one box and when the box died, I lost a lot. I tried hosting at 1&1 once, and after playing with it, I immediately filled out their cancellation form. Total time with their service: about 5 minutes....

We have an experiment in evolution in our own back yard -- a vivid and undeniable example of natural selection at work.

Dandelions. The plague of the suburban lawn. Dandelions sound like a cute little plant, and they're really not all that bad looking taken as just the flower. Indeed, their method of distributing seeds gets my vote as pretty darn ingenious.

Dandelions get their name from the petals of their flowers. The outer ridges look like "lion's teeth", at least according to some French person, which is where the "Dent de Lion" originates its name. The danger to destroying your lawn is certainly as deadly as the lion's tooth, and their ability to evolve certainly demonstrates that....