That Hosting Company

This is really yesterday’s rant. ThatHostingCompany that webhosts the Miata Club website I do, disappeared from the face of the internet for about 5 hours last night. Even their site was unreachable! Did somebody kick out the plug on the server? Was the custodian dusting and accidentally flipped the switch to off?

No big deal, you say, well this seems to happen with alarming frequency. And on their about page they claimed 100% up time in 2001 – HA – they were off the air for almost a whole weekend in October.

They are the genesis for this little blog, I wanted some way to remember all the outages. They don’t go down everyday, just seems like it, so I will have other things to rant about here. Trust me, I am of an age where I am on the cusp of cramudgeondom and lots of things p!ss me off.

My 15 Seconds Of Fame

I am now famous. I was mentioned in Randy Nieland’s Tech Specialist’s Email Newsletter yesterday. It raised my stature a notch or two with the couple of other geeks I know that I turned into Gnomies. 🙂 We had a little email conversation about whether or not he should start to blog and what might be the theme for it. He is not sure if he wants to go there though.

More exciting than when I got the Master’s Miata Club a mention in Chris Pirillo’s Windows Daily Email Newsletter.

Up, But Really Down

The folks that host the Miata Club site and the images on this blog That Hosting Company, Inc. have had some spotty, to say the least, connectivity recently. They have this blurb on their about page, “In addition, our connectivity uptime is above the industry standard goal. For the year 2001 we have a 100% uptime rating, and we use a third party company to monitor our connectivity as well. (www.internetseer.com)…” You can go to that site and get a free monitoring tool that will let you know if your site is down. So I did just that after THC last downtime episode. Tonite ThatHostingCompany went down for about 5 hours. Did I get an alert from Internet Seer? Nope. No wonder THC uses it to monitor its up-time, it thinks they are up when they ain’t.

Look At Me

Now I am more famous. I submitted another photo to The Mirror Project today. Winter Event joins Hard Drive Clock in what used to be Friends of Jezebel’s Mirror. Going to have to get one with me and the Miata to add as well.

Nearly 70 degrees for the ride home. Dropped the top of course. The only remnants of the snow of a week ago is the sandy spots on the overpasses.

Yearly Planning Meeting

Master’s Miata Club meeting tonight. Long one, we tried to plan our whole year’s worth of events on one night, nice try. We a had a big turn out and everyone had good ideas, but no one had any dates. Just a lot of vague recollections of a festival in a certain month (maybe.) We did nail down a few things and if all the ideas pan out we should have an exciting year.

Almost 70 degrees at 4 o’clock, so we had top down motoring for the trip home and then half way to Augusta later that evening. Got cold real quick after the sun went down 🙁 so for the interstate leg of the trip we buttoned up the bonnet.

Here You Go

The lugnut adapter just arrived on my desk. It left South Bend, IN at 10:04 PM on the 8th, not bad. This one is not chromed like the one I originally got with the wheel package. I’m not complaining, mind you, the price was right, FREE! Thanks Tire Rack

Mr. Lockergnome Blogs

I’ve been reading the blog of Mr. Lockergnome, Chris Pirillo, after a link for it appeared in the windows daily email thing. He just started doing it like a week ago, and if you want blog-envy, check it out. He has got all kinds of cool things going on, a calendar, links, drop down boxes, cool graphics… One thing his does, is when you click on a link, it opens in a whole new browser. When you are done looking at that page and close the browser window, there is Chris’s blog waiting there for you. Whoa, I need that. Started to go back and edit my posts with links to do that (add ‘target=”_blank”‘ in the “a href” tag.) Then I thought that’s kinda like that annoying pop-under ad that X-10 uses, never mind. Plus, now that I think of it, it seems kind of insecure, “If you love a web surfer, set her free.”