Tag Archives: morningside

Taking a Walk

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Greenwood Street Looking UpSometimes you have to stop and smell the roses. Or take a picture of Greenwood Street looking up the hill to Stanton Heights. Either way you’re interacting with the world in some way, stopping to look at stuff. Not so worried about time, time, time, but willing to see life as a sequence of events, you go from one to the next, and if you don’t get there precisely at 5pm then well, that’s ok. You saw something cool along the way.

Of course other times you really want to get to where you’re going, and the sights aren’t that interesting, but they waylay you nonetheless.

I had hoped to make a tremendous amount of progress on our corporate site yesterday but I got waylaid by some emergency client work. One of our clients sites got shut down by their host, Hostgator. Apparently they were using up too many resources. Why that is I’m not sure. I think the developer who originally put their site together did a really crappy job, but I can’t say. I’ve never really looked too hard at it.

Of course then it gets shut down for taking too many resources away on a virtual server and it’s emergency central. I can’t blame em really. Their site was totally down. I talked with Hostgator’s support and they said to just respond to the email tech support ticket that they say they sent, but didn’t, and it’d get turned back on. I tell them to resend it, and they do. So we respond back saying “turn the site back on”. But they won’t. Not until we document exactly what we’ve done to insure it won’t happen again.

At this point the client is freaking out, and we convince them to go onto the Rackspace Cloud, spend a little more money, and then we can figure it all out. Hostgator wouldn’t even let us run the site to see what kinds of errors it was kicking or anything. It’s kind of hard to figure out what the problem is with a WordPress site if you can’t turn it on.

Sure we could have put it on a whole ‘nother test server, but what would be the point of that? Why not just turn it on in the same location but live. Same problme for Hostgator, but we get the site up. Even when I said, “ok we’re going to go witha a dedicated server, but in the meantime till we switch it over, can oyu make the site live?” but they wouldn’t. So they lost the business of the client.

If they had just worked with us, and not been so rude on the phone with the attitude that we were taking advantage of them they’d have probably turned a little money every month from someone using a virtual hosting account, into an over 130 buck a month dedicated hosting account… But instead they decide that customer service is best when it’s rude, and perfunctory, so there ya go.

We grabbed the site, stuck it on the cloud, and it’s running like a dream. It was crap on the Hostgator site. Ran like crap. Obviously it bogged their server down, because they shut the puppy down. Now though it’s flying, and someone else igs getting their money.

What’s my point of this story? I didn’t plan on doing any of that yesterday. Staying on hold with Hostgator for long stretches arguing with their techs. Digging around a file manager in CPanel, investigating a wordpress installation I had nothing to do with. Etc. These were ‘roses’ that were stuck in my face that I had no choice but to smell, rather than work on the OrcaPack corporate site.

So today I get to do it a bit more. This morning I had more client work, and then the boys came home and I had a 3 year old sitting on my shoulders while I tried to work, so back to the Moglo I go. And on the way I decided to stop for a few minutes and take a picture of a typical Pittsburgh street.

Why not right? Gotta stop and smell the roses.

Live From Morningside

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Morning GloryI honestly don’t remember what I did yesterday. Is that bad?

I think I didn’t get much sleep the past couple of nights, a combination of staying up too late, being sick, the cat catching a mouse, and kids waking me up to goll darn early.

I mean really. Why can’t my five year old just get up on her own and go downstairs. She knows how to turn the TV on, she just hates to go down there alone while everyone is asleep. It’s killing me. 6:30am after I stay up till 3am and she is poking me in the eyes telling me to get up.

Not cool.

Anyway today I managed to get her to go wake up her mother who was sleeping on the bed in the baby’s room from whenever he woke up last, I think he got up four or five times last night. Another issue.

Then I managed to sleep till after 10am. Lazy? Maybe. Still if I had gotten up at 6:30 I wouldn’t still be awake now, and wouldn’t have been at all productive today. Better to get a good 3-4 hours in than nothing at all.

I decided for the afternoon today to head back down to the Morning Glory Coffeehouse here in Morningside. Fresh air, sunshine, coffee. Good stuff. Made some progress on the OrcaPack website. I think it’s going to take me longer than I thought, but I’m progressing. I have all the content written, but getting it into the pages, along with graphics and images is taking longer than I had expected to start with. I think though that once I get really going it’ll be faster. It’s mostly just getting the right stuff prepared at this point. I still hope I can get it live by the end of the week and we can start showing it off to people. Our current sites are just horrible compared to these, and I’m really enjoying working on our own stuff, rather than on stuff for other people.

Normally I blog in the morning, but since I woke up at 10 that was kind of shot, and i’m doing it now. I’ll do a few more things, and finish up my day and head home. I have to cook dinner tonight. Orange Cheek’AN. I’m not sure what the actual protein will be. Probably those veggie chicken strips.

60 Degrees IS Warm

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So yesterday I took advantage of the 50 degree temps and sun, and headed out for the afternoon to the Morning Glory Coffeeshop in Morningside to work outside my dungeon. It’s a nice place, and it was good to be out and about.

Of course now I want to go do it again today. Maybe this afternoon again. There’s definitely an attraction to working outside the traditional office.

I was watching a Frontline from PBS the other day called Digital Nation which you can find here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/ and there were a number of parts that struck me about it. The one that is in  my head now though is that they showed a big office park in the Hudson Valley that IBM built for it’s employees. The reporter walked through the place and it was a ghost town. Rooms with mobilitiy desks. Offices with furniture and phones but no people. Walking down empty corridor after empty corridor. All those people were working from home. Even holding meetings in Second Life.

They showed one group who had people on 3 continents all meeting together virtually. They had never met each other before in real life.

I’ve not worked in a traditional office now since 2002. I think I miss it. Oh sure it’s been great to work from home, and get to see my kids grow up. Heck right now I’m sitting by the front window in my living room, while my 7 month old is asleep upstairs for a nap, and my wife and 3 year old are in the kitchen apparently attempting to make bagels from scratch. If the noise gets too loud I can put headphones on, or head down into my office, or head out to the coffee shop. If I need to talk to people about work stuff I can IM them, or Skype with them, or just call them on the phone or shoot them a text. No real need to have them in the next room. Heck we can even have shared whiteboards, show each other our screens, etc in these things.

All that’s missing is the personal touch. I dunno. I think I miss that. I always think how cool it’d be to have some hip cool office space with neat furniture, lots of space, a foosball table, people working in the same space, going to grab some lunch together. Tall windows with lots of natural light.

I guess I’ll have to stop writing this blog and get going on my work today so that we can someday have that.

Working from home is great. I just really hope that it doesn’t become the norm. There’s something to be said for putting everyone in one place physically that lets us bond as a team together.

Plus it’s hard to play foosball with 3 other people if we’re all on different continents.