March, 2005:

Our hosting Co-Op is a lot less of a Co-Op and a whole lot more of money pit for me than I originally envisioned.

Sure, I’ve given away lots of free access to various people for various reasons in the past: special projects that I agree with, artists whose work I appreciate and wish to support, and friends who have limited needs and consume very few resources and wouldn’t otherwise purchase hosting if I weren’t being generous. Having the freedom to be able to do these things means a lot to me. But paying $100/mo just isn’t worth it for what I get out of it. That’s why we started the Co-Op in the first place.

At this point, there are 6 paying members in the Co-Op. They get everything I get (i.e. just about anything they want) and they don’t have to do the technical work to make it happen. Unlimited domain names, unlimited FTP accounts, and unlimited space. Anything that isn’t currently supported can be added through nothing more than a simple email. All of this for $10/mo. I’d say that’s a pretty good deal for them.

But, with only 6 paying members, I’m still out $40/mo. The goal was that I would pay nothing (my technical and administrative contributions would be my payment). I would be happy just paying $10 like everyone else. To make matters even worse, I only have 2 members who pay religiously on a monthly basis. That means that often times, I’m floating the full bill every month until people get around to paying me.

I’m sure if I sent invoices I’d be paid on time. But, this isn’t supposed to be *work*. To save my time and energy, I don’t send out bills or invoices. I expect that the members will do what it takes to remind themselves to pay me each month. I keep no record of who has paid and who hasn’t. It’s just friends helping friends. The honor system. All that good stuff. As best as I can tell briefly looking over PayPal records, there is over $250 in outstanding balances to me. One member hasn’t paid in over a Year. Another, in over 6 months. Two more are 3 months behind. And then I have the two good members, who are 100% current. What’s even funnier is that the two people who are the *most* behind are also the two most active members in terms of disk space and system usage.

If you’re a Co-Op member, please, please, please pay what you owe.

If you’re currently getting hosting elsewhere and would like to be part of the Co-Op, please let me know.

If you are currently getting free services from the Co-Op and would like to send a little donation as a token of your appreciation, they are happily accepted as well.

So I’m still listening to that Kelly Clarkson song. Over. And Over. And Over. Although I do have a little bit of a change now. Through a long line of links, I managed to run into a “Recording of ‘Since U been gone’”:http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2005/03/this_weeks_best.html ( “mirror”:http://revjim.net/archives/2005/03/tedleo-sinceubeengone.mp3 ) by “Ted Leo”:http://www.tedleo.com/ which is quite good (possibly better than Kelly herself). So, I go back and forth between them: A two song playlist on repeat.

If you’re a fan of this song, I have a question for you: what’s the deal with whatever noise that is that sounds like a car door chime? I mean… what’s the point of it? It’s pretty distracting and doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the song. Does it mean something that I’m unaware of? It doesn’t matter. The song still rocks.

I’m out of “Cool Green Apple” gum. Actually, I’m out of gum entirely, except for what’s in my mouth, which is 5 pieces. I’d go get some more from the vending machine, but they only have normal flavors. And something tells me that after having the cool taste of mint mixed with the sour taste of apple for so long now, having mint by itself would be rather depressing.

I’m leaving work in 30 minutes. Because I deserve it. I only wish I had a CD burner in the car… so I could burn this song onto a CD. I could put it on my phone and listen to it with my phone’s headset, but it’s not quite the same. I like to have it bumping and loud.

Oh… speaking of that, during my drive at lunch, I was flipping stations and happen to land on some station at just the right time to hear someone requesting “Since U Been Gone” to be played. I called Jess to celebrate with her, but she didn’t answer her phone.

Tonight it’s Poker and Waffles (yes… Poker and Waffles. Don’t ask me, it was Miki’s idea) at Patrick and Miki’s. Josh and Erica are coming with us. I’m going to have a blast. Then, on the way home, Erica and I are going to stop into a random Wal-Mart and terrorize the late night patrons. Because it’s Wal-Mart… and we can.

Jess’ parents get in tomorrow. We’re having a Lobster/Shrimp dinner at my Mom’s on Sunday. Monday I work. Tuesday and Wednesday I’m off for family fun. Thursday and Friday I’m back at work. On Saturday, they leave. Fun times. No really. I mean that.

My jaw hurts.

… Ya damn right, they’re bigger than yours, i could teach you, but i’d hafta charge.

Something is incredibly gross about chewing gum in a public restroom. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I feel like I’m taking gulps of the grossness of the restroom and mixing them deep into the core of my gum, only so that I can continute to chew on it for the next few hours. So, whenever I go into a public restroom and I happen to be chewing gum, I try to keep my mouth closed, chew as little as possible, and breathe through my nose. Like any of that would make any difference.

Speaking of gum, I’ve got 5 piece of the new Extra “Cool Green Apple” in my mouth right now. Yeah, this stuff is great. Unfortunately, the flavor only lasts about one minute, then you need another piece.

Oh yeah, and Kelly Clarkson is the bomb. Ok, maybe not. But her song “Since U Been Gone” is great:

bq. But since you been gone
I can breathe for the first time
I’m so movin’ on, yeah yeah
Thanks to you, now I get what I want
Since you been gone

Seriously. Get this song if you don’t have it already. It’ll be stuck in your head in no time. I’ve had it on repeat for the past 3 hours or so. No. I’m not kidding.

(Conference Call induced thoughts)

I’m not quite sure why, but it sounds… redneck… trashy… ghetto… something… when I hear someone say something like “I’ve worked for THE Company for 10 years” as if the world is so small or that their lives are so specific that there is only ONE Company (THE Company) in their minds. I know that isn’t REALLY what’s going on… it’s just a phrase… but I don’t like it. I’d much prefer “I’ve worked for THIS Company for 10 years” or “I’ve worked for (Insert Company Name Here) for 10 years”.

Maybe it’s just me.

This weekend, the “Jew”:http://gentlenews.com/ and I would like to watch Wayne’s World. If you’ve seen it… you know why. If you haven’t, then you need to. We’d also like to play some poker. Preferably, we’d like to do these things with other people and not just stare at each other all evening. We’re thinking either Friday or Saturday night. Jess and I have sortaplans (yes, that’s a word) Friday evening, but they can be moved to Saturday if that’s better for other people. Mrs. Jew works Saturday during the day, and we’d really like for her to be there. Hence, either Friday or Saturday night.

So, which night would you prefer to join us? You don’t have a choice. You’re coming. I just need to know which night would be better.

For those of you that keep track of this sort of thing, as of this morning, I have stopped using Evolution as my primary email client, and have switched to Thunderbird.

There is really only one reason. Evolution 1.4 is *way* too old for my tastes and all of the newer versions of Evolution available to me (2.0.3 and 2.1.1) are broken in some way (2.0.3 crashes when I get a mail that has an iCalendar meeting invite in it, and 2.1.1 just randomly crashes on certain messages. In BOTH version the Calendar is very flaky, at best). Maybe when 2.1.5 is installable on Debian (too many packages missing right now) I’ll give it another shot.

Thunderbird isn’t *better*, it just doesn’t crash. And that’s important. Evolution had a lot of well thought out (and a few not so well thought out) shortcut keys that made doing the things I do commonly a lot faster. Thunderbird seems to be seriously lacking in the shortcut keys department. I also really liked Evolution’s use of GTKSpell so I could see which words were misspelled as I typed them. With Thunderbird, it’s an extra step.

While I’m on the topic, I wish there were a good, simple, calendar solution for Linux.

Evolution’s calendar doesn’t work. And, even if it did, remote calendars are virtually unsupported.

kOrganizer supports remote calendars, but not reliably. And, since it doesn’t bother to color code each of the different calendars being viewed, looking at it can be a little confusing.

Mozilla Calendar is what I use now… despite the fact that I hate it. It supports remote calendars, it supports color coding, and it supports multiple calendars. Those things are important. Event notification, however, sucks. The fact that it doesn’t have an alarm daemon is terribly frustrating, and would be even more so if the event notification actually works. It’s also really annoying to have *three* different ways to install it, each of them with their own problems and limitations.

Mediocre software doesn’t make me happy. I’d even considering *paying* for something, if there were actually anything better available.