I’m almost done moving everything over to slicehost.com. Just a few small items left to do. I’ve been taking my time moving things over, making sure that each server works before moving the next.

I think that today I’ll be done and I can shutdown my local servers. It will sure be nice to recover all that money going out for T1 and electricity. It’s about $700 per month that I’m paying out right now. The new hosting is $166 per month. That’s a big difference in price.

I would not recommend running your own T1 and servers for hosting. It’s just too expensive.

I’ll be moving all my servers to SliceHost.com very soon. Like next week. My T1 is going away in about 30 days. I’m going to start moving things on the 1st of June.

That will save me about $500 a month.

Dr. Smash is back to work on the Wicked Zuk. The suspension is pretty much done and now the breaks are being plumbed in, radiator being mounted, foot controls fabbed, steering mounted, and other parts are being put on. I’m thinking that in a few weeks it will be able to roll and turn.

It’s been a long time since I posted anything here.

Dr. Smash has been working on my new buggy. Still waiting for things to really start happening on it. It’s been with him since Dec. but not a whole lot has been done in the past few weeks. Mostly just waiting for parts to come in. Looks like it’s not going to be finished by the June 1st like I hoped. I’m just crossing my fingers that I’ll get it by July. I was really looking forward to driving it soon, but all well. Dr. Smash got slowed down when his building burned down and he had to move, then again when he started getting a ton of business after he moved.

I still don’t have my axle swap on my Samurai finished either. It’s been since Thanksgiving that I’ve actually done any wheeling. All I really need to do is have driveshafts build and finish putting it the rest of the way together.

I’ve been working 6 days a week, so I’ve been really busy with other stuff. But I’m finally getting caught up. I’ve let a few customers go, and I’m probably going to get rid of a few more soon. I think I’m going to be closing down ORS in July. Still I have customers not paying their bills on time. So I switched to a new billing system. I can see when people open their invoices. I can see them open them and not pay them. That just really ticks me off. So, I’m just finished with it. Turn them all off and tell them to go somewhere else.

Anyway, the guys are coming up this weekend and we will probably do a bit of wrenching on the Samurai. Maybe even get it running. Probably not.

Well, I need to get back to work.

I’ve been a small business owner for many years now. First with BMG50 Wireless and then Orange Room Software. One thing that has really bugged me about doing business is when customer don’t pay their bills on time. It really just tweaks me.

Back when I was doing the ISP, I would always have people paying late. Sometimes I would understand, other times it would make no sense to me. The bill comes on the same day every month, yet they “forget” to pay it, or “didn’t see the bill”. They would call me wondering why they could not get online. Ridiculous.

Later I started Orange Room Software. I’m not dealing with people anymore, I’m doing work for small businesses. Yet still my customers continue to pay late. A business they consistently pays their bills late just doesn’t sit well with me.

I do web sites for a handful of businesses. They get a monthly bill either on the 1st or the 15th of every month. I would expect them to pay me within the 15 day grace period. But a lot of times it will go over 30 days. I have my billing software setup now to automatically close the web site down after 5 days late. That’s 20 days after the bill was sent out. I email and FAX the invoice to the customers. Still….

I don’t pay my bills late. Not my personal bills and not my business bills. I setup my bank software to automatically pay my bills when they are due from my credit card. Then I just have to pay my credit card bill from my account. My CC is my buffer to make sure I don’t overdraft my account incase my customers don’t pay me on time. This way, my bills are never late.

I only have one business pay me electronically currently. It just makes no sense to me in this day to not pay monthly bills with the computer. You don’t have to cut checks, mail checks, and keep envelopes, stamps, and checks on hand. Heck, I have never ordered checks for my business and I have never used them for my business.

I recently took a full time position at a company in Reno. It’s working out very well for me. I no longer have to deal with the “business” side of things and I get to focus on just programming.

So starting in June/July I’m going to turn off my T1 internet connection and close the doors on Orange Room Software. It’s just too much for me to constantly beg my customers to pay me. I’ll get all my customers setup with cheap shared hosting at some mega-hosting company and let them deal with billing on their own.

I’m not going to close ORS, I’m just not going to take on any web hosting or light work. I’m raising my prices to $150 per hour and I’m only going to take on interesting, quality projects.

I was at Dr. Smash’s today and he has started on my Zuk build. I can’t wait until it’s done!

Link To: My Samurai
Link To:Reno4×4.com Thread

The Samurai has been tore down since Thanksgiving. I have the front Toyota axle under it now, but I’m missing a sprint top plate. I’m going to steel one off the old Chevy. I also have the 6.5:1 transfer case with twin-stick installed.

Things I have left to do on it are:
1) Steering drag link.
2) Rear axle.
3) Break lines.
4) Drive shafts.
5) Repair busted Birfield.
6) Remount tires on new rims.

After that, I’ll be back on the trails. It’s probably only a days worth of work to get it going again, but I just haven’t been motivated to work on it. I go out there, mess around for awhile, then bail.

Next weekend I’ll be helping Dr. Smash move to his new shop, so maybe the weekend after that I’ll have it finished.

It’s really, really raining! This is awesome…. We are going to have new trails this year!

Why is it that Unix has such difficulty with network mounted filesystems? You mount a remote filesystem and if that remote system goes down then your desktop stops functioning also. Even Mac OS X has this problem. Can’t open apps, can’t close apps, can’t unmount the share, can’t list the directories, nothing but power off and reboot. Even if the share comes back online, it still blows up your desktop.

Windows doesn’t do that. Ahh, MS Windows. The slightest breeze will blow it up, but loosing a filesystem does nothing to it. It just happily unmounts it and goes one with it’s day.

I’ve tried CIFS/SMB, AFP, and NFS. They all do the same thing. I guess I should get a different gigabit card for my NAS. One that doesn’t timeout constantly when set to Jumbo Frames.

My friend Dave is building a new desktop system. So I offer to sell him my dual 500GB drives so I could buy a 1TB USB drive and a Airport Extreme. So that’s all good and he brings over his computer parts and I order up my stuff.

Well, Monday night Jane brings home our new Airport Extreme and I start setting everything up. I format my USB drives that I received a few days before and started copying over all my data.

Things didn’t go so well. Over the network it was going very slow, but I was OK with that. The next day I find that the copy was still going. All day the copy was going. The next day I gave up on that. So I pulled the NAS out of the rack and brought it into the office. I plug the USB into the NAS and try to mount the drive.

Nope, the NAS software can’t read Apple partitions. So I boot Ubuntu on the drive. After a few hours of hacking around and figuring out how to mount the HFS drive and another bit of time figuring out how to mount the FreeBSD UFS2 drives I get the thing copying. Then it stops. Restart…. crash… The thing just kept losing the connection on the USB.

The next day I finally get everything copied over and notice that the fan isn’t working in the USB drive. The USB drive was getting very hot. The fan in the back was not working. I’m thinking to myself, “it’s probably something simple like it’s not plugged in.” I could just open it up and fix it myself, but there is a do-not-open sticker on it. Lame.

I shoot a email off to the support asking about fixing the drive. The next day, I still haven’t heard anything back. So, I open it. The fsck’n power wires for the drives are pushed into the fan blades. Lame. So I fix it up and notice some jumpers. I get the user manual for the drive and found out it for setting striping or spanning modes. It’s set for spanning. I figure that striping would be faster access to the drive. So off I go changing things. I set it for striping and
finally get it repartitioned.

So I built up Dave’s system because it has the USB 2.0 ports on it and my old NAS didn’t. I pull the drives from my NAS and put them into the new system and plug in my USB drive. The copy went much faster this time… except it’s still dropping the USB connection. Peeved I continue restarting and copying.

Finally I get the dam thing done, Thursday night. I connect it to the Airport and everything seems fine. I kick on my Time Machine backup and let it go for the night.

The next day, Time Machine was locked up. ARG! It also locked up my Finder and my Airport. Reboot everything, and it’s working again. Start Time Machine… a few hours go by and it locks up again.

All day I messed with this dam thing trying to get it to work. I reformatted it 50 times. I did everything I could think of and still it’s locking up left and right.

Finally I copy everything back onto the Linux system. The copy went perfect. I setup an RMA to send it back, but I start reading the return policy for EagleTech. It says that if they don’t find anything wrong with it they will charge me $45. Well, I know exactly what’s going to happen. They are going to fool with it for 10 minutes and say everything is fine.

Well, I have set it back to spanning and formatted it using Linux. Now I have it blank and bare connected to my Mac doing my Time Machine backup over USB. It’s going very fast and so far so good.

I’m going to finish the backup then plug it into Dave’s Linux box and copy all my files back onto it. If it locks up one more time I’m done with it.

I think I’ll try to order a new controller card for it and replace it myself. That way I won’t have to mess with EagleTech support.

Oh, and they tested the drive before they shipped it. The checked off everything, but they didn’t check the cooling fan. Lamers.

I should just build my own stuff for now on.