After too many years of billing errors, DNS outages, and other woes, I've finally moved lawley.net to a new hosting service...with other domains to follow suit shortly. It took a long time to find a place that would give me the range of services I need, at a reasonable price. On the "must have" list are mySQL, majordomo, telnet or SSH access, and plenty of storage space and transfer allotments. All that, and reliability and low price, too. Not an easy combination. CIHost had given me all the features I wanted for $23/month (quarterly), but the reliability just wasn't cutting it.
Spent a long time yesterday researching--from rating sites to company sites to google groups searches to find a place I might be happy parking my beloved domain names. Finally ended up with Web Intellects, which seems to have the right combination of price/performance/features to meet my demanding needs. Made the switch last night, reconfigured the DNS entry, and voilá voilà*! All seems to be well. Web site is up, majordomo lists are working, email accounts are all live.
The price is good...$24.95 for the "webmaster" account, which lets me host up to 5 different domains (real hosting for each, not redirection to a subdirectory). Not bad for only $1.95 increase in monthly cost. If I only had one domain, I could go with the $18.95 hosting version, which has the same feature set. And the reviews on webhostingratings.com are quite good. (I note that CIHost has "requested removal of reviews of its services." Why am I not surprised?) Keeping my fingers crossed...
The only snag was that my OS X beta version of Eudora (haven't paid for the upgrade) doesn't want to pick up mail using encryption. The good part is that's going to finally force me to make the switch to mail.app that I was going to make over the Thanksgiving break.
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*<vent>It drives me nuts when people spell this "wah-lah" in their writing. I know it's petty, but for some reason it's become a linguistic hot-button for me. And I see it everywhere these days, it seems.</vent>
As I was cleaning out my e-mail (again), I found this message from my mother, dated August 2000, in which she recounts a conversation between my children (who were then ages 6 and 3.5):
Today in the car Lane and Alex were discussing the reality of Santa Claus (I gather the North Pole has been much on TV news, and they noticed Santa's workshop was not located or photographed). They want to know what I think, but I manage to get away without answering. Lane is holding out for Santa's reality, but Alex thinks grown-ups could dress up like Santa and just get presents from the stores. The presents do look like they come from stores, don't they? Lane claims the stores get them from Santa, but he does not seem convinced by his own argument. Finally he says, Well, I know Santa is real because I *personally* talked with him on the phone. Alex then does a very good Santa imitation, Ho Ho Ho, and Lane joins in. They agree they sound like excellent Santas. And then, they look at each other a little amazed by what they almost figured out.
I think my mom needs a blog. But she says writing publicly like this would make her uneasy. :-(
This from April 2001, account provided by my mother:
Lane and Alex are sitting in the back of the car: as usual, I can hear much but not all of what they are saying, and I participate in moderation. Just how this conversation began I am not sure.Lane: I don't believe in religion or evolution. I don't believe in Adam.
Me: You believe in Santa Claus, though.
Lane: Okay, but not in evolution.
Me: Well, you like science and a lot of scientists do believe in evolution. How come you don't?
Lane: Because I am not a monkey!
Alex laughs. I make ineffective attempts at clarification which are ignored.
Lane: Okay, Al, I'll tell you how it was. First there was a pile of mud or something like that. Then a lot of animals came by and each one gave something. Like the bird gave its butt. And maybe the cat gave eyes. And some animal gave a nose, but which one ...
Me: It's hard to think of an animal with a nose that would be right for you, huh?
Alex reaches over to pinch Lane's nose. Lane retaliates. I scold and am ignored. Alex says, "Poopy Lane." Theoretical discussion ends with raucous laughter as boys decide to engage in the verbal experiment of applying to every noun that comes to mind the adjective "poopy." It is clear they have a great future as poets and intellectuals.
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