This week is off to a rocky start

I’ve been avoiding “me” posts around here for a while now but a lot has happened lately and I figured an update was in order.

Saturday night I was at a grading session for final projects from the web design course I helped teach this past semester and in the middle of grading I got an e-mail from a writer for the New York Times. It was definitely one of those, “guys, this is important, brb” moments.

I spent all of Sunday studying for an exam which I thought I had on Monday afternoon, while being in a restless mood since my databases were down all day long. I had a couple of blog entries I wanted to write and I couldn’t do anything at all.

Monday rolled around and my sites were still down, but I got my things together and headed off to the library to prepare for my exam. On the way out I realized I ought to look up the final exam schedule, and I had a sinking feeling in my stomach… was my test really in the afternoon? Did I misunderstand the schedule? (Note: before final exams period starts, the only way to look up the time slots is with a cryptic schedule that doesn’t list any specific information.) When I got to the library I looked up the nice published schedule, and sure enough I discovered that my exam is actually today (Tuesday) in the evening. It was time to head back to my dorm.

When I got back to my dorm in the afternoon, I was surprised to receive a very desperate e-mail from my server admin, and if you saw the message that was up yesterday, you probably heard the news. My server admin was (and still is) very sick and the server was going down… which meant my work was cut out for me yesterday. I spent the whole afternoon exporting all of my databases and downloading all of my files, then signing up for a dedicated server at Media Temple, then editing all the DNS information with my domains, then transferring my GoDaddy domains to Media Temple (because I’ve been meaning to separate myself from GoDaddy for a long time now), then administrating my new server and setting up all of my websites, then importing all of my databases and upload all of my files, then… oh, that was it. I finished somewhere around 11 pm.

So now I have dedicated hosting and it looks like the DNS information is propagating pretty well. All this has delayed my plans for blogging and web designing quite a bit, but that’s not important to me right now. What I can’t stop thinking about is that my now former server admin, Nick, is still sick, and I don’t know how sick, and I’m really worried. I’m praying for him and I hope to hear from him soon.

As an aside, the new hosting is costing me a lot but I need the reliability… this was my second move in the past few months and I can’t take another one. Fortunately my advertising revenue is covering the cost, so no worries there.

As another aside, I’m in the New York Times website today: “Times Sq. Ads Spread Via Tourists’ Cameras.” To any fresh visitors coming from there, hello, nice to meet you.

Back to the topic, please pray and hope for Nick’s speedy recovery. His blog, by the way, is greenr and he hasn’t updated in quite a while.

Edit: I totally forgot to mention, I’m working on re-branding this blog with an actual title, and I’m not decided on this yet, but currently I’m mulling over “The Montoya Herald.” I could also go with “Montoya Talks” or something, I don’t know, I haven’t actually changed the official title itself yet, I’m just experimenting with the header logo here… any ideas?