A Bargain or a Bust?

As 2007 approaches, my hosting and web development sales have started to pick-up. In 2006, all I had to think about was DCK Sports and DCKickball. 2007 is getting kicked-off with redesigns of BrianCartenuto.com and his restaurant Lavandou, among other projects.

In the distant past, I had hosted sites on my own Linux box, tucked away in my buddy’s co-location facility. After several failures (box getting hacked, hard drives crashing), I switched to shared hosting at TextDrive in late 2005. I paid about $12/month for Shared hosting (it’s $15/month now). As the kickball season approached, and traffic built-up for DCKickball and DCK Sports, I upgraded to Business hosting at $60/month. This was more of a precaution than anything else. I felt that $60/month for professional hosting was a good price for my business. I recently upgraded to TextDrive’s new Business hosting plan ($100/month) in order to increase the number of domains I may host.

Which brings us to today, and a $1,399 purchase I just made. I decided to purchase the “Three Martini Lunch” (3ML) from TextDrive, which entitles me to lifetime Business hosting, in additional to lifetime Strongspace and Joyent accounts. This was an agonizing decision to make. $1,399 is nothing to sneeze at, and it’s not like I have a lot of cash handy at the moment. However, I also had the following stream of hosting payments for 2007 staring at me: 12 * $100 = $1,200. So, for $200 more, I get lifetime hosting in addition to a lifetime storage/backup account and a lifetime business productivity account.

So, as my business grows and TextDrive grows, it remains to be seen how savvy a decision this was. By all accounts, TextDrive has a sterling reputation of taking care of its customers, so I’m optimistic.

Mephisto, Multi-Site and Lighttpd

After playing around with Lighttpd’s rewrite abilities, I think I have a set-up that enables Mephisto caching goodness. The following is how I have chosen to configure Mephisto, so your mileage may vary:

1) Install Mephisto in your home directory (MEPHISTO_HOME).

2) For each domain you want to set-up, use a config like this:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "foo.com" {
  server.document-root = foo_com_docroot
  server.error-handler-404 = "/mephisto/dispatch.fcgi"
  url.rewrite = ( "/$" => "/mephisto/cache/foo.com/index.html", "/(images|stylesheets|javascripts)/mephisto/(.+)$" => "/mephisto/$1/mephisto/$2", "/(images|stylesheets|javascripts)/(.+)$" => "/mephisto/cache/foo.com/$1/$2", "/assets/(.+)$" => "/mephisto/assets/foo.com/$1", "/([.]+)$" => "/mephisto/cache/foo.com/$1.html" )
  fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
   ( "localhost" =>
     ( "socket" => "/home/YOU/var/run/lighttpd-fcgi-blog.socket",
       "bin-path" => mephisto_root + "/dispatch.fcgi",
       "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" ),
       "min-procs" => 1, "max-procs" => 2, "idle-timeout" => 60 )
     )
   )
}

3) In the docroot for foo.com (~/domains/foo.com/web/public, etc) create a symlink to your mephisto public folder:

cd ~/domains/foo.com/web/public; ln -s ~/mephisto/public mephisto

That’s it! I hope I’m not forgetting anything. Feedback would be appreciated.

The Greatest Xmas Card Ever

This is probably one of the coolest and most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received. Courtesy of Skittles.

My Code Page

I’ve create a code page to share plugins, extension, libraries, etc that I write. I seeded this page with three Mephisto plugins that I had put together for DCKickball. Enjoy!

A Little "Too Happy" Holidays

Want to be the hero of the holiday party? Want to wow your friends with your culinary skills? Whip-up some homemade eggnog (recipe courtesy of Martha Stewart):

Serves 26

This eggnog’s rich, cloudlike texture is produced by separating the eggs and beating the whites before adding them to the milk mixture. The eggnog base can be made one day in advance; just beat in the stiff egg whites and whipped cream just before serving.

• 12 eggs, separated
• 1 1/2 cups superfine sugar
• 1 quart whole milk
• 1 1/2 quarts heavy cream
• 3 cups bourbon
• 1/2 cup dark rum
• 2 cups cognac
• Freshly grated nutmeg

1. In a very large bowl, beat egg yolks until thick and pale yellow. Gradually add sugar to yolks. With a wire whisk, beat in milk and 1 quart cream. Add bourbon, rum, and cognac, stirring constantly.
2. Just before serving, beat egg whites until stiff. Fold into mixture. Whip remaining 1/2 quart heavy cream until stiff, and fold in. Sprinkle with nutmeg.

I made this fired this up last night for a dinner party, and with 1 cup less liquor than the recipe called for, it was still knocking people on their asses. My buddy Will turned into a complete maniac after 4 cups or so, challenging me to a wrestling match after I defeated him in a friendly game of ping pong. You’ve been warned.

Car Quote Hell

My girlfriend Carrie is in the market for a car. She recently accepted a job offer that pulls her out of DC and over to Tyson’s Corner. Oh the humanity! (says the DC snob)

So, being the great guy that I am, I sit down to help her research new and used cars, both for purchase and lease. We hit the usual suspects, including cars.com, craigslist.com, autotrader.com, etc. Yesterday, I went to Edmunds to check invoice prices for the 2007 VW Rabbit. On the site, there was an option to receive price quotes from dealers in your area by simply entering in some contact information. You also had the option to indicate if you only wanted to be contacted by email (even though phone number was a required field). I decided to give it a shot.

Big mistake. I received no fewer than 15 email responses from various dealerships, some automated, some from sales flunkies. You know how many quotes I received? NONE! And then, of course, my phone starts ringing. 703 and 301 numbers that I don’t recognize.

Thankfully, a day later, they’ve given up. Just be warned, people.

The Wire Finale

From the Sports Guy:

Speaking of Baltimore, after watching the season finale of “The Wire” this week, I wrote up an extended rant about the show and how much it means to me, both as a writer and a human being, and how I believe it’s the most important show of my lifetime, how I can’t remember being more attached to four TV characters than the four school kids from Season 4, how I simply can’t fathom why more people wouldn’t give it a chance … but it ended up sounding too preachy, so I’m just going to say that it’s my favorite TV show of all-time and leave it at that. Name another show that could peak during a season in which its best character (McNulty) basically disappeared for 12 of the 13 episodes? How is that possible? What a show. I miss it already.

I just finished watching the season finale of The Wire. It is moments like this that I feel like an inadequate writer. The episode was visceral, moving, tragic and hopeful. Show me another show on television that can turn your stomach inside out, leave your head and heart spinning, and avoid all of the pathetic cliches and manipulative plot devices that pervade shows like Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, 24 or any other top-rated show on TV. The Wire’s lack of viewership is scandalous, so I’m here to say this, right here, right now, that I am going to make it my mission to pimp Season 5 of The Wire from moment it is announced, to the first episode, all the way through the season (possibly series) finale.

The Wire is uncompromising, true to life, intricate, gut-wrenching and embodies the best and boldest of televised drama and of fiction in general. Do yourself a favor, if you haven’t watched The Wire, rent/buy/on-demand Season 1. You won’t be disappointed.

The Wire – The Complete First Season

The Wire – The Complete Second Season

The Wire – The Complete Third Season

Back from Vegas

I’m back, and all banged-up. Those red-eyes look ok on paper, but look out. Left the big V Sunday night at 11:00pm and arrived in DC at 6:30am Monday morning. Took about 1:30 to walk in my front door and promptly pass out.

For the time being, enjoy some pics from the third WPBT.

Update: Pauly is live-blogging:

• Tourists with Bad Hair 1, Pauly 0
• WPBT Holiday Classic: -EV Prevails
• Snailtrax, Male Prostitute

Yogging

I went for a quick run tonight with Carrie. She popped over to my place after work, and we bundled-up and braved the wintry evening. I was amazed at how easily the run went by. I don’t know if it was Carrie’s moderate pace (she of double marathon pedigree) or just having someone to talk to. We took a 4 mile route south on Columbia/Conn/Florida, north on Mass Ave and east on Garfield/Calvert. It was a nice little mix of up/down running and nice Embassy row scenery.

From 930 to $9.95

The other night Taurus and I headed over to the 930 Club for the Jet show. I can always count on Taurus to do some legwork and grab tickets to great shows at 930. Now, the doors opened at 7:30pm but Jet wasn’t scheduled to come on until 10pm. I had never heard of the opening band (The Blue Van), so I wasn’t sure how early I wanted to get there.

Despite some second-guessing, we rolled over around 8pm. I like to head upstairs and grab a spot on the rail. Best way to catch a show there, unless you’re downstairs in the first row of crushed humanity against the stage. In any case, we staked a claim on the rail and waited for The Blue Van to come out.

Come out they did. They blew the doors off. I am not a music critic, but here’s what Pitchfork has to say about them:

“The Blue Van are more a controlled science experiment—what happens when four zealous Danes are brought up smack dab in the middle of nowhere listening almost exclusively to Kinks, Animals, Who, and Doors records?—than a fresh rock outfit. Their LP The Art of Rolling is an exhumed time capsule of 60s mod and psychedelica.”

I come home from the show think “I need to get my hands on some Blue Van tracks.” I checked out a couple BitTorrent sites but not much came up. Besides which, I’m getting pretty tired of BitTorrent lately (slow/no downloads, etc). I checked out iTunes. Bam, both albums, right there. Tracks for $0.99 and albums for $9.99. Not bad, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Sure, I liked the music live, but will the albums hold-up? Do I feel like spending $10 or $20?

Then I thought, what about eMusic? I had read alot about eMusic, but never bothered to check them out. Here’s what I found out:

• Sign-up for a free trial membership (14 days)
• Stick around and pay $10/month for 30 downloads ($0.30 a track)
• The music downloads as MP3 files (no DRM, no expiration, all good!)
• You choose from a selection of music from non-major, indie and foreign labels

That last point is pretty key. Looking for the latest U2 or Shakira album? Look elsewhere. eMusic is all about music sampling and discovery. After setting-up my account, I downloaded a couple of tracks from The Blue Van (you can sample tracks before you buy just like on iTunes), as well as some tracks from The White Stripes and Interpol. I’m honestly excited about this experiment is music purchasing. Will I download enough to make the subscription worthwhile? Will I find enough music to suit my tastes? I guess we’ll find out!