February 28, 2002
Approved!
Pretty exciting news today: I received a call from the mortgage company today to tell me that we had been approved for the loan on the house. Shew! So it looks like we're buying a house. I'm not sure if I'm more nervous now that we've been approved or before we were approved. From everyone I've talked to, being a little scared and nervous about buying your first house is pretty normal. I'll continue to keep you all updated with the latest as things happen. I'm still in amazement that I'm going to have a back yard! Wow. This opens up a whole new world of hammocks(gift hint), a grill(another gift hint), and cookouts. Very cool.
Work was really busy today. Tommy was out due to a death in his wife's family, so I was in charge of running all of the Mac calls. It seemed busier than usual, but that was probably due to the fact that I'm not that used to running lots of callls lately. It was actually a refreshing change. My job is just like the seasons: when it's summer, you wish it were cold and snowing. When it's cold and snowing, you wish it were warm and sunny, right? Well, when I'm running calls, I wish I was at my desk working on web stuff. And when I'm working on web stuff, I sometimes wish I were up and running calls. Either way, I'm still happy.
I've finally just come to the realization that I have way more ideas than I have time. There are bunches of things that I would love to do with this site right now, but have neither the time nor the energy to devote to it. For one, I'd like to switch my "Friends" page over to being just a list of links to some of my friend's websites. It's way too hard to keep up with everyone and I'm always getting asked "Why am I not on your friends page? Am I not what you'd consider a 'friend?'" This will just make it simplier and make more people happy...I think. I also need to figure out if I'm going to continue to update the CD changer thing and the survey. I actually have a new survey..I guess I should put it up. I guess this site has kinda been pushed near the back of my nightly priority list, so things that used to get updated don't get updated as often. As I've said before: if there were only a couple more hours in the day....
And finally, OLM.net finally got their ass ion gear and set up my new hosting plan. Now comes the fun part: dividing up the load between the two servers.
February 26, 2002
A Hyper-active website
Howdy, boys and girls! I must (again) apologize for not posting here with any kind of regular frequency. I had REAL intentions of posting a long "here's everything that's been happening in the last week" on Saturday, but we ended up being busy and I ran out of time.
If any time in my virtual world has ever been crazy, that time is now. As you might guess, CustomTacos is at the root of this mess. You know, sometimes I question why I keep spending money, time, and sleepless nights on the site. It must be because I truly believe that people get enjoyment from it. So, to keep you all updated: A second hosting package has been purchased for the site and will be give the name: sparetire.CustomTacos.com. Since the site obliterated the 8GB transfer limit this month (thanks, Mini Truckin'), the second server package includes an additional 12GB of transfer. This gives me a total of 20GB of transfer and almost a gig of disk space. I guess we'll see how long that holds up. Hopefully longer than the 3 months that the first $200 bought me.
Speaking of money, the movie "Money Pit" comes to mind a lot lately. However, I've been spending a great deal of time looking for good ways to dig myself out of this hole. I've contacted a bunch of aftermarket companies to see if they are interested in doing some paid advertising on the site. I've had ONE response so far. Nobody wants to spend any money. I finally broke down, gathered up my pride and started asking for donations for the site. I was surprised at the response. i can't say that I'm rich after the first day of donations, but I'm better off now than I was this morning. Plus, there is discussion now that others will follow suit and donate soon. A couple of the guys from San Diego have even discussed having a car wash in the near future and then sending the proceeds from the fundraiser to me for the site. It's so amazing to sit here and watch these people whom I have never met come together for a common cause. This is why being a mini trucker makes me proud. People are willing to go way out of their way to help others.
I was going to talk about something else on here tonight, but I seem to have forgotten it. That just shows you how consumed I am. I think I've spent a good 5 hours working on the site today, between cleaning up this morning after a rather nasty discussion forum brawl from last night and updating some things and doing preventative damage control before another brawl broke out tonight. Jeez, this could be a full-time thing.
February 22, 2002
In a whole new light
You know it's been a non-eventful day when the highlight of your day was discovering that our Operations department installed new ceiling flourescent bulbs in our department. They're the "new-age" bulbs (kinda like GE's new "Reveal bulbs) that put off a cooler, brighter light. Pretty exciting, eh?
What a sad, pitiful day. I'm really looking forward to this weekend. No plans (so far), so it's hopefully going to be a catch up on sleep weekend.
February 21, 2002
Takin' it up the tailpipe
Well, I did the innevitable tonight: I purchased more hosting for CustomTacos. It hurts. This new server, when it comes online later this week, will share the load with the current CustomTacos server so that we stay below the bandwidth limit. My only fear is that we'll outgrow this additonal 12GB as quickly as we've outgrown the current 8GB (4 months).
It's strange how quickly this has gone from lots of fun to pretty darned stressful. Remind me again why i do this? Oh yeh..the users.
February 20, 2002
It's bad to be popular
Well, I spent most of my day pondering the sticky situation that I'm in. Remember way back in your school days when it was a good thing if you were popular? You know, if people liked you. Well, it's still good. Until you use all of your 8 gigs of server bandwidth and have to shut down your popular truck website.
The second guy at OLM sales was pretty helpful in offering suggestions for additions and changes to my hosting strategy. As far as the first guy goes: I might as well been talking to a 5-gallon bucket.
I asked lots of questions, took lots of notes and even sat down afterwards and made up a little spreadsheet to compare my options. To tell you the truth, none of them are very good. At the very least, upgrading my hosting to allow for more site traffic is going to cost $20 (double what I'm paying now!), if not more. The worst part is that I don't know how "high" to upgrade. My limit is currently 8GB/month and it looks like we're going to shatter that limit after only being up for four months. So, do I double it? Will we be pushing 16GB/month in another 4 months? I don't want to be doing this every four or five months. This is both stressful (to me) and painful to my wallet. It kinda sucks to be popular.
Speaking of which, my issue of Mini Truckin' magazine came today! YAY!!! And, as everyone has been telling me, CustomTacos is featured on page 10! This month, they featured 5 of their favorite websites and CustomTacos was listed at the top of the list (not necessarily meaning that it's the best, however) and also got a screenshot of the site....the ONLY screenshot of any of the websites mentioned this month! WOO HOO!! Pretty cool. So, I have a feeling that bandwidth is going to continue to go through the roof for the rest of the month at least, and perhaps calm down a bit when the next issue comes out. Brian made a funny comment about this whole situation: "Write back to minitruckin and ask if they can pull their plug! Quick! Get the lights!"
Seriously. I've been Slashdotted.
February 19, 2002
Not dead..just..busy?
Ta-dah! Not dead. Nope. Just busy and tied up in lots of knots (stuff that keeps me busy from 7am-2am).
Let's see: what's changed since the last time I had a chance to write in here? Well, I got a new 667mhz Titanium Powerbook. It doesn't take too much to keep me happy. Now, if I could just get my lazy boss to order me a copy of GoLive 6 for OS X.
It looks like we're buying a house. Now, don't go all celebrating and sending us gifts (refrigerators, washers, and dryers will be in order in a few months for those of you looking for house warming gifts, hehehe) quite yet. We signed 200,000 pages of mortgage application papers and we hope to hear from them in the next two weeks. Then, and only then, will we par-tay. Until then, we bite our fingernails.
A large part of the reason why I've been so delinquent on here lately is because I've been busting my butt to get the CustomTacos.com stickers purchased and a little system established for sending them out. Thanks to my spiffy new color printer I got for Christmas, I'm printing professional-looking address labels, return labels, and thank you notes inside. Orders have been pretty goo so far, except I expected to be totally bombarded and haven't quite seen that volume yet. Members can pay online using Pay Pal or by mail using a cashier's check or money order. I expect I'll start seeing mail orders later this week.
Traffic on the site has been absolutely phenomenal lately. It might have something to do with the site being featured in the first couple pages of Mini Truckin' this month. I haven't gotten my issue yet, but I'll post a photo of it when I do. I'm so absolutely excited about us being mentioned in there. It has really driven site traffic up through the roof. Tonight for example, I checked to see how many concurrent users were logged in on the discussion forum. 30. Actually, by the time I took this screen shot, it was 29. But 30 users! All at once! And not all talking about trucks. Movies, Bar-B-Q cookout meetings this summer, and more. Amazing. So amazing that OLM.net sent me a bandwidth warning this morning. The warning said that if the site continues to be as active as it has been this month, I'll go over my allotted trasfer limit of 8 gigabytes. It looks like I'm going to have to look into upgrading the hosting plan. I figured I'd have to do that sometime..but not this soon.
Of course, then again: I figured I would have updated my blog before now, too.
February 11, 2002
News From the Home Front (or maybe not)
Here's some photos of the "property in question" I shot Saturday (Click thumbnails for larger pics):
 In front of where the house will be, looking towards the back of the "house" |  Looking out past the back yard. Look! The Chickahominy River in the back yard! Nice! |  This is the entrance to the neighborhood. Pretty desolate looking right now. This will be humorous to look at in a few months |
February 08, 2002
What if your name was..
Every day, when I start up Adobe Go Live to begin my hectic day of playing webmaster, I see this guy's name: Bert Blodau. Which got me thinking this morning. What if my name was Bert Blodau? Would I introduce myself as Mister Blow-Dow? Or maybe I'd just walk in the room and say "Pah-dow!!" Just a thought...
Perhaps I'll go buy a house tonight.
February 07, 2002
Townhouse Floor Plans
Here are the floor plans for the townhouse we're looking at:
Enjoy!
February 06, 2002
When life throws you a curve ball, DUCK!
It's not very often that I rant on here, but here goes.
Do you ever have days where life throws you a curve ball? I did today.
You see, we're in the middle of developing a client extranet website for one of our clients. This website will only be accessible to our clients, but I have been spending a great deal of time trying to make this new website fit into the Agency's corporate "look & feel". In the advertising business, as with any business (but perhaps even more), image is everything. So, I felt it of upmost importance that it exactly mirror the "voice" of our company and how our clients perceive us.
As you may have guessed, this is no easy task. With no less than 50 million vice presidents (half of them may be creative), I know that making everyone happy with the new design is virtually impossible. With that in mind, a few of us from ITS sat down today with one of the VPs to talk about it. I didn't expect the meeting to go well.
The weird thing is: the meeting went bad in different ways than I expected. The VP ended up saying that he does not want us to spend a whole bunch of time coming up with a new design, but rather use the existing design that we use on our Intranet. Bleh. I mean, don't get me wrong: I think the Intranet design is good for what it does. But ONLY for that. It's casual. It's playful. It's something you could show your Mom and she would enjoy it..but I would never want to show our clients this site as a representation of our company.
I won't get into too many of the other details, but it comes down to this: I just spent an entire month racking my brain to come up with an array of designs, hoping that at least ONE of them would be something useful. I even surveyed some of our Interactive Dept. folks to get their input on how to create the "voice" of the company. That alone was frusterating enough, and I was beginning to regain my confidence in my design abilities.
And it's not that the VP didn't LIKE my designs, he is skeptical of trying to push them through and get one of them approved. He also fears that it would not be consistant with the rest of our web presence. Well, lets see: Considering our clients will NEVER see our Intranet site, it shouldn't NEED to look anything like that site.
Folks, this is what happens when you have people telling you what to do that have little to no creative taste and absolutely no web-sense about them. This is not to imply that I'm an expert, because I make no claims as such.
Maybe we'll just go text-only.
February 05, 2002
XMUG Meeting
Busy busy day. Even though it wasn't a Monday, it definitely felt like one to me.
I did a short presentation on "What I do with my Mac" at tonight' XMUG meeting. I was not at all prepared, but it went ok anyway, I suppose. I got a chance to show everyone in the group how I manage my websites and what kind of technologies I use. People seemed genuinely interested and asked lots of questions, so I guess that's a good thing. We also had officer elections and I was "voted" in as the new Communications Director of the group. What does that mean? Well, I'll be in charge of maintaining the website and handing all internal (and external) communications. I think it's going to be great. The truth of the matter is, I feel like the group is due for a new group of officers..you know..to shake things up a bit. You know that thin layer of film that soup gets after it sits for a while on the stove? Yeh, the group was starting to get some of that. It's time to dip our ladel in and stir things up!
Running on fumes..
Wow, it looks like I've gone a record 5 days without writing anything on here. But, what do you expect when you're helping your grandparents move, thinking about buying your first house, building a bad-ass custom vehicle website, maintaining another custom vehicle website, and maintaining your company's Intranet (on your day OFF)? Oh, and don't forget fixing other people's home computers in your spare time. SHEW.
Tonight, we had the people at Ryan Homes draw up another cost estimate sheet. One of the reasons we wanted them to do this was because we decided that it's probably a good idea to put more down than the minimum 3%. So, we wanted to see how that would affect our monthly payments. It didn't help as much as I had hoped. But in this case, adding (or subtracting) $1,000 from the total cost of the house adds (or subtracts) $7 on the monthly payments. Want to add a soaking tub? $1000...or an extra $7/month. Take out the skylights in the master bedroom? You can subtract that $7/month from your payments. Decide to pay another $3000 down? Take a whoping $21 off each month's payment. I was hoping for a more dramatic change. Phooey.
I've posted photos from helping my grandparents move into their new assisted living place in Bridgewater, near my parents' house. It's a really nice place for them and I really think they'll be much better off there.
And now, I'm worn out. I got a ton of other stuff acomplished today, including getting pricing on some window decals for CustomTacos. Pretty exciting. If only I had another day off. Oh yeh. I took the day off for my birthday today. Yay me. Go me. Go to bed, me. *snore*