website

You may have noticed that the site has changed a bit. I upgraded the site to use the Drupal CMS which is a change from the Jetbox CMS. Drupal has a really clean design and an incredible amount of functionality. Everything has been migrated and you'll notice that all of my previous entries are now back on the site (back to 2003!)

There is something about that though. The old entries used an old markup language of escaping and other things that were processed pre and post database. Drupal does it completely different so you'll notice weird marking. In time I'll go through them and clean it up. But hey they are there.

Ok. so enjoy the new site, check out the google maps, videos and the RSS feeds. Whoo hoo! (Click on track the geek.)

Over the past two months I have been extremely busy with moving across the country, starting a new job, moving into a new place and on top of all that dealing with an incompetent web hosting company. I  previously hosted my websites with Reyox networks. oooh man do they suck. Anyhow everything is now moved off of their servers and onto new servers hosted by a different company. All the sites should be back online and stable now.

So what have I been up to?  

Well. I started a new job as the Director of IT for a local NYC non-profit; Manhattan Neighborhood Network. I saw the job posting about one week after moving to NYC and I had a strong feeling that this was the job I needed. I am starting my fourth week of employment with MNN and so far it has been the absolute perfect match of my skills. Not only that but the work atmosphere is awesome and I really do enjoy working for the company. You'll be hearing more about my job in the upcoming future. 

Work has really consumed a lot of my time. Prior to starting my new job I moved out to Brooklyn and I have two really awesome roommates; Keila and Albert. I have pictures of my place and the remodel that I did to my room which I'll be posting really soon.

Oh check out the videos section I finally posted 3 of my videos online. I have more but I need to get them compressed and ready for the web.  

My web hosting company deleted 3 weeks of data on my site and, at this point, is refusing to restore. I've begged and pleaded to no avail.

Today is the one year anniversary of the WiredGeek.com Blog!!!

Yes I know you are all excited about this anniversary as I am.

Ok.. excitement is over, I'm sick and I'm going to bed now.. Have a good day.

I'm sure that you are all wondering why I haven't posted any blog updates for a while.

Maybe I have been extremly busy?
? nope, even when I am busy I still update my blog

Maybe I was abducted by aliens?
??nope wrong again. If I was abducted I would have written about it. I mean come'on how cool is that?!?

Maybe I forgot how to write
?? possible.

The real reason I haven't updated my blog in such a long time is much more simple. I accidentally locked myself out of my own server. Yes, I admitted it. Several weeks ago I executed a command which was?meant to put one of the websites, hosted on my server, into read-only mode. Unfortunately the command put every website into read-only mode including my own. The only way for me to undo my changes was to SSH into the box. Since bad luck tends to hit in pairs SSH was also not working(also related to a permissions issue). This left me no with no other resort than to be physically in front of the box.

Now.... for more bad computing luck.

While installing another hard drive into the WiredGeek server I accidentally executed a delete command on the wrong directory. The directory was, unfortunately, leilakaldani.com which meant that every single one of the 800+ photos of my niece, and her father's side of the family was erased. Fortunately I had performed a backup a little over one month ago. Unfortunately I had not performed a backup in over a month!!! It took me 30 minutes to restore the data from backup and another 3 hours to scour the hard drive for the remaining bits of deleted data. In the end I was able to recover about 95% of the site.

After this event I am setting up a back-up system.

First I need to answer Oleg's question. Ya man I'm cool. School is keeping us all busy, we actually do have quite a bit and when you combine it with our ongoing business project we've been doing homework most every night. We have, however, been able to get to the beach to do some homework and also some cliff diving. It's been nice. So just think about this, while you are sitting in your office cubicle doing some number crunching we are working on our homework while watching the sunset over the mediterrean with a bunch of bikini-clad french women around us. So how's Portland ;)

Now about the website. For those of you that are frequent visitors you'll notice that I have made a few changes. First I changed the gallery around a bit. The changes were made to make it easier for me to do things remotely. Secondly I added a new gallery. This gallery is open for all PSU Euromed students to upload their pictures to, so hopefully you'll get an opportunity to see what the other students have been doing. In all honesty, every other student has had much more time than Jenson, Amanda and I have had. We used our time to work on our business project.

Other than those changes the website is the same; boring as ever.

So now the question on all of your minds, What did I do today?

Today our class took a trip to Puyricard?Chocolaterie. Puyricard is a chocolate/confectionary company that produces all of its products by hand and sells them in their own shops. Think of Godiva and then multiply the quality by 50.?Most of their products are made so fresh that they have to be eaten within 3 weeks after production but a few of their products last longer. After we toured the factory they took us back to the boutique and gave us all the chocolate that we could eat. I though I died and went to heaven.

I took full advantage of the free chocolate and dug right in. The first piece I picked up was wrapped in pink foil and I unwrapped it as fast as I could and shoved the entire thing in my mouth. That's when I realized that what I had picked up was a raspberry liquor candy and that I had just essentially taken a shot of whiskey (Although I'm not really sure what type of liquor it was, I just know that it was really strong). I make very interesting faces when I am expecting chocolate and I get a shot of liquor. My next piece of candy was not foil wrapped and I asked what it was before I shoved it in my mouth.

After the chocolate factory the bus dropped us off in AIX-EN-Provence a small town near Marseille. Other than neat buildings and shopping it wasn't anything exciting. I did, however, take quite a number of good pictures. I'll post them up tomorrow after class. So check back here tomorrow around 6pm my time (do the conversion for your own time zone).

That's all I have for now. I will post again tomorrow and maybe on Friday. On friday at 1am, however, I board a train destined for Barcelona,Spain and then I'm off to Salamanca, Spain. Once I find an Internet Cafe in Spain I'll post.

Blog notification is working now. I was having some trouble getting mail to send correctly but everything is working just fine now. I was going to write a fancy blog tonight, but I am pretty tired so I am going to go to bed instead.

By the way, if you sign up for automatic blog notification an email will sent to your email address whenever I post a new blog entry. That way you won't have to check my site every day. Good concept, eh?

night all.

I was going to write a very interesting blog tonight with cool stories about milk, cereal and the world of tiny little fairies that live under my bed but instead I coded! (I know shocker, eh). My blog section now has comments, isn't that cool!!! It took me a little while to figure out the phplib template system but as you can tell I figured it out. I am going to bed now..
Comment away you crazy wrascals.

Ok here's the deal. When I buy a domain name I buy the domain name so that I and I alone (with the exception of a few of my friends) can you use the domain name. BUT NOOO it can't be that way can it. Freakin Spammers have to spoof my domain when sending THEIR spam. Leave my domain alone!!!!
In short here's the deal spammers are sending out emails with the FROM email of "Jimmy@wiredgeek.com" or "Sam@wiredgeek.com". These accounts do NOT exist, never have and never will. It's just a ploy to get past mail servers and it is probably working from time to time..

Unfortunately, my only recourse, short of hunting them down and shooting them, is to stop the wildcard email matching at wiredgeek.com. I.E no more sending mail to me at "crazyguy@wiredgeek.com" or "whatupdog@wiredgeek.com". No more; those days are gone.(I know, sad isn't it) The only emails I will get from now on are "Jacob[~at~]WiredGeek.com" along with jredding, jacobredding, redding and dextor.

I hope that's understandable. Oh and if you participate in SPAM, do everyone a favor and pop everyone of those viagra pills you just bought and go f@wK yourself!! (I'm a little angry).

I just finished yet another website. This time for the surf club. Check it out www.surfing.pdx.edu