I’ve maintained a Dedicated Server with some friends for a few years now. First we were with 1&1. That turned out to be a disaster from the get go. Their support was unbelievably bad and we had all kinds of problems getting things setup. Our server eventually got turned in to a zombie spammer by some botnet. At that point we decided to move to Server Beach. The quality of their service and systems was much better. We stayed with them for the last two years and it was a solid two years. But once again, our server was recently zombified by a botnet. This time it was more our fault for neglecting server upgrades/patches for nearly a year.

Our focus previously was to have a server we could develop custom sites for through our company (Binary Moon Studios). Having a Dedicated Server allowed us to host our client’s sites and have a sandbox that we had a lot of control over. It worked out pretty well. As BMS is a freelancing outlet, the throughput of business varies widely based on what we are all up to with our regularly scheduled lives. We’ve all been pretty busy so we haven’t sought out new contracts or clients. These days we are mostly hosting personal sites and that has shifted our server needs.

This time we decided to get away from having a Dedicated Server and move to a managed/shared solution. I keep seeing tweets about people loving Media Temple. I checked them out and now we’re in the middle of migrating to them. The two big factors in choosing them was their virtualized “grid” structure and the fact that it was a managed account (we are no longer responsible for maintaining the server). Most hosts have you rent a physical box and you don’t have an easy way to upgrade it - upgrades usually mean migrating to another psychical box. With Media Temple we aren’t stuck with a piece of hardware that is aging and will eventually require us to migrate.

However, it doesn’t matter how well a hosting company is put together, migrating from one to another is always a painstaking process. Half of the reason for this post is to make sure my site is functioning properly now that it has been moved I have the tough part (database portion) figured out and now its just a matter of rinsing/repeating a few times and we’ll be back to normal. Back to command line land for me!

I think what I had in mind when I took up Mountain Biking was something closer to Hill Biking. I lived in Arizona for so damn long I forgot what traversing a real mountain feels like. If you don’t do it on a regular basis, it makes you feel like a worthless meatbag. Once you do it a few times and your body starts adjusting, it does end up being a lot of fun

Each weekend I try to go out at least once and find a new place to ride. I’ve been using a combination of online trail reviews and maps, plus a book I picked up. None of them work 100% of the time. I combine forces to insure I find something and don’t end up wasting my time.

In my experience, the various trail review sites are hit and miss. Most are user entry and instruct you to “keep going down Road X until you see a rock on the left. Pull off and park. Trail picks up right by the rock.”. Seriously. That’s shitty.

The book I am using is entitled Bay Area Biking and I find it a useful place to start looking for trails. The difficulty rating the author uses doesn’t really make any sense to me. Being a beginner, I’m looking for the easy stuff right now. More than once I’ve been duped by comforting pics of reasonably elevated terrain and the ever deceiving “low” difficulty rating of 2. Only to arrive at the location and wonder WTF IS A LEVEL 5 LIKE IF THIS IS A LEVEL 2?!! I HOPE A BEAR EATS ME, ANYTHING TO STOP THE PAIN!

Once you find the starting location, it’s usually in a park. The park will inevitably have a bunch of trails inside it. Another shortcoming of the book is that it doesn’t show you the suggested trail in context to the off-shoots and other trails. When an intersection appears it’s not always clear which path is the one you are trying to follow. Is it the big Fire Road that goes up the hill, a trail that cuts back…sort of in the direction you came from or that vaguely defined deer trail to the left that looks like it might lead you off a cliff? I can’t wait until I can just carry flexible, digital paper that lets me zoom in and out on maps when I’m in the middle of no where. Enhaaance!

On every outing, I have had my camera with me. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve kept any of the photos so far (that’s on par though). I did take a pic with my phone last weekend. I had just reached the end of one length of the trail. I decided to turn around and go back the way I had come. As soon as I turned around to get back on the trail I saw this sign. It’s a stereotypically bad camera phone shot, but it gets the point across, “The odds on this trail are stacked against you. Enjoy!”

While getting this shot off my phone, I realized it says “No Weapons” on the top right. Are you fucking kidding me?! If I find a sign at a trail head giving me instructions on how to duel a Mountain Lion, I’m changing out my backpack for a flame thrower.

If you’re like me, you expect everyone and everything you interact with to be as high tech as possible. There is a lot of technology out there and everyone should be using as much as they can. If you have that attitude, you’ve no doubt run in to people that think you’re crazy.

Why doesn’t the GPS in my car update itself from a satellite or open wi-fi signals I drive by? Why don’t you have texting enabled on your phone? Why can’t I just IM a sales rep from your website? Why the hell are you using MapQuest?! Why aren’t you blogging about your business? Why can’t I point my phone, like a Tricorder, at any product and get details about it?

And on and on. None of this is really impossible. It’s not like I’m demanding my own spaceship with an FTL drive. Granted, when it comes to the level of personal involvement in technology, each of us has to decide how wired we want to be. I’m just going to make a grumpy face at you when you tell me you aren’t connected for at least 18hrs a day.

Businesses, on the other hand, have no excuse. Well…they spew plenty of excuses. Too costly, too complicated, “we’re working on it”, etc. Businesses that haven’t figured out that technology, specifically the Interwebs, is key to their survival are quickly dying off. Many are lagging behind and don’t even seem to know what to do with all the options available to them. Take this tweet I saw from @AcmePhoto this morning –

“Marketing failure w/ company I love & trust. They did it wrong w/ email blast. From line “customer-service” subject line “Email blast” ;-(”

If a company can’t handle a technology that has been thoroughly explored, such as email, what are they going do when the Social Web eventually comes charging their way? All they will hear is “I’m the juggernaut, bitch!” and then the lights will go out.

I actually worked for a company that handled email campaigns for big brands like IBM, Polaroid and Sony. There was no sophistication with how these campaigns were prepared and processed. It was embarrassingly low tech and management wasn’t up for investing anything to make these efforts more accurate and profitable. Oh and guess what! They went under! Hahaha, that fact gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

If you have suggested that your company start blogging, that they setup a live video stream, that someone should man a Twitter account or expose their culture via photos on Flickr, thank you. You’re not alone and we all appreciate your efforts. If they looked at you like you’re crazy, it’s ok. Just envision them eventually being tossed in to the Bonfire of Ignorance with the rest of the technologically illiterate companies.

The reason I decided to write about this is that I keep finding organizations that have Twitter accounts and are using them effectively. They are actually interacting with their followers like a normal person instead of only spamming robotic updates (one of the rare situations where I’m not advocating robots :P). Quite a few high profile companies are tweeting. Technically. The number of companies that do it right are few and far between in my experience. If you use Twitter, you’ve experienced the bots that come through and add everyone and have nothing to say except prepared messages. Thanks for making more spam, asshats!

A couple of the good guys I’ve found recently are @goldengatepark (de facto park site) and @scifri (Science Friday on NPR). Now maybe a slick ad agency person convinced them to venture out in to the Twitterverse or maybe someone listened to a “crazy person”. Either way, someone did a good job