Office Cafe

Hurricane Ike Heads for Office Cafe

This is now old news. Please check the National Hurricane Center for the latest.

Hurricane Ike

As of the 11:00 PM advisory from the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Ike is headed for the home of Office Cafe. The site is hosted in Florida, just a little north of the black dot with the “H” on it, labeled “8 PM Tue.” Obviously, this is not great news.

Note: Click this link for the latest on Ike: Hurricane Ike Graphics

We will get a chance to test out our emergency backup systems. At this time, we are counting on AT&T for data connectivity during the hurricane. We have a generator powered by natural gas from the local gas company. I have other sites hosted by others in other parts of the country, so Office Cafe could quickly be moved to one of those, but for the time being, the primary server will be used to test our emergency systems.

For another point of view on the hurricane, please check out the blog of a good friend of ours, David Helbig. He can be found at davidhelbig.com. He will be reporting from within the storm. He blogs on a variety of topics, so please look around while you are there, and enjoy a good read.

While you are at it, my wife, Marla blogs on many interesting topics. Coffee Shop Journal is where you can find her blog. Many people check in with her daily. She has a perspective that really makes you think. Check it out!

With the storm still in the Atlantic, several factors will steer its direction and strength. The computer models do not all agree with the forecast track. We are accustomed to keeping an eye on the predicted track for several days as the hurricane nears. So we still hope and pray that Hurricane Ike will take a steeper turn away from the Eastern seaboard, heading harmlessly back out to sea. But we will continue to prepare, because in Florida, that’s just what we do.

Switching Mom and Dad to Mac

This was a banner week! Mom and Dad decided to replace their WindowsXP machine with an iMac. Yes, they are grandparents and yes, they decided that they could learn a new operating system. Their needs are normal: e-mail, web browsing, and looking at pictures of their (nearly grown) grandchildren.

The setup was easy (except for Bellsouth’s e-mail). The e-mail setup would have been a little easier if we had the correct passwords. (The ones they had written down were not correct). After a little help from AT&T (which now owns the Bellsouth assets), we were able to get them to check their e-mail.

Sending e-mail, however is a bit of a trick with AT&T/Bellsouth accounts. After scouring the web for a few minutes and working out when to put the full e-mail address instead of just the username portion (the part before the @ symbol), we finally got mail outgoing. Once you know where to put what, Mac OS X’s Mail 3 Application works just great, even with AT&T/Bellsouth.

I got e-mails from both Mom and Dad, so I know everything is working. My mom thinks she may have deleted a bunch of her mail, but I assured her that they were simply in the trash, and could be gotten back if she moved them back to her inbox before the week was out (Mail defaults to emptying messages from the trash after a week).

The best part of switching them to Mac, was … drumroll please … I can now help them over iChat! I can request to take over their screen, move the mouse and help them do whatever they wanted to accomplish, all the while maintaining an audio chat while I help them.

Well, actually, that’s not the best part of switching them to Mac. The best part is that I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, keyloggers, shopping “helpers”, spyware, and other malware that is often found on Windows machines. I know, they are not non-existent, but my experience (and those of my teenagers on their own MacBooks) has been that viruses are MUCH harder to get.

The part they seem to like best is video chatting. It is so easy with iChat. With our oldest going to college away from home next year, they are looking forward to “seeing” her, even when she is in school.

I rest easier knowing that helping them accomplish anything on the Mac is only a mouse-click away. Not that I mind helping them in person, it’s just that sometimes a small matter can be cleared up in just a few minutes over iChat. And we can get caught up with the latest happenings, all at the same time!

Congratulations Mom and Dad!

Tags: Mac, Think

Back to the Original Server

A few days back, I decided to move OfficeCafe to another server so I could rebuild this one. It’s done. I had about a half hour of down time while I made the old server stop listening for connections, powered up the new server, and made WordPress talk to MySQL again.

Again, Bryan J. Hong’s book, Building A Server With FreeBSD 7, came in real handy. I had rebuilt this server so that my standard directory structures could be implemented.

The main problem I had was that WordPress could not access the MySQL database. Checking back in the book, I realized that I had missed a step on page 215. I needed to create the wordpress.conf file and restart Apache. MySQL also needed to be restarted:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server restart

That did the trick. We’re back and running. The preparation for the move back involved backing up the database(s), copying them to the new server, and restoring them.

There are a lot of details involved in moving a WordPress blog from one server to another (and back)! I don’t recommend making a habit of it. But in the process, I realized that having a backup of the database and the root directory of the blog is a great thing to do. If I need to move it to another server, I should be able to pick up the main files and drop them into place and keep going!

Tags: Technical, Virtual Hosting

The Third Place

Over at Coffee Shop Journal, Marla talks about one of my favorite topics. I love to be in the Coffee Shop, just bumping into the people. If you frequent one or two shops with any regularity, you will get to know the people around you. Sometimes you don’t get a chance to know their names, but even so, you nod or smile to acknowledge that they exist. Even that can be a comfort to some lonely soul.

Her blog post is a fun read. She names a few regular characters and a few that just pass through. Take a minute and read it.

And oh, The Third Place? Well there is already a lot on the topic, but if home is the First Place, work is the Second Place, the Third Place is where you hang out: church, the coffee shop, the mall, the park, the bookstore, etc. See Marla’s blog. She describes it in several posts.

Tags: Think, Third Place

Alone But Not Lonely

Today I spent a little time at Starbucks. I had been doing errands and one errand took me to the same plaza as one of the oldest Starbucks in the county. I stopped in to sit and think for a while. I was alone, but thanks to friends who were already there, I was not lonely. Our conversations were brief, but just long enough to connect and get caught up.

It is good to sit and think. An idea popped into my head and fortunately for me, the iPhone works great in this situation. I wanted a quick answer to a technical question, and within a few minutes I was reading a post from someone who had already gone down the road I was about to go down myself.

It is a good time to think about business and family, too. Goals and new ideas can be brought to mind by just looking around the room. This time someone thoughtfully left today’s newspaper on the small round coffee table next to me. I don’t know what new ideas may come from the headlines I scanned or the article that I read. Sometimes that doesn’t come for a couple of days. But just the act of being there usually makes the stop about more than just the coffee.

I do not discount the value of just relaxing. But today I needed mental stimulus. And I found it. I remembered a small project that I had in mind. I needed a part for the next step. And I realized that I had one more stop on the errand trail today.

Tags: Errands, Think