• Vibrant community, on the forums and Campfire
• Wonderful docs by Pickled Onion (holy crap, there are eBooks now?)
• Amazing customer support, also via Twitter
• Great uptime and low latency

Montastic tells me that Slicehost suffered a bit of downtime during my time with them (via a quick Gmail search), but it happened so rarely that I can’t recall ever being frustrated at the service. (How about Dreamhost, you ask? Ahem.)

It’s been quite the experience, trying to admin a VPS at Slicehost. It was a lot of fun and pain trying to set up an Ubuntu server from scratch. I learned quite a bit, and found respect for all the unsung sysadmins out there.

But lately, learning more and more about the art and science of system administration almost feels like premature optimization. That’s not to say that the subject matter is not interesting (or easy, because it’s completely insane how the Internet exists), but I’m going to wait until when the optimization becomes that much more effective.

This feeling is magnified by what I’ve been doing with this slice. The full potential of this $20/mo slice has gone to waste, being used to host only this WordPress install.

The fact is that I bought this slice, thinking that I would be deploying some major webapps. You see, past-JK would have thought that future-JK would be awesomeing all over the place. Current-JK is sad that this is not the case.

But he is hopeful. Uh, back to first-person.

I’m hopeful. I also have a couple non-programming projects I want to start up, and it’d be nicer to have a solution that has a more pay-as-you-go style of billing. I am back to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Change. Change always brings something new and exciting, doesn’t it?

And this post is how I end the first half of the year of 2009. Kinda not very exciting, but I’m learning to find excitement apart from dates that have merely numerical quirks.

Tomorrow’s going to be quite the day of packing. Lots left to box and move into my car for the drive back into Ohio.

I don’t know what version to call this “Lair”, but this is how it looks for now.

I guess I should post a full tour of the place, but really, it’s just a regular apartment. I don’t know what some people are wanting… maybe after a couple weeks of decorating I’ll be able to show some coolness.

The move wasn’t too crazy. I’m happy that I have so little stuff. Pretty much all my stuff falls into four categories: kitchen accessories (with a small box of toiletries), clothing, books (and all the paper documents), and electronics (oh the cables… so many freaking cables…). Over the year, I intend to start a scanning project of all my old documents, as well as start selling even more crap I don’t need.

All the while I’m realizing how little stuff I truly have, I’m realizing how much bigger this apartment is compared to the last one. There are too many cabinets and closets going unfilled. I liked the limits that were placed at my last place.

However, I am enjoying the much larger and more traditionally shaped living room. My last one was much longer than it was wide, and so it created an interesting situation with my work desk/bench. Now, I have plenty of room to mess around with.

Time to go look at some posters and dry-erase boards. A printer/scanner is also being researched.

• Mailing Address (done): USPS
• Financial: Chase (done), Chase Credit Card (done), Charles Schwab (done), FNBODirect (completed), HSBC (completed), Zecco (screw it, I’ll do this later), Paypal (done)
• Work/Insurance Companies: Nessie (Oh dear lord, the illinois.edu change has made a mess… will do this later), Health, Dental, Vision
• Online Stores: Amazon (done), Ebay (done), ThinkGeek (I like the catalogs…, completed)
• Utilities (disconnected): Power (08.04), Water(08.04), Internet(07.30)
• Etc: Gamefly (done), Wired

Note to self: (done) means the new address, (completed) means new new address.

There should be an app that does all of this for a one time fee. I’d pay for it. I actually will be moving again in three weeks, after my new lease starts at my new apartment. When that happens, I’m going to have to go through most of these sites again. Ugh.

I bet, though, this is going to be near impossible other than hacking through some of these sites because of the lack of an API, or completely impossible if a service doesn’t have an address change form available online. Never say never, though.

Sidenotes Galore

I was met with some of the worst and the best UI on the Internets while changing my addresses. Just a few sidenotes, for my reference and for yours.

• Ebay Address Changing SUCKS: You have to type in the same information three times. There should be a “Change All”.
  • Registration address
  • Payment address
  • Primary shipping address: But this one is nice, because it matches up with your PayPal account
• I still hate HSBC’s User Interface
  • Minor nuisance: I had to go into “Customer Service” to change my address, labeling wasn’t clear
• Funding your Zecco account is still a pain. I’m going to continue to hold off on using a service with such a trashy money moving system.
  • The instructions are ridiculously convoluted.
• Whoa. The USPS Address Change form restricts me from copying and pasting my confirmation email address. Makes sense. More sites need to do this (even though it’s annoying for me).
• I love Mint. Just a few minor UI issues aside, it’s beautiful. I wonder if Mint is working on some glorified address changer. It’d make sense for them to do it, since they already have a universal login screen across multiple banks and financial institutions.
• Amazon’s Address Book: There’s a confirmation page for removing an address, but there is no easy to access cancel button.

Of course, I would love to cut to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”… Yeah, I can’t get it out of my head either. It’s such a great song.

Sidenote: I got surprised about the $3M buyout of the “Where I’ve Been” by TripAdvisor. Yeap, turns out it’s nothing.

After 17… seventeen years in the states… these are the states I’ve touched (and one province from going over Niagara Falls). You know, I’ve done a huge circle.

For the 80th time, I am currently employed at MoCo, Inc. in sunny-right-now-but-it’ll-snow-soon-enough Minneapolis, Minnesota. Today concluded my first week of a full-time job. Tiring, but definitely something new.

Thankfully, I was able to find two nice roommates with a house about 4 miles north of my job. Let me take you back to some of the happenings that led up to this.

The Hunt

After finding out that there would be some kind of relocation assistance from the company, I left Amir’s place in Madison, Wisconsin for the second time and headed up.

The journey was yet another 6 hours of driving. There was a nice 6 hour drive from Champaign to get to Madison. Plus the 4 hours it took to get there from Cincinnati. If I ever wanted to go back home this route… it would take me a full day’s drive. At least, I’ll get to visit some people on the way back down.

There were a couple of places I found through Craigslist. I found a group of buildings that were owned by this lovely management group, but wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. I wanted to live as close to the city as possible, probably because I had this really Romantic notion of the “city”. Of course, I don’t really do too much of that to begin with, so I don’t know why I was fooling myself.

Another place was about 30 minutes West of the city, lodged in between the millions of lakes here in Minnesota. Rent was cheap… but location wasn’t too good.

All throughout this time, I was getting situated in the city… soon finding out that the streets of Minneapolis is crazy. The numbering system for the streets are a little bit more sane than St. Paul (they tell me that city was designed by drunk Irishmen), but naming streets as numbers followed by a “Street” or “Avenue” which were also followed by a compass heading (1st Ave N & 1st St N… it doesn’t help that the abbreviation of street is the same as the “st” following the 1…) wasn’t too helpful either. I just went ahead and said screw it to the numbers, and went off of the streets that had names… like Hennepin and Washington.

Right. So I ended up ending the search at this very suburban city called Columbia Heights.

The Job

It’s a nice small company, just like how I like them. Quickly, I learned the names of all my coworkers in the web development department. Going out to lunch everyday with them really helped in this process. I think I’m going to keep doing that… even though previous budget would freak out.

The building has a great view of Minneapolis, even though I have to stand from my cubicle to see it. I’m growing to like cubicles, as long as they’re low like these: They definitely create pockets of productivity now and then.

I like what we’re working on, and that we’re developing things in the B2C side. I also like how I’m learning more and more of the stuff that I believe in.

Closing

Looks like this might be pretty good for a while. I don’t know for how long… it could be short, it could be long… but it’s fine the way things are.

Kinda. You’ll see what I mean in the next posts to come.