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My New (Old) Office

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I move back to old quarters.

I spent much of today preparing to move my office back into my house. Late in the afternoon, Mike arrived from work and we loaded a bunch of stuff into the back of his pickup. I’m now typing this from my relocated office.

For the three and a half years, my office has been in a condo I own in downtown Wickenburg. I moved it there after the last tenant broke their 1-year lease and abandoned the place. When I discovered that nice white carpet (installed by the previous owner; I’m not a complete idiot, you know) completely trashed, I decided I was sick of tenants and sick of having a three bedroom house with only two occupants and no guest rooms.

We moved our offices to the condo in August 2003 (I think). It was nice to have a dedicate workspace, a place I had to go to to work. It got even nicer when DSL became available and I could get fast Internet.

But as time went by and I got more and more involved with my helicopter work, the downtown office became an inconvenience. If I had a call for a flight, I’d have to hurry home and get changed into normal clothes before driving to the airport. That was about 30 minutes shot to hell. And I started to get lazy, to not want to go to work in the morning. That’s not a good thing when I’m facing a deadline.

I wanted an office at Wickenburg Airport, but the powers that be in Wickenburg decided my small business wasn’t worthy. I guess I told too many truths on wickenburg-az.com. Made a few people feel uncomfortable. They decided to punish me by not letting me have an office at the airport. When I got the FAA involved — after all, the town’s agreement with the FAA has an “economic non-discrimination” clause — they started “cooperating” and finally got around to putting out an RFP for the 1000 square feet of land I had my eye on. But do I really want to be a tenant of the town? I thought so at first, but after dealing with the town’s crap for the past eight months, I’m pretty sick of it all and not very interested in giving the town any of my money. Frankly, most of my business comes from Scottsdale these days anyway. I’m still trying to decide whether to bid on the space after all.

So I decided to move my office back into the second bedroom at our house, the same room that was my office when we first moved here 10 years ago. It’s a 12 x 10 space with a nice, big closet. There’s no additional cost and a nice tax deduction for a home-based office. Best of all, I can go to work at any time of the day or night without commuting a single mile.

Mike’s office, which occupied the master bedroom of the condo, has been reduced to the size of a desk and set of shelves in the upstairs “den” where the television and stereo are. Not too shabby. He tunes into Sirius radio on Dish Network while he’s working and listens to it in surround sound. The window he faces has the best view in the house.

The view from my officeMy window also has a nice view. It looks out into the garden with the mountains in the distance. I just finished setting up the Webcam for wickenburg-az.com, which shows the view. Here’s the small view. (Well, if you’re looking at this during the week of January 22, you might actually be seeing the inside of KBSZ studios; there’s a tiny Webcam problem right now.) When spring comes, I’ll start working in the garden again. I’m looking forward to it. I miss gardening, but when my office was in town, I never seemed to have time for it.

Right now, 2/3 of my L-shaped desk has been moved into my office. My Dual G5 computer and the big 20-inch Sony monitor has been hooked up. I put the Dell speakers on the computer, but I think the old Altec Lansings sound better, so I’ll put them on tomorrow. I’ll get the last piece of my desk later in the week, after I clear space in this room for it. (Still got one of the old “library” shelves in here.) That’s also when I’ll bring in the printers and the Ethernet hub.

Other stuff that cluttered my office is gone. I sold the G4 that was my Web server — it sold for $335 on eBay yesterday and I shipped it out today — and I moved the G4 eMac to KBSZ studios for audio streaming. Today, I disassembled the Dell Dimension L933r computer that was my old PC test mule in preparation for donating it to the local library. My old Strawberry iMac (a G3) is in the garage, waiting for me to restore it to factory settings and dispose of it. I gave my old clamshell iBook SE to my next door neighbor, who is home-schooling her four young kids. She now has her own “computer lab.”

That leaves me with a very reasonable 3 computers for my work: my Dual Processor G5 (now about 3 years old), my relatively new Dell Latitude D820 laptop test mule, and my reasonably new 15″ Mac Book Pro test mule. Oh yeah, and my 12″ G4 PowerBook, which I really can’t part with. No need for all the desk space I had in my downtown office. I’m even cutting myself down to two printers (rather than the 3 I had accumulated). Look for some new items on eBay soon.

Getting rid of all this old equipment feels good. Although I actually threw away — in a Dumpster! — three external SCSI hard drives and a dual bay SCSI CD-ROM reader today, most of the other equipment is finding a good home. I hate throwing stuff away, but I really hate storing it. And let’s face it: old computer equipment has very little value these days.

So now I’m sitting at home in my office at 8:25 PM, listening to iTunes music on my G5 (right now: “Wish You Were Here” on Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd). It’s later than I’d usually be working. I think I’ll be working longer hours with my office in the house. Getting more work done. Blogging more.

And doing a lot of work in my pajamas once again.

Brew and Go

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I get a new coffee maker…again.

It’s disposable products all over again.

Brew and GoI’ve been using a Black and Decker coffee maker called “Brew and Go” (formerly, “Cup at a Time”) for about fifteen years now. I like fresh-brewed coffee every morning, but Mike doesn’t. It’s silly to make a whole pot — even if I do want a second cup, I won’t take it from a pot that’s been sitting on a burner for 30 minutes. So I make a single fresh cup every time I want one.

(And in case you’re wondering, I usually don’t drink brewed coffee in restaurants. Burner sludgification is one reason. The other is that most restaurants out here don’t know how to put enough coffee in the brew basket to make a strong enough cup. I think it’s because it’s pre-measured and it comes in bags. This is the same reason I’m avoiding those “pod” coffee makers. You can get decent restaurant coffee in New York and on the west coast, but in the midwest, southwest, southeast, and elsewhere, the only way I can get a cup of coffee that’s strong enough for me is to order a latte at a coffee shop.)

The other day, I bought my fourth or fifth one of these coffee makers. They work fine for about two years, then they start getting unreliable. The usual symptom is that they stop brewing before all the water in the reservoir has been heated and pumped up to the grinds. You wind up with a 2/3 full cup of coffee with leftover water. It isn’t a big deal to push the button again — usually that’s enough to get the rest heated and brewed. But experience has taught me that this is only the first of the pot’s symptoms. The next step is that button getting broken. And when that happens, the coffee maker won’t work at all.

So I consider the funky button a warning sign. I’ll need a replacement soon. So I went online and found a replacement for a good price on Amazon.com. (Note to my critics: Sadly, you can’t buy anything like this in Wickenburg, so shopping locally was once again out of the question.)

Oddly enough, they showed two models and the only difference I could see between them was the size of the machine. Since both were under $20 with only a $4 price difference and I figured that I could use one in my hangar, too, I bought them both. I was curious to see how they differed.

They arrived yesterday. Their boxes are identical with two exceptions:

  • One box says “Deluxe” (that’s the $17.99 model) and the other doesn’t (the $12.99 model).
  • One box illustrates and identifies a stainless steel travel mug (the $17.99 model) and the other one illustrates and identifies a plastic travel mug.

I opened the deluxe model and got a good whiff of the plastic aroma that accompanies many new appliances made primarily of plastic. I pulled out all the packing material, plugged it in, and brewed through some plain water. Then I decided to read the instructions for some tip to get the smell out. The instruction book only had four pages in English — not much to instruct.

Of course, the unit is made in China. I’m not sure if the original “Cup at a Time” was made in China. It was a long time ago. It was probably Taiwan back then.

I brewed up a cup of coffee using the built-in filter basket. I usually don’t use that thing because grinds get through it into the coffee. I like my coffee very strong and usually grind the beans to the first “Fine” setting on the machine at the supermarket. The “gold” filters that come with many coffee makers simply aren’t fine enough to prevent the grinds from going through. But I figured I’d try it a few times. If I could make a good cup of coffee with the reusable filter, I’d save a few bucks on paper filters — not to mention the time it takes to cut the #2 cone filters down to size. I’ll experiment over the next few days and maybe even get some coffee ground a litte coarser.

The first cup of coffee tasted a bit like the plastic I smelled. Or at least I assume so — I don’t make a habit out of tasting plastic. There’s a puddle of finely ground coffee at the very bottom of my cup, like mud on the bottom of a pond. The first problem will be remedied with time, the second will probably require a grind or filter change.

But the coffee maker performed flawlessly, using up all its water and making a nice, hot cup of coffee.

The old coffee maker is now sitting in the trash like the three or four that came before it. As we all know, it’s usually more expensive to get these things fixed than to buy a new one. That’s how the disposable economy came into being.

A little side story here. Our original DVD player only lasted about 5 years. We tried to get it fixed and everyone we brought it to quoted us a price to look at it that was more than the thing was worth. Then we tried to give it away to a school or electronics repair training facility so the students could use it to learn about the machine and/or how to fix it. No one would take it. Mind you, this isn’t a machine that had been abused. All of its parts pretty much still worked. It just didn’t play DVDs anymore. The only option was to throw it out.

I recently sold two very old Macs (an 8500 and a beige G3) on eBay. I got 99¢ for one and $9.99 for the other. Plus shipping, of course. Although I’d spent a total of more than $5,000 for the machines years ago, I was willing to take the money. Not because I needed the $10.98 but because I didn’t want to take the two machines — which were still perfectly functioning — to the landfill.

I guess their new owner will do that one day.

It’s time for another cup of coffee.

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The Server Project Begins

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I [finally] get Mac OS X 1.4 Server and start to plan for installation and deployment.

If you’ve been following this bLog, you know that I recently purchased Mac OS X 10.4 Server from someone on eBay. I got the software at a smoking price — less than the Apple employee discount, in fact — and considered myself very fortunate. The only thing I can’t figure out is why it took the seller more than 10 days to send the software to me in a flat rate Priority Mail box.

The software arrived in good condition. The box looked a little worn, as if it had been handled by too many people or shuffled around from one shelf to another. But the seals were intact and the box appears to contain all the discs, documentation, and proof of purchase info — including the all-important serial number — that a legal copy of the software should. So I’m pretty confident that I did not buy used or pirated software.

Now that I have the software, I have no excuse to put off my big server project.

The goal, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is to install Mac OS X 10.4 server on my current Web server machine and use the following features:
– Web server (Apache) with PHP and MySQL for dynamic content
– E-mail server
– Mailing List server
– FTP server
– Streaming Video (QuickTime)
– Blog

I’ll also set up secure space on the server to back up my own personal documents, as well as Mike’s.

In addition to all that, the server will continue to run the same other services the server runs now:
– FileMaker Pro databases
– Webcam
– Steaming Audio (for KBSZ-AM)

All this on a Power Macintosh G4 running at 866 MHz. Seems pretty ambitious, but we’ll see how I can do. If all else fails, I’ll take my old G3/300 (beige, mind you) out of retirement and use that for the Webcam and FileMaker Pro databases.

I’ve made a list of steps that need to be done to get the project going. Here’s what I hope to accomplish today:

1) Adjust the upload address for all Webcams. Although the KBSZ-AM Webcam currently uploads to some GoDaddy hosting space I have, I think the wickenburg-az.com and Editor SpyCam Webcams both upload to my current server. I need them to upload someplace that won’t be affected by the change — probably that GoDaddy space — so I don’t lose Webcam service. I also need to adjust all Web page references to that new space.

2) Adjust the file locations for the ini files I use to display sunrise/sunset and upcoming event info on various Web sites. This information is generated each morning as a text file that is inserted in the appropriate locations on various Web pages. I need to change the source location for the ini files in the Web page HTML and then set up an AppleScript that automatically uses Fetch to move the files where I said they’ll be right after the files are created.

3) Set up hosting on the GoDaddy server for the Web sites I host on my server. This is temporary and will give me the time I need to make all the changes on the new server before moving the sites back. Some sites will move over without any major changes. Other sites, like wickenburg-az.com and aneclecticmind.com will undergo complete facelifts using new features available to me in Apache and the blogging software that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 Server. By moving them off my server to a place where they’ll continue to be served without interruption, I won’t be rushed to build the new sites. Some will be at GoDaddy for less than a month; others might be there for several months.

Since it’ll take up to 48 hours for the DNS info on the Web site move to propogate, I’ll have to wait a few days after I finish these steps to move onto the next step. Hopefully, while I’m waiting, the new RAM will arrive. I’d already ordered and installed 512 MB of RAM on the server and quickly discovered that the RAM was bad. When I get the new RAM, I’ll install it and send back the bad RAM. It should arrive today. If this RAM doesn’t work, I can only assume that they sold me the wrong kind of RAM.

When I’m sure that the sites are being served from GoDaddy’s servers, I can move on with the next steps in the project. I’ll write about those later on.

Stay tuned for progress reports, including problems I’m sure to encounter. And wish me luck!

Snagged the Server!

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Another eBay success.

I managed to win an auction for a copy of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. Apple sells this for $995; I got it for $449 including shipping. According to the seller, it’s in an unopened box, so it sounds legal to me.

I’m excited about this. I’ve been sitting on the fence about switching to Mac OS X server for about two years now, but my recent dealings with the folks who sell WebSTAR made me decide to take the big step up. I run a bunch of Web sites on the G4 in my office. I also run a FileMaker Pro database Web publishing server, Webcam software, and audio streaming software.

I used to run e-mail there, too, but the IP address I had was somehow linked to a spam account and all my e-mail was getting bounced from the sender as spam. What a hassle that was. So I moved my theflyingm.com domain name to a GoDaddy.com server and use that for e-mail and hosting my podcasting files. Although I now have a different IP address, I think I’ll keep theflyingm.com on GoDaddy’s server. They offer a ton of bandwidth for a very affordable price.

Now, I need to come up with a plan of attack for the new server. I want to take my time about setting it up, so I’ll probably start by moving all the Web sites I host over to GoDaddy.com for a month. Then I’ll set up my new server’s features, step-by-step, and get the Web sites all in place. I’ll “flick the switch” back to my server and, with luck, there won’t be any service interruption at all.

Those of you reading this who don’t know about GoDaddy.com and have a need for domain name registration or Web site hosting should really check them out. They’re affordable and reliable and have excellent free technical support by phone. (E-mail tech support stinks.) They also have a lot of how-to documents on the site to answer the easy questions.

Speaking of how-to documents, I got an answer to my MIME Mapping question that pointed me to a file named .htaccess. A Google search got me the information I needed from the JavaScriptKit Web site’s Web Building Tutorials pages. I think this will be a gold mine of information for me as I work directly with a Unix-based Web server for the first time.

As I work my way through this project, I’ll probably report my progress here and provide detailed how-to information in the companion Web site for my Mac OS books — that’s where most readers interested in this kind of stuff are mostly likely to look for how-to information from me.

Oddly enough, I haven’t felt this excited about a computer project for a long time. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and to learning the new things that’ll make it all work.

Oh, and the good news is that I didn’t win the other hard disk auction.

MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, eBay Shopping

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Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Maria Speaks Episode 20: MPEG-4 Lessons, Server Woes, and eBay Shopping. This episode is a hodgepodge of information related to my podcasting efforts and the trouble it has been giving me lately. You can find the transcript of this podcast in the “Call Me a Geek” area of Maria’s WebLog. The easiest way to find that is to click the link on my home page, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Let’s start with the MPEG-4 lessons. If you’ve been following my podcasts, you know that I’ve begun creating the occasional enhanced podcast. Enhanced podcasts include images and links and are saved in MPEG-4 format with a .m4a extension. My other podcasts are saved in MP3 format with a .mp3 extension.

Podcast publishing is not exactly a simple task — well, not when you do it the way I do. After recording, editing, and saving the audio file, I then log into Blogger where I create a blog entry for the podcast. There’s a link field that I fill out with the URL for the audio file’s location on a server. I put a short blurb about the episode in the entry and publish it.

Publishing the entry on Blogger does two things. First, it creates the Maria Speaks home page. That’s the plain old Web page you see when you browse www.aneclecticmind.com/mariaspeaks. Then it creates an XML feed file called atom.xml, in the same location as the home page. This feed file has all the codes necessary for podcatching software — like iTunes and a bunch of others I really don’t know — to see and download the new audio files.

But that’s not what most subscribers use to access my podcast. They use my Feedburner feed. Every 30 minutes or so, Feedburner’s software checks out my atom.xml file to see if it has changed. If it has, it revises its version of my xml feed file, which can be found at feeds.feedburner.com/mariaspeaks. That’s the file most subscribers subscribe to and it’s the one with all the bells and whistles to make sure my podcast entries appear correctly in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere.

Sound confusing? It is, in a way. But I don’t usually have to deal with too much of it. As I said, I create and save the audio file, then create and publish the corresponding blog entry. Blogger, Feedburner, and subscriber’s software does the rest.

My MPEG-4 lesson started yesterday. Well, in all honestly, it started about four months ago, but I didn’t realize it then. Back then, it was a problem getting my podcasts to work. But I changed the way I was doing things and it started to work, so I assumed I’d been doing it wrong in the first place. Actually, I wasn’t.

Here’s the symptom: my enhanced podcasts weren’t accessible from the Maria Speaks podcast. Anyone trying to access the file from the Maria Speaks home page by clicking the entry name got an error message. File not found. And there was no attachment to either version of the xml feed file.

The regular podcasts were fine.

Thus began my troubleshooting exercise. I zeroed in on the difference in the file name extensions and started researching. To make a long story short, I discovered that in order for me to include m4a files in my podcasts, I had to set up a MIME mapping on the server to identify the m4a extension’s type as audio/MPEG.

If you’re completely lost, don’t worry about it. This isn’t the kind of thing most computer users need to deal with. I certainly don’t. Fortunately, I have a server in my office that I can set up MIME mapping. I added the appropriate entry, moved my m4a files over to that server, fixed the URLs in Blogger, republished, resynced Feedburner, and everything began working fine.

I’m still trying to find out if the server space I have on GoDaddy.com can be modified to add the MIME mapping I need there. I’d much rather serve from that server than the one in my office.

So that was my MPEG-4 lesson.

Server woes started this morning. I was still fiddling around with the MPEG-4 files and was very surprised to see that the folder on my GoDaddy server that I’d been using to store my MP3 files was gone. I mean gone like it was never there. And oddly enough, two folders that I thought I’d deleted were back. What the heck was going on?

I assumed that I’d accidentally deleted the missing folder and was mistaken about the other two folders. After all, I’ve been busy lately with my QuickBooks book and a bunch of unexpected helicopter charters. I was obviously being careless. So I rebuilt the missing folder from backup files on my iDisk and went to work.

All the way to work — it’s a ten-minute drive — I thought about my carelessness. And when I got to my office, I did some more research. What I soon realized was that all of the space on my GoDaddy server had been reverted to the way it looked on October 10. Over a month ago. What the heck was going on?

I called GoDaddy technical support and was fortunate enough to have a tech guy answer right away. I told him the symptoms. We did some brainstorming, using the info we both had. We soon discovered that on October 10, I’d requested a change from a Windows server to a Linux server. For some reason, it had taken GoDaddy five weeks to process the change. In the meantime, I kept uploading files to the Windows server when the Linux server was already set up but not accessible to my account. Last night, GoDaddy switched my access to the Linux server, which hadn’t been updated since I requested the change. So I was suddenly faced with a server that hadn’t been updated for five weeks and access to the server I’d been using all along was completely cut off.

Well, this wouldn’t have been so bad if I was using the server space for a Web site. I keep backup copies of all my Web site on my main production computer. If a Web site’s directory or disk is trashed, I can have it replaced in a matter of minutes. But the only thing I use this server for is storing my podcasting files. Not just for Maria Speaks but for KBSZ-AM’s Around the Town radio show, which is broadcast every weekday. When GoDaddy made its change, it wiped out about 20 podcast files.

The really tragic part of all this is that I’d been saving all those podcast audio files on my PowerBook’s hard disk. Two days ago, I got an onscreen message saying I was running out of disk space. Well, why not delete some of those podcasts, I asked myself. After all, I can always get new copies from the server.

Two days later, of course, I couldn’t.

Well, the GoDaddy tech guy was very helpful. He told me they’d do a server restore for the Windows server and copy the files in my directory there to the Linux server. Although GoDaddy usually charges $150 for this service, they admitted that they were at least partially at fault for the screw-up and waived the fee. Now I just have to wait up to 10 days for the files to reappear. And, when that happens, I have to re-upload any files I uploaded to the server between yesterday at midnight and the day the server is restored. Like this podcast.

Oh, and I did lose one of my enhanced podcast episodes. It was one of my better ones, too: Mac and Windows File Sharing. It was on my .

Mac disk space, which I also cleaned up in an effort to get rid of unneeded files. So if you have a copy of it — that’s the version with the m4a file extension — please send it to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’d really like to put it back online for the latecomers here. The lesson I learned in this ordeal is that I must have a copy of every single file I want to make available on a server. If I’d had all my files, I could have just restored the server back to its original condition and got on with my life. And not bore you with this story.

SmartDiskWhat’s weird about this is that I considered the server my backup and I deleted the originals, depending on the backup. If you recall my famous NaNoWriMo podcast episode, you’ll remember how I spoke about the importance of backups. Yeah, well the originals are important, too. Which brings me to the final topic of this podcast: eBay shopping. I’ve been surfing eBay for the past two weeks, trying to get a deal on a portable FireWire hard disk. The idea is to use the external hard disk to store all my media files, thus keeping them off my PowerBook’s internal hard disk, which is only 40GB. SmartDisk makes a drive called the FireLite and I figure I can get an 80GB model for about $130. There’s plenty to choose from, all in unopened boxes. But I seem to have the worst timing; I’ve lost about a dozen auctions in the past two weeks. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually bid on two of them at a time, knowing I can’t possibly win both.

That’s the same technique I used to snag a new iSight camera this week. I put the same bid on both cameras. I won one and lost the other. Fine with me. I figure I’ll bring the camera home and use it on my laptop for a Webcam and for iChat. I might also do some video podcasting — but don’t hold your breath on that.

My other big eBay acquisition is Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited. It’s about half the price on eBay as it is in the Apple Store. Sealed boxes, unregistered. Sounds almost too good to be true. We’ll see.

The server, of course, is so I can finally get rid of WebSTAR and do some serious Web hosting on my server. I’ll bore you with that in another blog entry.

That’s all for today. I hope you learned something from this mess. Thanks for listening!