Okay, so while I was happy with my account at Drundo, they did away with the account level I was on, but grandfather’d me in at my original level. All was hunky dory.

Last week, I get the message that they’ve ‘upgraded’ all the legacy accounts to the new equivalent. Higher price, without my permission, and while some parts were upgraded, others were downgraded.

So after consulting with the House Finance Manager (husband), I went looking for a new hosting company and plan.

I settled on webhost4life, and last night, began what I thought was going to be a tortuous session, and loss of email for days. Boy, was I surprised.

I grabbed the files from the old server, bought a new domain, then went and ordered the advanced package, with my new domain. Smooth enough. They up sold turbocharged – more disk space for a piddling amount which was fine – and soon I had a brand spanking new website. Time to migrate kaplooey. The only issue there was that I had to ask the helpdesk to fix the email on the kaplooey domain. within 30 minutes of the ticket, I had kaplooey email back up and running on the new server, transparent to outlook.

While migrating this blog, I upgraded to dasBlog 2.3. Smooth there as well, since this is not using a database.

So, I have a new web host, more space and features, for less than what I was originally paying before, even before my upgrade.

Part of the deal with webhost4life was 5 sql databases (It was a time limited offer, so good luck if you go after it. So I’ll be working more on my personal applications. Trying to fit it all into 1 was annoying.

Also, just to let you know, I’ve been on Twitter (as @kaplooeymom) more than here lately, cause it’s easier to do one-liners than blog entries.

Did I get it right?

Yes, I did! BTW, on Windows Server 2008, Network Service needs read/write permissions on your asp.net website - at least here on the new host. More about that later.

We had an amazing but exhausting time. We stayed at the Polynesian Resort, ate on the Disney Dining Plan, had three character meals, park hopper passes for 7 days, and arrived home utterly spent. Of course, I got sick, but that seems to be par for the course these days.

Here, have a pic. Cell phone snap of the girls with Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother.

Hey, I like alliteration.

Anyhoo, my pc is still not hooked up. I need a different usb cable to hook it up to the wireless receiver thingy. It’s prolly a good thing. The only machine hooked up to the internet right now is MyPrecious, and I can’t really waste time playing games or surfing on it.

I’m getting much more done, but I need my main pc up and running soon. Got the 5.5 yr old’s room cleaned out, and the laundry organized. Getting bunches of knitting done. Not finishing much, but working on works in progress.

Coupla birthday parties to take girls to today, then somehow force The Husband to celebrate his own birthday. He didn’t come from a big birthday celebrating family like I did, so it’s a bit like pulling teeth.

As soon as I get my main PC back up, I’ll start again with the technical posts. I wanna blog about the book app I’m building and do some writing about having a career when you weren’t looking for one.

Blogging using Live Writer, from MyPrecious – I think I’ll change the machine name tonite to reflect that.

Essential Software (links will be added later):

• Avast home free – with web and p2p only. I don’t use any other stuff.
• Visual Studio 2008 Express editions Web, C#, VB, MSDN Xpress, SQL 2008 Xpress.
• Notepad++
• PageFour
• Firefox
• XMarks set up in both Firefox and IE. I keep different bookmarks in each browser, and each browser is set up with their respective xmarks account.

I will be purchasing a cordless mouse. I’m not the touchpad kind of person. I seem to be typing this okay, so we’ll see how long term use when I have to do documentation or coding on site really works. But right now, this is cool.

It’s gonna be called ‘my precious’ – I just know it.

 

Loading all the essentials I’ll need for a mini/net book. And I’m interested more in the BOOK part, rather than the NET part. At least for now. I may or may not get a wireless plan for it. We shall have to see. But the opportunity to work on docs and code (with VS Express) wherever I am is the important part.

And it’s my favorite color. It matches my car, actually.

Not just the Answer. My age, as well.

I’ve done the introspection stuff required every year. I’ve reexamined my short term and long term goals. All privately, of course.

In other news, we’ll be heading to Disney world the end of June. We’re doing this right and staying 8 nights on premises, at the Polynesian. Still arguing with my husband about needing a rental car. He says no, but I may need to see if I can get one to go check out yarn stores. And Transformers comes out while we’re there, so unless Disney has a movie theatre on site that will carry that, we’ll need transport for that.

7 and a half days of kindergarten left.

Well, nothing like realizing the talk you're giving the next day is based off a completely wrong interpretation of the main article used for inspiration. At 11:45 the night before. No wonder the demos didn't work. It would have helped if I hadn't been so swamped for the last three weeks at work with server STIG-ing. (I'll tell you where to STIG those servers!)

Well. Nothing for it. Time to re-invent. I went to bed @ 2:30 AM Friday night/Saturday morning, and got up at 6:15.

I checked in, listened to the start up talk, then headed for the nearby starbucks. I hate coffee, but I ordered two venti Tazo ice teas, claimed a table with a plugin, paid for internet access ($3.99 for 2 hours, not bad, in my book), and went back to 'work'.

I only missed two talks.

At 3, it was my turn. Wouldn't ya know, the laptop wouldn't go into dual screen mode, so I could only use the main projector screen.

There were about 8 people there, and one left. The rest were fairly interested. It was a high level ish talk, very niche. And I hadn't done anything like this in at least 11 years.

Negative: I could have had better demos. I could have been a little more polished with my words. I used 'um' and 'okay' way too many times. My powerpoint deck sucked (way out of practice). One person left the talk about 10 minutes through.

Positive: I stayed engaged for 50 minutes out of the hour. Only one person left the talk. I answered questions without freaking out. I vaguely remembered how to stand up there and make eye contact and present without looking like a nervous idiot.

Conclusion: I definitely want to keep this up. I don't want to go back into training as a regular gig, but I do want to reacquire my presentation skills so I lose much of the nervousness I had last week. I'll be working on a set of interesting but unique topics that I can submit for code camps that won't be like everyone else.

In other news, the fam damily is coming for the spring birthday/memorial day shindig. I don't know that we'll be swimming, though - depends on the weather. Also, now that code camp's over, I'll definitely be moving my PC from the family room to the yarn room, and finally installing Windows 7 RC. 8.5 days left of kindergarten, and 9 and 2 half days left of first grade.

Disclaimer – this is an opinion piece (and not even a well organized one, at that).

There’s a recent discussion around the internets about something specifically offensive, and the discussion has also segued into various talks about women in IT, specifically programmers.

Guys, there are females who program. Girls, yes, you too can be a programmer, if you like logic puzzles and can describe clearly how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I’ve been programming since I was 12. Back then, I was one of two females out of about 40 students (5% ) in the summer school computer class (way back in the late 70s). Any computer clubs I went to, I was usually the only girl.

Now, 30ish years later, I’m speaking at a code camp. Out of 24 speakers, there are two females (looking at the names). Which my ms calc says is 8.3%. Not much of an increase there. At my current company, the split seems to be about 50/50 company wide, but at the last several places I’ve worked, I’ve been the lone female developer, often the lone female in IT. (It’s a good thing I like action movies and football.)

This is my opinion, but for most, programming is a solitary task, and for the most part, women are social creatures (Myself not included – I wouldn’t have a social life if not for my kids). And until “social programming” emerges as a viable methodology, IT and programming will remain populated by those who don’t mind the long silent hours populated by the occasional outburst or the required social interaction when getting a drink from the fridge.

But, hey, that’s just me.

This is a test of the Live Writer blogpost editing system. If this were a real blog post, this content would be meaningful. This is a test. This is ONLY a test.

Inserting test picture:

Cool.