D&P - Blog

So I enjoy watching the news when interesting things are happening. So I have two topics I want to blog about that I saw on the news this morning.

First is about a high school teacher (I forget what school) who apparently told his psychologist that he has had homicidal thoughts about killing the school administration. The psychologist apparently thought the threat was real enough that he contacted local police, and he now has an order to stay away from the school. Now, that in itself isn’t very funny… except that one of the kids they interviewed said, “Well, he could never really control a class… and if you can’t control 30 people then you can’t control yourself”. Lol… judging from the way the kids looked in the interview… I think I would have a hard time controling 30 of them if they didn’t want to be “controlled”… lol, so I guess that means I’m mentally incompetent.

My second thought is on the recent issues about the immigration laws that are looking to be passed, and how a bunch of kids are skipping school to go “protest” about it. What’s funny about this is *most* of the kids they interviewed that were walking in Houston and protesting… didn’t really know what they were protesting. And of course there was the expected, “I hate Bush, Bush is going to ruin everything” comment… but the funny thing is, is Bush (from what I’ve read) supports letting immigrants come and work here (not having to be a citizen, but having to be registered I believe). So I don’t think the large majority of these kids know what the real issues are on the plate. (Not claiming that I know everything that’s going on either).

That’s not really what I take issue with however. What I take issue with, is that at Reagan High School, the students wanted to put the Mexican flag up with the American flag, and the principle let them! They also interviewed people who thought the Mexican flag should be flown higher than the Texas flag. This made me laugh at first… because that’s just ridiculous… until they interviewed 2 random people, and one of them (of hispanic descent) said, “Well I don’t see what the big deal is… it’s just a symbol, you know? This should be about the people, not about a symbol.”

If “symbols” don’t mean anything then why do we fly flags at all? And why did they want a Mexican flag up there? And why did they want it HIGHER than the TEXAS flag?? I’m sorry, but no other country is going to be put “higher” than our country and our states. This isn’t Mexico, this is America.

That’s all!

So I think I’m going to be moving over to another VPServer. I’m having major FTP problems with my current hosting provider (hosteasier.com). They have a good price, and excellent customer service, but they’re having problems that they can’t fix. I can’t upload more than 10 files at a time via FTP because it always times-out. Even checking my e-mail takes a while and sometimes doesn’t work. I couldn’t send an e-mail yesterday for over an hour cause it would just keep timing out. Access to the sites can sometimes be slow also.

I went over to jeremy’s house last week to run some tests from his machine and had the same results. Also, about a week ago Matt Ryczek complained that he wasn’t able to send anything either… and lives well away from here… so it’s not my ISP.

Hosteasier’s final conclusion was that their server is ok, and it must be something on my end. I insisted that it’s not, and their response was “Do you have a firewall turned on?”. Grr.

So I have hihowareyou.com on midphase.com. I figured since I have MidPhase hosting it until next June or July, I’ll just keep it over there until I have to switch it to my server. I’ve never had any FTP problems with them (and they’re even in the same datacenter as hosteasier!). Upload 256 files in 22 folders? No problem! And I never have any problem checking mail from that server. They also have support forums where everyone who has midphase hosting can talk to eachother. So if a problem (like my FTP problem) comes up, you can ask around and see if anyone else is having the same problem.

MidPhase offers VPServers now, and I’m going to sign up for one of those and have them move everything over ASAP.

In other news… that kinda relates…

I’ve been hired to do a e-commerce site for LazerTone. A guy from church owns his own toner and ink service… mostly selling remanufactured toner, but he wants to start a consumer retail site, and not just sell to businesses. So I said I’m up for the task… and it’s definately going to be a huge project. I figured at first that it should be pretty simple… I just about have the new store for my uncle’s site done… and I could just switch it over… but no.

I first am having to figure out how to use PayPal’s Website Payments Pro… to accept credit cards directly on the site. I think I have it mostly figured out… but I can’t test it until I have a domain name with SSL (https), and I’m not signing up for that until I have everything moved over to the new server.

Apparently, it’s no easy task if you want to ship your things via FedEx through a custom application. There’s a whole huge certification process you have to go through… then you create the application… and then go through another certification process before you can have you site go live. You have to talk them through it on the phone, and then mail them the printed tests you did so they can verify that everything’s ok. It makes sense… but what a pain.

The biggest part, and what I won’t have ready on time is accounting for all the possible exceptions. What if someone buys something, and then cancels the order? Or you ship it to them and they cancel? Or they get shipped the wrong stuff? Or you only have 4 out of 5 of the things they ordered in stock?
I have to make a way for that to be tracked and recorded and fixed. Should be fun though… and by the end I’ll have a really nice product to sell to other people also.

So Adobe has apparently bought Macromedia for $3.4 billion and the deal is expected to close by the end of the year. I wonder how this will fare, seeing how I use Macromedia for a lot of web developement, and Adobe to edit/construct images for the web. Maybe they’ll bring more/better/full support for PHP in Dreamweaver… I sure would like some auto-completion for things other than the 5 or 6 functions that start with “$_”… but that’s just me.

You can read the full article (though not very long) here: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22611

I’ve also posted my first, well… post over at the new site.

“The law is a idiot,” said parish beadle Mr. Bumble in Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.” People of faith today have every reason to reach a similar conclusion, as endless head-butting with the secular legal system seems to occur with dismaying regularity.”

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050409-102735-7659r.htm

They’ve found water on Mars!

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html