My web hosting account came up for renewal this week, and I just can’t do it.  You see, about two months ago we had a little “incident” where several of my sites on the same host were defaced, with no good explanation as to how/why.  We suspected it had to do with a FrontPage Extensions vulnerability at our web host.  Which wouldn’t have been that big a deal if the note I sent via the company’s prominently displayed “Tell our CEO how we’re doing” link hadn’t been summarily ignored.  Twice.So this weekend, to take my mind off a grueling week at work (don’t ask - wasn’t pretty) I decided to drill in and migrate my stuff, including blahgKarma, to a new hosting account at A2 Hosting.  I found A2 via 43Folders (thank you Merlin), where they not only heartily endorsed A2 (they host 43F), but had a sweet 20% off coupon.  And, I could finally dump Windows hosting, which I’ve been wanting to get around to for some time, but haven’t.So far, so good.  The A2 control panel, cpanel, is WAY better than my last host’s.  And, Fantastico is making for some fun playing around with various Open Source web-based CMS installs, including Drupal which I used for a project last year and liked.Web hosting is certainly a commodity these days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy it inexpensively AND have it work well.  Now if I could just find something with a cpanel equivalent on an OS X Server backend, I’d be REALLY happy… 

Caught a forward from a friend in Public Safety and thought I’d pass it along. You know how we get all this cool info on Hurricanes when they’re spinning around out there? Ever think of the folks who fly out and GET some of that data? Here’s a link to an amazing video shot on a hurricane hunting mission from the back of a C-130 cockpit. Awesome!

I’m not a timid flyer, but if its alright with you I’m going to add “hurricane hunter” to that list of occupations I’m glad some folks are drawn to, but “none for me, thanks”.

Enjoy.

A local landscaper came by last week offering to trim trees at our house. We agreed to have a variety of trees trimmed, which the landscaper priced by the tree, and included the trash removal (i.e. no charge item). As it turned out, we had to drop one of the trees to be trimmed - a neighbor’s which he preferred to do otherwise with. The landscaper accepted the change this morning, dropping it from the work, but when presenting the bill had increased the price by $75 for the trash removal, which he had included previously.

We changed the scope, he accepted it but I suspect knowing the price increase was coming, which we found out about at the end of the job. Who was right? We expected the vendor to deliver what he promised (these items at these prices) and he expected to make his money (this much for the job). By not presenting a new price before the work started he turned what otherwise would have been a very happy customer into a negative outcome and no or negative reference. Mismatched expectations…

Set, maintain, manage and deliver to a clear set of expectations - they don’t have to be point-level tasks and you don’t have to charge by the task or T&M to ensure satisfaction, but if the work changes and so will your price - be up front about it and put the customer in the driver’s seat.

The moral of the story… when you’re working with customers, they typically want to know what they get from you, how much of it and what it costs - however articulated. If you’re pricing by the job, both parties should expect to exchange value on the results… if the customer wants to change the scope and you don’t like it, be up front and discuss any impacts - you don’t have to accept the change, but you also shouldn’t expect to creep your fees any more than you’d expect to let the customer creep (or in this case, shrink) the scope.

This vendor won the battle and lost the war… Its a shame to do good quality work but leave the customer unhappy because you either didn’t want to have the conversation, or worse because you are trying to “sneak it in”. Manage those expectations…

Duh!

I’m not much of a sports fan, but I do love HDTV, and what’s HD at the moment is Olympics coverage. Did watch a couple of snowboardcross races this evening, including two of Lindsey Jacobellis’. I was digging it - having seen some of the media coverage of her Olympic trek, and thinking what a pretty, articulate and confident 20 year old Olympian would do for her sport… and then it happened.

My first reaction was the same as most, I suppose… “why”? And in the moments following the fall, I realized that the post-incident, and not the incident itself, would likely be the defining moment in this young athlete’s life. I was nervous as she was immediately interviewed, and she waffled - understandable, given the magnitude. She seemed a bit overwhelmed - and who wouldn’t be? But what would her story be? Didn’t look real promising at the outset…

And then it happened. In an interview with Bob Costas, this poised, articulate and acutely disappointed athlete did it…

She took responsibility. Amazing.

If a big lead and rocking your way to a gold medal causes your concentration to break, and to rotate those extra 20 degrees on your Method, that’s inexperience, being 20, being distracted. Owning up to it, even in stages - THAT’s a sign of maturity beyond her years, and the ability to learn from the mistake and move on to the next mistake a sign of leadership.

Lindsey - here’s some advice. Keep making mistakes. Don’t go out of your way to make them, don’t make the same one(s) over and over, but keep taking chances, keep slugging away at it, keep learning and doing. You’re not the only person in or out of your sport who’s going to screw up, whether its bad judgement, bad execution, a momentary lapse in focus… but if you keep playing the game you’ll have a chance to learn from mistakes, and then - just like this time - you’ll have an opportunity to deny them, hide them, pass them off on others - or take responsibility, do what you can to avoid the same outcome in the future and move on.

Good on you, is what I say, and proudly wear that Silver medal. Like many things you’ll achieve in life, there will be others who wish you’d done it differently, or not done it at all, but you’ll notice most of those folks will criticize you from the comfort of their recliners, and not on the hill.

Lindsey Jacobellis, Olympic Medalist. You go girl!

For anyone else out there working to move off Win to the Mac, here’s a tip…

If you intend to use an external drive to share between the machines, or to facilitate your transition, consider formatting it as FAT32. MacOS X will read from an NTFS volume, but is unable to write to NTFS. Sounds simple, right? Just connect the external drive to the PC, and use the Storage Manager to format and move away…

Not so fast there, Junior. XP has a limitation as to the maximum size FAT32 partition it can create. While FAT32 partitions can (at least theoretically) be as large as 2 terabytes, the Win2K and later (at least through XPSP2) can only format up to a 32 gigabyte partition. Which is a pain when you have about 120 gigs to move around, and have a 250 gig drive (9 partitions, anyone? I don’t think so). Why? Because monster FAT32 partitions don’t perform as well as monster NTFS partitions, that’s why. Makes sense…

What to do? Well, you could format an NTFS partition and then deal with it being read-only on the Mac. Or, you could look around the Web and find the ever-cool “SwissKnife v3” drive manager from CompuApps. SwissKnife, found at CNET’s Download.Com site, took longer to download than it did to create the requisite 248 gig partition. I moved a few files to the drive, connected it to my loaner PowerBook, and then dragged a couple of files to it and guess what - IT WORKED!

I’m in the process of switching from Windows to the Macintosh, and today realized what Reason Number Two is for me doing so.

Despite using two spyware programs that actively scan for intrusions, PLUS Norton’s Internet Security Suite, the browser on my Windows laptop was hijacked a couple of days ago. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to figure out what hijacked it and how to un-hijack it (since the security programs STILL don’t pick up the problem), and then I accidentally tripped over it this morning. While running an Ad-Aware Professional spyware scan, I happened to see a path I didn’t recognize, inside my Windows user folder. Sure enough, there was a folder in there innocuously called “complete”, but hidden from view as it was flagged as a System folder. It revealed a small package - just 2.6 GIGS of crap .zip files that point to all sorts of BS on the Internet - ads for software, services, prescription drugs at a discount - you name it, it had it.

Its going to be really nice to work on a machine that’s not being so heavily targeted by the crap-eating dogs that develop spyware and viruses. Oh, I know - to plenty of folks the Mac is just that much more inherently secure than Windows, and I believe that to a degree, but lets face it - the sociopaths writing this slime are going after the big hits, and with Apple being the BMW of the personal computer industry with around 5% of the overall market, part of the pressure on Windows has to be related to big bang for the buck.

See… size does matter. In this case, smaller is better. Buh-bye Windows, hello Mac.

I scan around 150 blogs at the moment via RSS, and

I’ve read about folks who use blogs as a way to capture info they’re likely to be interested in (themselves) later, and until recently thought “Why would you want to do that? - Just store the stuff on your HD”. Well, today I think I figured it out - my hard drive doesn’t really have an application that would allow me to annotate the material like I can on a blog (read: mini content management system).

Lets say I want to start tracking “stuff” about a particular topic. I want to make notes on the “stuff”, link to websites, maybe maintain a file or two (although not many), etc. I could do this in my main blog by tagging the content… or, if I think a different audience may be interested in the material (like mainly me, but perhaps a few others), I could just jam it all into a separate blog altogether.

I’m thinking about trying this… WordPress has a decent tagging mechanism and I may cross-post the stuff to both blogs, but this will give me a chance to check out what (if any) multi-blog capabilities WP has. Wish me luck!

Hey TechWatchers… this just in, from Halley