As you can tell by the top of the website, my web hosting has been provided free of charge for the past while by AlwaysWebHosting. They have been extremely generous and I wanted to thank them very much for all of the help, support, web space, etc. that they have provided for me over the past while. If you are looking for a great web host, definitely give these guys a try.
Unfortunately, they can no longer provide me with web hosting and I am now on the hunt for a new host. This biggest issue that I am running into is the fast that shared hosting does not seem to be enough for my site. I use a lot of processor and I get a lot of traffic.
So, this is what I am now working on:
A new web host so that I can move Daily Cup of Tech
Ways that I can optimize my website to reduce CPU
Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress
Designing a new theme so that the website comes up quicker
Any suggestions/comments/ideas on any of these would be greatly appreciated!
Once again, thanks to AlwaysWebHosting for all the past support!
Well, it took over a year, but we now have definitive proof that the Lost USB Drive application works! When I launched the Lost USB Drive Experiment in early June of last year, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I had all but forgotten about the experiment.
So, imagine my surprise when I had this in my inbox this morning:
Dale,
I recently took over Costa Coffee Eastleigh and have found your USB Memory stick, I’m not sure how long it has been here but if you would like to pop in and collect it I will put it to one side.
Thanks
Matthew Store Manager
Costa Coffee 27-29 Market Street Eastleigh SO50 5RG
To be honest, I was a little shocked! But, at the same time, this totally made my day! Just goes to prove that there are some honest people out there and that a little ingenuity can go a long way!
If any of you are in the area of Matthew’s store, go in, congratulate him on his honesty and integrity, and buy the biggest, most expensive coffee on the menu! Way to go, Matthew!
As many of you have noted, I have been absent from the blog for some time now. The reason for this is that I find myself recently looking for work. I really do not want to get into all of the details why I am looking for work but all of the reasons are positive!
I also wanted to add a little something for those who have come from links on my resume, either paper, digital or online version. This is just to emphasize that Tim Fehlman is my pseudonym that I am writing under and you can rest assured that I did not just link to some random blog!
If any of you live in the Edmonton, Alberta area and know of someone who is looking for a good Director of Information Technology, please feel free to send me an e-mail at tfehlman@dailycupoftech.com.
I know that you have all been waiting patiently to know the winner of the BlackBerry. Before I announce the winner, I would like to first thank everyone who generously donated toward Daily Cup of Tech. I know that the BlackBerry was a great incentive to donate but I know for a fact that there are people out there who have donated even if there was no chance of winning anything.
Also thanks to AlwaysWebHosting for the continued excellent job of hosting and maintaining DCoT. It is really a load off my mind to know that I do not have to worry about this.
Now, the moment you have all been waiting for. The winner of the BlackBerry is Ken S. I will be sending Ken an e-mail shortly so that I can get the BlackBerry to him. Congratulations, Ken!
For those of you who did not win the BlackBerry, thank you for your generosity! I am planning on doing some other giveaways again in the future and all donations that are made to DCoT after July 1, 2007 and before the draw date will be eligible for the new prizes. I do not know exactly what these prizes will be or when I will make a draw for them, but I will keep you posted.
If you are interested in donating a prize for people who donate, please e-mail me. I am willing to give you some publicity in exchange for the prize so send me an e-mail and we can talk over details.
My wife and I are planning to move within the next year to a different city. My wife has some plans that cannot be realized where we now live. So, we are starting to prepare ourselves to move.
There are very few things in live that I have more than moving. Some of the things that make it completely unbearable include:
Digging through everything that you own and deciding whether or not it is worth keeping
Getting rid of all the junk you don’t want
If we have a yard sale to get rid of our stuff, I hate haggling with people over whether a 15″ CRT monitor is worth 50¢ or 25¢
Packing up all of our possessions into as few boxes as possible and then living like nomads for a couple of weeks
Daily going through a list of things that needs to be done before the move and still forgetting something
Finally getting to the new place and then spending the next two weeks making things usable
Realizing that I have too much of one thing (e.g. extension cords) and not enough of another (e.g. patch cables) in the new place
Discovering all of the “wonderful” things about the new place that you never knew about (”I wonder why the real estate agent never mentioned that the back alley is converted into an all night drag drip every weekend?”)
Realizing weeks later that you missed something really important and it is now too late (”You didn’t get that 99% off everything in the store coupon for SuperTechWarehouse that I mailed to you? Too bad. I think it expired at midnight last night. Didn’t you remember to forward your mail?”)
I have similar issues with moving from one web host to another. I’m always concerned about moving the right data over, will my database still work, will the links still be active, etc. This is why I really took my time before deciding to move to a new web host. Once that decision was made, I needed to make sure that I moved to the right web host. As I mentioned in my previous post Time for a (Webhost) Change, I had a lot of criteria that needed to be met.
I then got the generous offer from Ronnie at AlwaysWebHosting to sponsor the hosting of my blog! I was ecstatic but cautious. I checked out his systems to see if they actually met my requirements and they did. Ronnie and I talked via e-mail extensively about various aspects of their systems and services.
I was about to tell Ronnie that I want to go ahead and move things over but before I did that, I decided to back up Daily Cup of Tech to my system at home. This took me over an entire day to complete but, better safe than sorry, right?
I then started on the long list of things to do. I was not really looking forward to this part of the process but it was a necessary evil. I then remembered something that Ronnie had written in one of his e-mails that immediately made me smile! Ronnie wrote, “we can transfer your site over, including all files, databases, and even email”!
So, essentially, instead of me spending the weekend making a list of all the possible things that I need to do, forgetting half of them, and then fighting to keep the website up and running, I spent the weekend with my kids and the AlwaysWebHosting team went to work.
All in all, it took AlwaysWebHosting just under seven hours to transfer the files off my old host and three hours to reconfigure the entire website! All this while supporting all their other customers as well! All I needed to do was exit my DNS settings to point to the AlwaysWebHosting DNS servers and I was in business.
There was one very minor change that I needed to request and that was dealt with in a matter of minutes. It probably would have been dealt with even faster had I requested it over the phone as opposed to sending it via e-mail!
And I’m so totally impressed with my new “home” on the web. Great bandwidth. Awesome web control panel. Super technical support. I don’t think I could ask fro anything more!
Now, if only AlwaysWebHosting had a moving company!
As you can tell by the top of the website, my web hosting has been provided free of charge for the past while by AlwaysWebHosting. They have been extremely generous and I wanted to thank them very much for all of the help, support, web space, etc. that they have provided for me over the past while. If you are looking for a great web host, definitely give these guys a try.
Well, it took over a year, but we now have definitive proof that the 
As many of you have noted, I have been absent from the blog for some time now. The reason for this is that I find myself recently looking for work. I really do not want to get into all of the details why I am looking for work but all of the reasons are positive!
My wife and I are planning to move within the next year to a different city. My wife has some plans that cannot be realized where we now live. So, we are starting to prepare ourselves to move.