Under ConstructionAs 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:

  1. A new web host so that I can move Daily Cup of Tech
  2. Ways that I can optimize my website to reduce CPU
  3. Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress
  4. 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!

Will Work for BandwidthAs 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.

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

if ($ref=='http://www.mcfeetors.com/personal.php')
{
echo '

Since you have come from my personal website http://www.mcfeetors.com, you know that my real name is Jason McFeetors.’;
}
?>

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.

WebMy 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!

BlackberryIn a post from last week, I alluded that I would be announcing this week about a prize that I will be giving out to one lucky supporter. I did not want to let the cat out of the bag until I launched another program but it looks like that program is going to take some time to get off the ground so I figured that I would let everyone in on the big secret!

While I was at the Midsize Enterprise Summit, we sat in on a number of boardroom sessions with vendors who would talk to us about their products. As most vendors do, they bring along a bunch of swag to entice the audience.

One of the vendors came in with some really nice portfolios and I thought, “That’s a nice piece of swag to take home!” So, I sat through their presentation and in the end, they asked us for our business cards. I figured, “OK, I guess we need to pay for this conference somehow,” since they covered all of the flight, hotel, meals, etc. so I tossed in my card.

I was a bit confused when the vendor tossed all of the business cards into a box and started shaking it and then asked one of the attendees to pick a card. I was even more confused when he called my name (I wasn’t really paying attention), shoved a black and red box in my face and said, “Congratulations!” I must have looked really confused because the guy sitting next to me said, “You just won a BlackBerry!”

Now, here is the ironic thing. I don’t need a BlackBerry because I have a Motorola Q that is paid for by my work. It does everything that I need and I can use it for person things if I want. This was apparent at the conference because the people in my boardroom session immediately started bidding on it, even thought I had given no indication that I was interested in selling it.

When I got back to my room that night, I called my wife and told her the news. She came up with the brilliant idea, “Why don’t you give it away on Daily Cup of Tech?” I knew there was a reason I married her! So you all have her to thank.

How To Enter

Everyone who has donated in the past and everyone who donates in the month of June will be eligible to win a Version BlackBerry 8703e. This includes donations to Release the Code as well. For every dollar you donate (or have donated), you will receive one chance to win the BlackBerry. Very simple. I will make the draw and announce the winner on July 9, 2007. (I’m going to be on vacation that week so I will not be available to make the draw sooner.)

I have included a list of all the people I have on record who have donated in the past. If are one of these people and you name is not listed, please e-mail me so that I can check to see where the problem lies.

AlwaysWebHosting (05/01/2007)
AlwaysWebHosting (4/21/2007)
Asheville Technologies (5/28/2007)
Asheville Technologies (5/27/2007)
Barry H. (4/24/2007)
Bradley K. (5/27/2007)
Brian C. (4/17/2007)
Big Voice Design (5/28/2007)
Daniel W. (05/06/2007)
Daniel W. (05/06/2007)
Digital Motoring (05/03/2007)
Ed M. (04/12/2007)
Eric John W. (4/13/2007)
Gordon W. N. (05/03/2007)
Jogima, LLC (5/17/2007)
Kay A. S.( 4/15/2007)
Kenneth G. S. (05/06/2007)
Lona M. C. (05/03/2007)
Mark H. (4/28/2007)
Martin B.( 4/15/2007)
Martin W. (5/13/2007)
Nathan L. (5/27/2007)
Phillip B. (5/26/2007)
Philip D. (4/30/2007)
Robert H.( 5/26/2007)
Samuel C. (5/19/2007)
Sherard E. (05/04/2007)
Stuart B. (5/27/2007)
Todd E. (04/06/2007)

Good luck to everyone!

Atlanta SkylineI just thought that I would give everyone the heads up that I will be in Atlanta all this week attending the Gartner Midsize Enterprise Summit. So, if I’m a bit slow in getting back to people or in answering questions, this is probably why.

I am assuming that it is going to be a pretty busy week as they have a lot of different things for us to do. But, I have a number of posts already complete that should keep you occupied until I am able to write daily again.  You will also see a couple of guest writers, Rob Dunn and Raymond Hicks, strutting their stuff this week as well.  Thanks for helping out, guys!

If anyone out there is also attending the conference, please feel free to let me know. I’d love to sit down with some of my readers over a cup of coffee.

Source CodeA great big “Thank You!” to everyone who donated to the release of the source code for DCoT Menu. Because of your generosity, DCoT Menu is now available to everyone as open source code. Feel free to download the code and start making your own derivative branches of this application.

Here are the generous people who we all have to thank for this:

So, here is what you have all been waiting for, the DCoT Menu source code: Read the rest of the story…

FawnJust a quick post to tell everyone that Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn has officially been released today. If you are trying to get the ISO files for downloading, you may have some difficulty because a lot of the servers are overloaded today. I am finding that the bittorrent route is probably the best way to go. So, to help spread this around the globe, I am posting all of the latest Ubuntu torrent files and the MD5 checksums for the files.

If you do not have a bittorrent client, I usually use μTorrent and if you are looking for an MD5 checksum tool, I like MD5 Summer.

Here are the files:

Have fun!

I want to take this opportunity to express my condolences to the victims and their families who were so horribly touched by the tragedy that occurred yesterday at Virginia Tech.  Daily Cup of Tech mourns with you at the loss of your family and friends.  We also mourn the loss of their contribution to society.  The world is a lesser place now that they are no longer with us.

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