Update: Site migration, Nanowrimo, and Marble Maddness.

Migration

Ok, so as the past two posts have hinted, Jackie and I have migrated most of our sites to a new host, Midphase. I compared 50+ packages to find a baseline for what we needed and rough cost. The initial round checked out

Disk Space, Monthly Traffic, Uptime SLA, Setup Fee, Price / month, SSH access, OS, MySQL databases, Dedicated IP addresses.

From there we narrowed it down to a dozen or so packages by eliminating overly expensive packages, bizarre limitations, required domain transfers, etc.

From there we checked Live Chat support, Statistic aggregators, Cron access, and Ad Credits.

The end result was Midphase- they had the features we needed, little chance of overrunning bandwidth or storage limits, and the best bang for buck value. Half our sites are already migrated, with OSC and Ian’s site next on the list.

NaNoWriMo

Also started NaNoWriMo this week- just hit 20k words around midnight. Last year I was closer to 30k words at this point, but I suppose it’s to be expected that I’m not as amped up about the second book in the series when I haven’t completed the first. It’s all good though- I’ll still power through it and get it done by christmas- that’s the goal, not sure how realistic it is.

Marble Maddness

One of the reasons I’ve been behind is Ian’s relatively new obsession with a marble maze- we bought him a $20 kit and he loved it. The only real problem was some of the parts that clipped togetherdidn’t give the included marbles enough clearance- either by poor design or manufacturing defect. anyways, I got it in my head to build him one. I started small- 12″x8″ zigzag and he went nuts. Within a few days he was asking me to build him a bigger one, which is what I’ve been working on. the new one is 30″x28″ and an absolute monster. Fortunately you don’t get Mesothelioma (lung cancer) from aluminum shavings, just Alzheimers (I’ve been cutting and shaving aluminum rails for the marbles to use).

I’ll have pictures when I’m done.