Tag: Journal

Little rant for the evening…

Good evening readers. (In this case “readers” is the term I casually use to act like I actually have “readers” when in fact…I am simply writing to myself a bit to vent.)

so.

It is absolutely amazing how loopy you can get when you’re tired, sick, and have taken a sizable shot of Nyquil to have an easier evening.

Well…when I say “you” I obviously mean “me”…unless…umm…nevermind.

So…in case you didn’t see my tweet, you should all google “askew” so you can see what its like for me every day.

Not the “askew” part per se, just the googling. I am asked to “google” things on a professional level so often that you might honestly wonder how I actually got into all this. Which was simple. A decade or so ago, I use to keep a journal. Shortly after a violent break up with the restaurant industry I started keeping my journals in electronic format. LiveJournal, then C2…at one time I was even using phpbb. Until finally after a gazillion hosts and many many blog platforms later…Wordpress won me over. Of course I am a great big dork. Mainly because every one in a while I have to say ‘Tony is a dork’ in my posts so that I come up on the search engines properly…that is…by searching for ‘Tony is a Dork’ you might still find me.

I did mention I am a little loopy. Mainly sleep deprivation of the “under-a-day” kind. We used to call that “wedging” – if you were awake for so long that you started feeling drunk…yeah thats wedging.

Luke the Cat - TonyTown.comAnyhow. I should probably introduce you to my assistant blogger, Luke.

Luke the cat is a little bundle of insane cat whoopass that you all know kittens to be.

He is lovable all the time. He plays with absolutely everything. His favorite toy is a straw, which you can use to make him climb up anything, including innocent roomies that dont realize that a spastic kitten is about to climb them like their life depended on it. He also feels my sandals are mice in disguise and attacks them regularly. And when he gets tired he gets absolutely adorable by climbing up my back without notice so he can curl up on my shoulder while I am typing. (Not joking…he really doesnt care what I am doing, when he wants to sleep he meows twice and if I havent picked him up he climbs on his own.

So yeah. I am really tired now, even the cat is passed out, and I just realized I wrote about nothing on my blog, so I’m fired and tired for the evening. You guys have a great one and hopefully my next post will have something remotely umm…relevant…in it eh?

Night!

-Tony (and his assistant Luke)




This is only the beginning…

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to apologize to everyone that’s been so diligent in coming here looking for new material…only to find that I took a ginormous freaking vacation from writing.

I wasn’t sick, or sunning it up on some beach…I just kindof get overwhelmed (i.e. – lazy) on the holidays.

This winter some really cool things are coming to a head in TonyTown. There is a new webserver on the way, the entire hosting platform is moving to a virtual server with about 1000% performance capabilities.

I have been asked to start contributing to another multi-writer blog (go me!).

After a having a fit of common sense…I am starting to accept project offers for other blogs and websites, and have three on the schedule already. One is a new book being released next month, I am facilitating all of the web branding, including the site design and even helping with the content. I’ll be promoting/branding the new website soon, if you have comments or questions, my normal contact pages are all still available.

Some of the cool stuff:

Another AWESOME blogger – Lauren Carlton from Mommy Is Rock ‘N Roll is recruiting me to help her move all her stuff from Blogspot.com to a WordPress blog (might even be hosted by yours truly!)

Wayne Johnson, a successful musician and owner of Noteworthy Ministries (they do really cool things for kids with guitars!) is publishing his biography written by himself and his close friend Frank Ball (from FrankBall.org and North Texas Christian Writers). The book is called Guided Missteps – Hard Times Make for Good Music (@guided_missteps / GuidedMissteps.com) and is a journal of Wayne’s life and how music turned his life around.

Totie Richardson is a very close friend who is also an incredible Tarot reader. Her business via word of mouth is insane considering she doesn’t advertise on the net, so much that we’re putting a website together not only as generic contact point, but also as an informational outlet on the many Tarot projects she has in progress. The website will be at http://tarot-geek.com and will showcase Totie’s wealth of information and life-experience.

Tony-Hunt.net is almost finished. It is my professional site and will showcase some of my projects and IT skills. It’s still a work in progress so don’t be surprised if the site is unavailable, but expect to see some serious promotion on both tonytown.com and tony-hunt.net coinciding with all the websites that are going online.

Anyhow. It’s Christmas Eve.
You should all be hanging out, knocking down some Nog, and having fun.

Merry Christmas everyone! …and thanks for reading!

-Tony




Fun stuff setting up a puter…

Last year…when I upgraded to Windows7…before the PC Crash of 2010, this was in my journal and it needed to be posted…
>>>>>>
So the computer I blog from and surf from and do most of my geeking and gaming on….it’s fast approaching a deadline for a new OS.

Actually. My release candidate is expiring today. In non-geek terminology, my pc will become such a pain in the ass to use that I am forced to either reinstall Vista, or reinstall a licensed version of Windows 7.

This kind of sucks. My PC is so frickin enabled that power users would need like 2 years of classes to put this kind of thing together.

The hub of all this installed ability revolves around a capable OS.

Which again. Is not expiring.

So far here’s how it’s been going:

(Old encryption program doesnt like W7, switched to bitlocker last summer, just to test it out.)

Get nastygram telling me my version of W7 is about to go belly up.
Audit everything installed on this PC.
216 applications that would have to be reinstalled.
Looked for alternatives.
Alternatives would involve incompatibility for roughly half my apps, and half my games would no longer work.
Not an option. More research.
Audit necessary free memory to upgrade to W7. 2TB.
Because you cant just install over a release candidate, you have to wipe it out and install clean. This requires the data on the boot drive to be migrated.
Because I am NOT paying a gazillion extra bucks to continue using Bitlocker, I have to decrypt externals before migrating data off the boot drive.
Decrypting drive 1, cleaning up apps installed.
App cleanup forces reboot before I can stop decryption. very. bad.
drive recovery successful, 8 hours.
Continue, decrypting drive 1, cleaning up apps installed. 6 hours.
Decrypting drive 2 will take …heh…48 hours. Tony not happy. migrating data off drive faster than decryption.
Migrating data off drive, 6 hours.
Decrypting of drive 2 now only 8 hours, acceptable. Not a happy Tony, but the alternative wasnt an option.
Drive 2 decrypted, migrating data back onto it. 4 hours.
Initial setup for primary drive W7 install, 2 hours. Only because I have to decide what apps to keep etc. make a list. etc.
W7 setup.

All in all. W7 has been good to me, but simply isn’t as “secure” as I’d prefer. Not everyone knows this but any kid with a little USB drive and a few brain cells can waltz into almost any Windows driven machine and crack open the password locked
>>>>>

I have LONG since moved to bigger and better setups. But this needed to go in the journal.