New Web Host

March 30th, 2008 by Mox

A couple of days ago on a message board I read, a friend asked for web host recommendations. Two other friends responded with high marks for Dreamhost. I haven’t been terribly thrilled with the performance offered by my previous host, so I’ve been considering a move for some time but never took the time to research a new one. With a recommendation that I could trust, now seemed like as good a time as any.

The move has been reasonably smooth, and I’m impressed with how much control I have over my account. There has also been a noticeable increase in performance. However there has been one strange DNS issue that I haven’t been able to resolve just yet. Adding “www” in in front of my domain still points to the old host. I may be the only the only one that sees this problem, though. If I SSH in to either the old or new host and ping the “www” URL, it resolves to the new host in either case. No amount of rebooting or DNS flushing locally has fixed it so it is probably my ISPs DNS cache that hasn’t fully caught up with the new info.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to work around this by configuring Wordpress to use the domain name without “www” on both the old and new sites. Wordpress will rewrite the URL if the “www” is added so you should always get to the proper site. This is only a temporary solution, however, because it requires that I maintain the site on both hosts.

I have also taken this opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress, which was just released yesterday. It was a very painless process, as most upgrades have been in the past. There should be no noticeable difference in the look or operation of the site as the biggest changes seem to be in the admin interface, but I haven’t yet had a chance to look into all the new features.

Update: 48 hours later, it would seem that my ISP’s DNS has finally caught up with the rest of the world.

Pillow Fight at the Galleria

March 2nd, 2008 by Mox

A couple of days ago, the following message showed up in my Twitter stream:

Glendale Pillowfight Sat, March 1 - 5:48pm. Be there by 5:40: Glendale Galleria Mall; in front of Target;1st floor; inside of the Mall.

Since I had actually planned to stop by the Galleria at some point this weekend, I decided to check it out (as an observer, not a participant).

I got there a few minutes before 5:40 and milled around trying to figure out who was going to join in and how they were concealing their pillow. I picked out one guy right away, his large Bed, Bath & Beyond bag seemed to be a dead giveaway. There was also a father with two daughters that I didn’t identify until I moved upstairs and caught a glimpse of the pillows in their bags. It didn’t seem like there would be much of a turnout.

As I was trying to find a good place shoot video (see below), I noticed a few other people who looked like they were waiting for something to happen. I guess I wasn’t the only one who was curious to see what would happen.

The pillows came out at precisely 5:48 and about 8 or nine people joined in. Except for one person who kind of half-heartedly yelled, “Security!” the whole affair didn’t really seem to draw that much attention. A couple of minutes later it was all over and everyone dispersed.


Pillow Fight at the Galleria from Jeffry Moxley on Vimeo.