March 2006


The inner curmudgeon now has a new home. Up until now it has been hosted at PowWeb, but I have been quietly looking around for an alternative host that offers more in the way of nerdy goodness (eg. SSH/SFTP access, Subversion repository). To date I have resisted moving because PowWeb’s service is pretty good, even if it does lack tech candy. They also have a kick-ass user community forum. However, recently PowWeb has been bought out by “the largest hosting company you never heard of” (Endurance International) and I suspect that the service is likely to become even more vanilla. In my experience, when bean counters take over a business, it ends up just another pile of beans.

On top of that news, they futzed a mail server upgrade, so I’ve decided to test the DreamHost waters. They’re a little more expensive and their user community forums suck, but they have SSH/SFTP access, Subversion and they offer Ruby and Python, which I wasn’t particularly looking for, but might be nice to tinker with.

I’ve still got my dire beetles site and a couple of others at PowWeb and I will see how things go at DreamHost and PowWeb before deciding whether to jump ship entirely.

Today I was going to post photos of me and my brand new 60Gb video iPod, but Crutchfield Electronics decided that what I really needed was extra foam peanutty goodness.

They did include a bundle of tip sheets explaining how to get started with the various kinds of gear that Crutchfield sell, but sadly there was no instructions on how to download my Brian Eno collection onto my brand new iPeanuts.