GoDaddy Difficulties
I'm having issues with GoDaddy. I forwarded two domains temporarily because we had to disconnect our server for a day. At the end of the day, I logged back into GoDaddy and deleted the forwarding. The confirmation page indicated it would take a "few minutes" to process the changes.
Fifteen hours later, the sites are still forwarding so I logged into GoDaddy to check that the forwarding was no longer in place. Both domains indicate that they are "still processing updates". What?!?! Time fail, GoDaddy!
I decided to contact their support about the issue and opened a ticket using their online system. Here's the confirmation page I received:
And here's the confirmation email I received:
GoDaddy - I recommend you invest in some new clocks and make sure they're properly synched. You're sending very mixed messages. Not to mention a poor customer experience.
Sweet Valley: Ten Years Later
I think I was in first or second grade when I was introduced to Sweet Valley Twins. Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, the perfectly beautiful 12year-old girls from California. It didn't hurt that they were slightly older (and at that age, don't we all want to be older?). Plus Elizabeth was a writer for the school paper! My dreams of being a writer found me obsessing over a lot of characters with a similar affliction (see also Green Gables, Anne of). In 5th grade, I discovered Sweet Valley High. This was great because I was starting to catch up to the girls in years so the advancement of the Wakefield twins to high school was perfect! And somewhere around my own middle school years, my interest in the Sweet Valley saga drifted off.
Still, I found myself intrigued when I read recently that there will be a new series - Sweet Valley: Ten Years Later. This one finds the twins around age 27, which is now perfect for me because I've reached the stage where you no longer fantasize about being older. Younger is where it's at! Plus, what would the girls be up to now?
For the low-low price of your dignity email address, you can sign up to read the first chapter at Sweet Valley Ten Years Later. I actually signed up and read it earlier in the week so I'm going to go ahead and give my spoilery-if-you-care thoughts here. I advise skipping the rest of the post if you want to read it for yourself. Really, I'd advise just not reading it. Ever.
Spoilery Bits:
Was the writing always this awful? I'm certainly not stuck-up about my taste in literature but it was terrible. An early line:
"That's okay," she managed, quickly ducking her face away from him, stealing a sliver of extra time as she put the doggie-bagged pork chop she was carrying carefully and more precisely than necessary down on the hall table.
Maybe back in middle school I was more forgiving of that kind of writing.
Which makes me wonder - who is their target audience for this? Do kids today still read the Sweet Valley books? Do they expect those of us who read them religiously as kids to pick this up and read it out of curiosity? The writing is so bad that I can't imagine they really want adults to read it.
Another fail if they're targeting long-time fans of the series is the storyline. Chapter One is told from Elizabeth's view. She is now 27, "self-exiled" in Manhattan after some horrible fall-out back home. She and Todd are no longer together, she contemplates sleeping with her boss at some d-list newspaper, and she refuses to speak to Jessica. The only person in California that she's still in contact with regularly is her new BFF (gag), Bruce Patman. Yeah, that Bruce Patman. The egotistical rich boy that kinda almost sorta raped her back in high school.
Wow, Elizabeth. And to think that one day I wanted to be you.
I'm not sure who their target market is for this. It appears to be only one book (the site isn't exactly clear) so maybe they will find a lot of people willing to buy the one-off for a quick read. For me, I think one chapter was more than enough.
Girlyfight: Nice Things Project and Punch Line
Rather than repeat what I've already written elsewhere, I'm going to direct you to a couple of posts over on Girlyfight.
After a whole lot of hours of programming and designing and coding and testing, we've launched a couple of new features:
- The Nice Things Project - an online kindness chain
- Punch Line - the Girlyfight phone line
Please take a few minutes to check out those posts and get involved. I'm excited about the launch of both projects and really want them to succeed.
Geek Rant: WordPress vs Blogger
Our blogs have been on the move in the past year or so as we try to find something that works well for us.
Originally our blogs were self-hosted using BlogCFC. As ColdFusion programmers, it was great. But as our interests changed from programming to other things, the upkeep became cumbersome and we moved our blogs (post by post) over to Blogger.
Blogger served its purpose at the time - we were going to downgrade our server at home since neither of us were doing much site development. We wanted to simply upkeep of our in-house server as much as possible so using hosted blogs on Blogger seemed like the thing to do. The downside (for us) is that having multiple Google logins means opening separate browser instances every time you need to tend to this blog or that. As a result, I tend to ignore the comment notifications when I see they are spam, even though I know I should go clean them up. Add a couple of posts that are for some reason particularly attractive to spammers and now I have one post with 54 comments that need to be deleted. And deleting a single comment in Blogger takes 4 clicks. Also, if anything ever happens to Blogger, all of our content is gone unless we remember to manually back it up.
So bring on WordPress. We host our own WordPress blogs and while I don't know a whole lot about the language it's written in (PHP), I've picked up enough to make the few changes I want to see. And that spam deletion? Once you're logged into the admin dashboard, it's one click per message. Plus all of our entries are stored in our own database that is backed up nightly. The main downside is that if our server is down for some reason, so are our sites.
This blog is already on WordPress. I'm working on moving Mike's now. Next will be The Rogans. It will take less time to set up blogs and import than to delete all that spam on Blogger.
The Raleigh Concert Scene
Every year, I await tour date announcements with great anticipation. And it seems like every time my favorite bands are touring, they aren't coming anywhere near Raleigh. Instead, we get a lot of country acts and "Remember when?" acts like KISS and Tom Petty. And the Backstreet Boys. Seriously. I realize preferences for music vary widely but I like to think my taste in music is pretty eclectic. Still, there's next to nothing on the schedule that interests me.
And yet somehow the City, in all their wisdom, felt that what the area really needed to spend tax money on was another concert venue. I guess so it can be half-filled with more sub-par acts while taking away from the established concert presence (not to mention foot-traffic and associated revenue at near-by restaurants) in Moore Square.
It's no secret that the economy kinda bites. Okay, not just kinda. It's been biting hard for awhile now. As a result, there's generally not a lot of spending money for extras like concerts. Especially since concerts are often very expensive, plus all the fees, plus parking, plus don't you dare think you're going to buy a bottled water for less than $10! A lot of acts are finding themselves in the position of canceling shows or even entire tours due to poor ticket sales. Some are canceling due to the poor health of band members (or, you know, poor ticket sales that they don't want to acknowledge). Everyone from Christina Aguilera to Simon and Garfunkel to Black Sabbath is canceling shows.
So Raleigh starts off with a lousy concert schedule. And then acts start canceling shows. Lilith and the Jonas Brothers (I know, how will I survive?) have already pulled their Raleigh dates. Who's next?
But John Mayer? He's still coming to Raleigh. I couldn't get rid of him and his skeeviness if I tried.
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