Jul 31 2018

Long time coming …

Tag: Computers and Electronics,Family,General,PaulPaul C. @ 3:53 pm

This site is going offline. My hosting provider raised the monthly rate from $7.99 a month to $13.99 a month. I will consider bringing it back online and hosting it from home, but for now, PaulandEmily.com is going offline – that includes the Gallery pages as well. I have everything downloaded and backed up, but who knows when I will have time to restore it all to a new server. The gallery especially is really old software so getting it to run on a modern operating system may not be feasible or doable.
So probably sometime in august 2018, this site will “go dark”.
-pc


Feb 26 2009

So my hearing isn’t as bad as I thought.

Train Horn

Created by Train Horn


Dec 03 2008

What kind of driver are you?

How dangerous of a driver are you?

Created by The Car Connection


Nov 23 2008

well isnt this fun?

*edit: i tried to post from my cell phone…but the box to type the actual blog didn’t show up so I couldn’t finish it*
Well, for the first time in probably 6 years, I had a hard drive failure. This happened in my new PC – the one I built about 3 or so months ago. The drive is under warranty, but of course, that does nothing for my data. I’ve been able to pull off my thunderbird mail files – haven’t tested their integrity yet. Glad I could get those, as I have just about all my emails since 2001 or 2002 and would die if I lost all those.
Once I have it up and running, I’ll sign up for Carbonite.com’s service and start my backups again with Comodo Backup (free!).
It woudl be one thing if I heard the drive clicking or saw error messages in the Windows Syslog – but no. The PC locked up on Sunday afternoon, then bluescreened. I rebooted and it was trying to load GRUB off one of my secondary drives (guess it was installed on there from some previous install). Wierd…booted with an XP cd and the pc was assigning my XP drive with an E:. Reloaded the windows boot loader and reset the MBR only to have it reboot into XP and immediately bluescreen. Wonderful. Guess I know what I’ll be doing over the next few days – trying to recover data, and reinstalling Windows. I had XP Pro 64bit this last time ardound. Maybe I will go Vista Ultimate 64 bit this time. Of..maybe I’ll toss it all away and install Ubuntu. Its worked well for months on my laptop and I’m addicted to Frozen Bubble 🙂
Lesson learned:
No more OEM harddrives for me. Retail only.


Oct 31 2008

Cast your votes!

Tag: Baby,Computers and Electronics,Friends,GeneralEmily @ 7:33 pm

There’s an effort to elect an unknown random person as President… and it’s someone we know! See this news website about the surprising new nominee:

http://www.tsgnet.com/pres.php?id=357563&altf=Mjuumf&altl=Tfbo

Press play when it comes up.


Oct 16 2008

Still undecided? Try this website

GlassBooth is another one of those websites that can help you decide which candidate more closely matches your opinion about different areas in politics. What I found different with this site is it actually tells you why you don’t match a candidate for the particular area.


Oct 14 2008

Webserver Problems….grin and bear it. (warning: geek content)

Tag: Computers and Electronics,Friends,really..?!Paul C. @ 3:20 pm

So on the 11th, I received an email from our hosting company, BlueHost.com, that the server would be undergoing maintenance to improve performance all around.

The server paulandemily.com is hosted on will be undergoing a hardware upgrade at approximately

10PM MST October 11th

We expect the downtime for the account to be 1-2 hours, but could becompleted long before that window. This upgrade will greatly increase performance on your server and therefor your account. We apologizefor any inconvenience.
BlueHost Support

Unfortunately that 1 to 2 hour window is now up to 6 days. I chatted with a bluehost.com live rep from their website (after having one completely ignore and the chat die from inactivity…thanks). He said that the admins invested $32,000 into memory for this server and they are merging two physical servers into one. Maybe they should have invested in CPUs instead of memory because I keep hitting a CPU bottleneck. I guess their upgrade did not go smoothly and the expiration for the migration has now been changed to:
Expires: Fri Oct 17 07:20:13 2008
I know a few of my blog readers have their websites hosted on my account so I wanted to give a heads up. You can track the maintenance a bit by going here:
http://serverstatus.bluehost.com/ (edit: added thanks to Sean)
type your domain into the box and click submit. Right now its telling me:
Server Load:
* 2008-10-14 13:05:31: Box under heavy load — you may experience degraded system performance
Services:
* 2008-10-14 13:05:31: box56 and box57 merged into this server to provide better services for our customers
The CPU load on the server is really high. This server has 8 CPUs (or 8 cores..can’t really tell) and its got a CPU load of 18.02, so that means that the server’s CPUs are over loaded. 18.02 load/8 cores = 2.2525 load average per core. That means that when the processor was working on one process, there was 1.25 other processes waiting to be executed. Think of it as going to your favorite grocery store and they have 8 checkout lanes open and 18 people waiting to purchase their goods. The processes are the shopping carts and the contents of the carts vary so some take longer than others to check out.

Anyway, if you get an error about the site hogging CPU time or something about it being suspended, bear with me and refresh a few minutes later. Same goes for AshandBrian.com, GSGates.net, KurtandJodie.com, AJAllen.net, 92Turbo.com, Go2Fast.net, LaryandNarni.com, HearnHappenings.com, MatthewandAmberly.com, and a couple other sites I host. TTFN


Oct 08 2008

Cool Screensavers

Tag: Computers and Electronics,Fun Links and StuffPaul C. @ 10:47 am

Saw this on downloadsquad.com (I think?). There are two screen savers. One is called Holding Pattern and its a slow moving video of the view from a window in a plane. The free version (“Coach” class) has 17 different views. The paid-for version (“First Class” $17.50) has 57 different scenic views.
The other screen saver, Cubicle Flood, is a security camera view of an office cube space which slowly floods over the course of two hours (sounds like a missing scene from Office Space!).


Jul 31 2008

new things

Tag: Computers and Electronics,Family,FunPaul C. @ 10:45 pm

So, some new stuff has def. happened recently.
My brothers company, CarDomain.com has downsized once again, ex-ing the staff from its long standing SoundDomain division, amongst others. SoundDomain.com is one – if not THE – largest online community for audio enthusiast. Their forums and members are very dedicated. They have users on there from beginners to shop owners, to those guys that seem to have nothing better to do then make their car as loud as humanly possible!.
Emily and I got a new phone system today. We’ve been using vonage for a while now – and previously another online group that went WAY under. Vonage has worked well for us, unless I had some huge download going 🙂 Previously we were using a two phone 5.8ghz system that worked pretty well for the last 2 or 3 years. One of the phones recently started acting up so we have now upgraded to the new Dect phone system.
Dect? what is dect?? Dect is a new frequency used by home cordless phones. Its a lower frequency, but right now, its only for cordless digital phones – this means it should be a really clear, strong signal. Previously, the 2.4ghz and 5.8ghz range were shared with wireless computer networks, absorbed microwave and other electronic interference, etc. So this should be a nice upgrade.
I went with a Panasonic 4 extension system (it can take up to 6 handsets). Should be a nice upgrade to our 2 phone system – esp for those who want to get a hold of us :). We looked at vtech, uniden, AT&T and other phone systems, but this panasonic one was the most comfortable unit, and to be honest … panasonic really has cornered the market on cordless phones.


Jun 23 2008

New Geek Toys…

Tag: Computers and Electronics,Fun,General,PaulPaul C. @ 10:46 am

I recently added some new toys to my geeky collection. Back in October, Dmoney hooked me up with a new phone – the HTC 6700 for SprintPCS. I LOVED this phone, I actually used the mobile Word/Excel frequently, it was excellent for text messaging, was convenient to have a decent camera around, etc. Last week, the keyboard started to go out – requiring pretty excessive pressing to get things like the space bar and lower qwerty keys to work. It was also starting to lock up once in a while and when a reminder popped up, it immediately went away so I couldn’t disable, snooze, etc.
Anyway, our SprintPCs contract expired almost a year ago, so we decided to shop around to see what was available. After visiting a bunch of websites and spending some time in the CinciBell store, we determined our current plan with Sprint simply rocks and couldn’t find anyone to even match it. Long story short, Emily and I both got new phones yesterday. She got a new Katana and I got the HTC Mogul (the 6800). The Mogul is faster and runs Windows Mobile 6. Love the phone. Couple pics I stole from the net:


Next, I built a new computer. My previous PC was a Gateway we bought at Best Buy almost three years ago – AMD dual core 3800+ with (upgraded) 3GB RAM and one XFX 8800 GT 512mb video card.
Instead of store bought, I decided to go back to my old hobby and build one. I went to my old favorite, Newegg.com to do the shopping. I went with:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 Yorkfield 2.66GHz, 12MB Cache
Motherboard: XFX MB-N780-ISH9 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI
CPU Cooler: ASUS V-60 92mm Vapo Bearing
RAM: mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
Video: XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT Extreme 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 – Added this to run in SLi
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos 1000
Power Supply: ZALMAN ZM750-HP Continuous 750W Modular LED Heatpipe-Cooled SLI Power Supply

This is by far the highest class machine I have ever built. I ran the FutureMark 3dMark06 on both my old computer and new computer and was pretty amazed. The old PC was running Vista Ultimate 32 bit and the new PC is running Windows XP Pro 64bit (to utilize all 4GB ram). 3Dmark on the old PC hit 3906 marks. The new PC was around 14,567 marks!! I may go to Vista 64Bit, but wasn’t really impressed with Vista enough for the 1.5 years or so I ran it. The changes to the control panel and Windows Explorer were enough to put me off. I never ran into stability or driver issues when using Vista, even with my printers.


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