Rinsefirst

Been doing lots of work lately. JR did well this month and I\’m excited about the direction we are heading for next month. A special thank you to all of you who decided to pay the invoices this month. It really does help a lot with the expenses that we take on. MSA is doing well to. That\’s where I am in fact right now. Dan has been doing a wonderful job both on his Golf hole as well as on a new website for MSA. It\’s really to bad he has other things to do most of August.

So what do you get when you put one of my favorite christian rappers together with Reliant K? Or better yet, what happens if you give John Reuben a Band? You get a song that actually says something.

I\’m not trying to be a nuisannce

I just think we can do better than this

That was simply my two cents

you can, you can take it or leave (we can and we will)

Awesome song, and makes for my now second purchase on Itunes. I\’m finding that Itunes despite my complete lack of pleasure for the interface and encryption is a great way to buy music legally. In fact, it might be to easy to drop 99 cents. Eh, as long as you dont go buying songs left and right.

But if you want to hear the song I\’m talking about:

www.myspace.com

I just think we can do better than this…

Today was a good day. I enjoyed it for many reasons. Not everything went perfectly, but I had fun doing whatever it was I was doing all day long. That is what is important.

This morning we showed a presentation that Amber and I put together at church. I\’m glad people found it representative of the trip. Me and Amber really wanted to try to make it as God pleasing as possible, keeping the focus on what they were doing down in Mexico, and not on how much fun that they had doing it (ok so it was a mix, but really, hard work is fun).

We spent the afternoon watching Nascar on TV with Jack and Sierra as well as Sam and Ashley at the Radabaughs. That was fun. I beat Jon, I think my dad beat Amber, and I\’m pretty sure Richard beat Nikki. I\’m wondering what will happen as we get closer to the end of the season. Will me and Jeff be able to come back and beat John and Richard? We shall see..

SRA was also tonight. Richard ditched me, which was ok. I had a great time non the less. Ken gave me a ride around Indy so that I know what I\’m getting into 2 weeks from now. I also managed to make the A main (which is the final race of the night) without going into the last chance race. I also managed to place 4th in that race. I really owe Ken alot. Oh Richard, remind me, I have the setup for the indy car so you\’ll want to get it from me if you plan on racing.

After racing, I went and played cards at the Radabaughs. We played Phase 10. All in all a good time. I didn\’t win, but I did get to see some child abuse ;-). (just kidding).

I then finished the night by talking to friends online, doing a little work, and playing a little poker. I think I will go say goodnight to my love and then maybe read a little. I don\’t read enough. I\’m starting up again.

So based on the scale I came up with, Thrifty actually made it to plat. Yes, that\’s right, they managed to score over 5000 hits in one day. Let\’s just talk about what that means in shear numbers today.

Our server handled at least (these numbers are only thrifty\’s not everyones combined):

5079 Visitors

65584 Page requests

302793 File Requests (includes images)

2.67 GB of data transfer.

It also caused us to maintain an average today of: 450 kbits/second. That\’s like 10 dial up modems of data transfer on average at all times today. That\’s crazy in terms of what we normally get. We\’re lucky to have 1 dial up modem in an average day.

It\’s amazing what making the front page of the variety section can do for you. Perhaps it\’s time JR did some press.

The music industry has a way of measure record sales that is kind of cool. You hear them say from time to time that an album has gone gold or platinum. Until just now I never know what it took to do that, so I\’d thought i\’d share:

The description Gold Album is applied to recorded music albums that have sold a minimum number of copies (in the US, currently 500,000 sales). A larger number of sales qualifies for the award of a Platinum Album (in the US, currently 1,000,000 sold) or Diamond Album (in the US, currently 10,000,000 sold) Similar awards are also less commonly quoted for individual recordings (singles), videos and increasingly for DVDs.

I\’ve decided that as of today I\’m going to have the same sort of system for daily hits on a site.

Silver: 100 hits per day

Gold: 1000 hits per day

Platinum: 5000 hits per day

Diamond: 10,000 hits per day.

Thanks to a newspaper article in the Star Tribue, one of the sites JR does went Gold today. They had been averaging about 700 people a day before that, but for the last 2 days they have been well above 1000 hits. In fact, I\’m expecting them to break over a gig of traffic today. That\’s pretty cool for us because I think it\’s the first site we have done that has broken 1000 hits per day (Art attack might have, but I wasn\’t involved with that).

Life continues to keep me busy, which makes me why I\’m still finding time to play a game of poker. We\’ve gotten a few more clients in the last few weeks which hopefully will turn into something. I\’ve also been doing a good amount of work for WLC lately. I\’ve been having fun with it so it\’s all good.

I\’m trying to figure out why it seems so many people are getting upset lately. Maybe they are all ready to go back to school. Maybe it\’s just common at this age. Maybe it\’s a cascade affect of some sort. I suppose there isn\’t much I can really do about it other than be there for the people that need me to be there for them. One thing has always been true though: money can\’t buy happiness.

Speaking of money. I played a free roll last night on Party Poker. It was one of those where if you placed in the top 50, you made money. Well about an hour after playing, I was winning pretty well. I had a stack that was twice the average and I had built up a pretty good table image. About then, the servers crashed. Amber and my family wanted to go to dinner, so we did. When we got back, the game still hadn\’t resumed, meaning I hadn\’t lost my chips.

11 PM rolled around and messages started coming across that they would have to take the server down. By this point, I was pretty sure the game would never get going again, and we would probably have so many people idle, that it woudln\’t be fun to play (playing against people who aren\’t there is a very long slow process).

Well, I get an email saying that they have closed teh tournament. Because I was still active, I got a share of the prize pool based on my chip count. Realizing that there were still 1200 people, and it was a 5000 prize pool, you\’d think we\’d all get like 4 dollars. Turns out though I was up quite a bit on chips (relatively) so I got 7 dollars instead. That just rocks. I probably wouldn\’t have finished in the top 50, and I still make money on a freerole. That\’s just cool. We\’ll have to see if I can do something with it, maybe I\’ll hold it for now.

Crap, I just realized I need to pay a bill. Time for me to go. Thank you. bye.

I\’m sorry honey for not spending as much time with you the last few days. It\’s been crazy with 2 weeks of vacation, and I should be doing more to make room for you even though my list is a mile long. Just know that I love you, and that I\’m praying for you before I go to sleep.

The last 3 hours have been hell. I went to compile something into PHP for my own usage, and found that mysql wouldn\’t compile into php correctly. I then tried to restart apache, and it failed. I hadn\’t even modified a file related to php, but apache failed. Why? Because something happened to the mysql libraries on our machine. I dont know what, but whatever it was, it wasn\’t cool.

I fixed the libraries, recompiled PHP, and re-enabled everything for everyone. Whats this mean? It means that Alex\’s exif module has been loaded in (cheers are heard around the world) and that my zip module is loaded in. Both of this will offer much functionality for our usage in the near future.

I hope to have some other cool stuff to show you all tomorrow, as well as some words on yet another new client. They keep coming. Now if only I can get a current client to pay. Oh well. We\’ll figure something out.

For now. I sleep.

I\’ve done a lot in the last few days, but I still find that I have way more stuff to do. Gotta love working. Let\’s talk about whats been up the last few days.

For a good portion of it, I was in Wilmar for Sonshine, the music festival that I go to every year. Overall, I thought it was pretty good, with the exception of day two. What went wrong with day 2 you ask? Well, it was the closing bands. Normally, the closing bands are really really good at worship music. They get 25,000 people in a feild to watch them (unlike the other bands which normally dont get more than a couple 1000). Everyone will stand and sing their hearts out, and for the most part, everyone is having a good time. The singers normally mention how Jesus affects their life, and overall, they just have a passion for God.

Day 2, was not like that. For the first time at sonshine (and i gone 3 years now) the closing band(s) didn\’t even mention the words \"God\" or \"Jesus\". Moreover, their songs were not very worshippy like. Now, I know Reliant K has never been known for that, and Switchfoot wants to maintain their mainstream image. But come on… Your at a christian music festival and you can\’t even say the word Jesus. Horrible in my mind for a closing band.

Not to mention Reliant K complained like babies through their entire show about how the sound equipment for his monitor wasn\’t working quite right. Reliant K… Learn to have more grace. Newsboys lost their lights on Monday and in my mind, played better. Their only comment about the loss of lights was \"I guess were going to have a candlelight service tonight\". That was awesome. So was Mercy Me. I just dont know. Switchfoot and Reliant K, stop looking inward and reflect on where your success has come from.

Ok, that\’s my speal on that.

The last two days have been spent at MSA. We have a new student server. A new firewall. Some new software on both. It\’s a lot of fun. Now when you come to MSA, you have to log in to use our wi-fi, much like you do at the U of M. We also have 2 layers of firewalls now. And the biggest thing yet: the ARCIMS Server is running on a linux debian box. Pretty cool if you ask me. I think I\’m going to install a map server on JR one of these days. It might be awhile, but I will.

That\’s all I really want to say right now. I think I\’ll try to write more later.