Host is being annoying lately, massive downtime (1-2 hours a day at the moment), their custom control panel rarely works, awstats doesn’t update much, and when it does it’s horribly wrong, plus I’ve been trying to create subdomain(s) for about a week now with no results what-so-ever!

Gah!

I’ve been lenient towards them enough, as I only made a call once a week or so, but this is getting way out of hand! They’re not even responding to my emails anymore it seems. (Just sent them a new one, let’s see what happens).

Granted, when it’s working, it’s working just fine. But this is nowhere near the 99.5% uptime they guaranteed, nor do their features work the way they’re supposed to. I wish I could just have regular access to the Apache control panel, but I’m stuck with their custom thing that doesn’t work!

Sorry, ranting here, but damnit! I want to get my work done here! I don’t care about the frigging money, it’s not much, but I did expect everything to be functional. As it stands I could’ve just well gone to some other cheap host.

The longer this takes the worse it’ll reflect on their company. As they got very good initial reviews, I can only imagine it’ll be far worse now.

Please let this horrid mess be over soon or I’ll be forced to let them get to know the real me. I’m already making an effort to log every single instance of downtime and such, but this is just getting plain ridiculous!

FIX IT, or at the VERY LEAST let me know what’s going on!

/Rant off..

Update:
Been checking other websites that they host, the ones that have forums so I could check their moods. Well, it’s pretty similar to my experience, some of which who are already considering switching hosts. This is just unprofessional.

I’ve been checking how long it would last to time-out while creating a new subdomain, so far it’s been running for a very long time, with no response.

This is annoying the heck out of me, and I’m desperately trying NOT to call them up in fear I might throw them some hurtful remarks.

…but I might just do so later today.

Update2:
Meh, I think I’m going to give them the weekend, if I haven’t gotten a (good) response by then I’ll just have to call them up.

Sol’s completely fine again.
I posted at a cat forum to get some opinions of people, as he had some problems.
It took him longer than normal to recover, and it was scary at times to see him so.. lifeless..
I was barely able to sleep during this time.

[announcer_voice] But he’s ok!

Just had a 90 minute (!) chat with one of the helpdesk workers of my ISP, and after initially trying everything we could think of to remedy the situation, word came in that there was indeed a DNS forwarding problem (in my area). Wether it is linked to the comcast problem is unknown at this point, but at least I know the problem is not with my PC.

An unfortunate side-effect is that I know have a problem re-connecting my LAN, whenever I activate it my Ethernet/Internet connection refuses to see *any* site.. hmm…

UPDATE: Managed to fix the LAN - yay!
And it seems like everything is working again.

gah!

About two days ago, I started to notice that for some reason I could not access a lot of websites anymore, which I think is due to a DNS update problem. I say this because I know that Comcast recently (also two days ago) changed all of their DNS servers in the entire United States. So it could very well be that my ISP is just slow their updates, resulting in wrongly forwarded websites.

Among the websites are www.epguides.com - which I use to organize my caps.. and www.penny-arcade.com - home of a popular gaming comic..

bleh! I’m gonna go watch TV..

Sol’s doing a little better, but I’m still keeping him inside as he’s still a little groggy.
The vet said it could take up to 3 days before he’s all good and well again.

As I need to increase my budget to finance Star Quest (check the PnP projects forum for details) I’m currently in the process of auctioning off almost my entire collection of comics on ebay. I have about 1000-1500 lying around which I franticly collected about 10 years ago.

It’s mostly (US) Marvel comics, as I bought every single comic they published (that means every X, Spidey, Trek, etc.. series) but there are some Dark Horse (Star Wars) and Image/Top Cow comics in there as well.

If you want, you can check them out here: Lightning Comics.
I hope to make good money on this over the course of the next few weeks because I’m going to need it!

Today I had Sol, one of my cats, castrated; I’m not a fan of this but it has to be done with all the cats in ‘death row’ and all. It costed me 37 euros, and next up is Nova, my youngest feline friend, for which it will cost almost 90 euros to have her sterilized.

Now I don’t mind paying, because I consider myself a responsible citizen when it comes to this sort of thing, but if they (goverment officials, animal-caretakers) really want everyone to do this, we need some kind of subsidizing. The way it is now, too many people will just forgo the procedure because of the high costs, making it seem like we’re doing this for nothing.

He’s a fighter, both physically and mentally, so it’s hard to keep him indoors at the moment, but I guess that’s what they call ‘tough love’. I’m allowed to feed him again in about an hour, so I hope that’ll distract him a bit.

I finished editing it today, running time is about eight and a half minutes and it comes complete with a full dialog of the host explaining the process and highlighting certain details. I’m pretty satisfied with the result and learned some new things along the way.

NEXT!

I did some minor editing today, and God the lightning was terrible over there. To give an example, they have some of Leo’s other (regular sized) paintings hanging over there, which are individually lit by a single halogen lamp, needless to say it didn’t do justice to the paintings. It was aweful! But I guess they thought it was ‘moody’.

I visited Tulipland today and took my camera with me.

For those not in the know, Tulipland is set to be the largest tulip panorama painting in the world. It is a project done by a single painter which will take him more than a decade(!) to finish. He (Leo van den Ende) started back in 1997 and is estimated to be done in 2010. Needless to say it is a very impressive piece and takes hard work and dedication. The detail in there is pretty amazing, some are almost complete paintings in itself.

Every year they move the entire painting (which requires specially crafted equipment) to a location where the public can view it for a few weeks, and he will be painting there as well.

As I did not have much time to prepare (or film) I’m not sure what the result of my footage will be, but I just imported into Adobe Premiere Pro and sorted it out, and seems ok. There’s not really an option for re-shoots so I may have to use some improvisational techniques to get it done. It’s more for personal use and editing experience anyway.