Wading through life

I got everything ready to make the move to WordPress 2.1… I backed up my database, I backed up all the php files. I deleted all the old files off the server and uploaded all the new ones. I read the warning about it needing MySQL 4.x, but I didn’t think anything of it. Surely Media Temple, a fairly high-end Web host, would be running the latest database.

Well, it turns out that they might be a bit too high-end.

Media Temple recently took another leap forward in their server configurations (they’re calling it Hosting 2.0) and ditched the traditional shared-server model for a state-of-the-art grid-server set up for people like me who don’t need a super-fly dedicated server. This helps avoid the bad-neighbor syndrome common in shared server models. In those situations, if you happened to be “sharing” server processes with someone who experiences severe traffic peaks on occasion, your Web site’s performance can suffer.

In the grid model, everyone is distributed across a big network of servers. Idle processes can be tapped from numerous sources to respond to traffic peaks. For the most part, everyone should be happy. Makes maintenance easier to, as a faulty box can be yanked from the grid without anyone’s Web site having to be switched over to a different server. This supposedly makes 100% uptime very do-able.

Bring this full circle, my aging account is unfortunately stuck on the shared-server until I upgrade to the grid. And it appears the shared-server environment isn’t getting MySQL 4.x. I think I’ll be upgrading to the grid sometime, but I have other things to think about right now.

WordPress 2.1 and its auto-saving and spell-checking (though I do have spell-check through a Firefox extension…), will have to wait.

Heavy burden

I may be way late with these, but I wasn’t to be left out of the Great Ice Storm Photoblog-o-rama. So, here are my contributions, uniquely mine in their own right. There is a rogue moon photo taken at dawn within a day or two of the ice storm pics. So, I just dumped it in with the others.

And if you’re wondering what the heck I have a picture of a gas grill in there for, I like taking pictures of paradoxes (is that the right word?), such as a uniquely summer-time thing such as a grill… but it’s draped with ice.
To see them, check out the slideshow of the other photos.

Dan’s watching 24 season 6 in the other room. Torture, I say. Torture!
I’m drowning out any traces of it with Newsboys at my computer. I still need to watch eight hours of season 5 on DVD… and then wait about 10 months before I can partake of season 6.

Sorry Krista. I know it kills you that I’ve committed to living a season behind…

If you want to peek in on the fun, there’s some chatter going on regarding my “Church: Jesus-style” entry.

Mom’s shared some stuff I didn’t know about Bill Vaswig, the guy who led the healing prayer workshop. Jonathan shared ideas about the importance of preaching; I tacked an appendix onto my original entry in response. And Crystal shared that she has, in fact, prayed mosquitos away, much like my late friend, John Peterson.

I’ve been under assault the past few days. And though this year has been all about learning to wield my Sword and actually fight, there are still times I lay down and say, “I don’t have it in me right now.” This of course isn’t true, but we can always convince ourselves of it. As I’ve seen in  a coworker’s e-mail signature before: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

This, from John Eldredge’s Waking the Dead:

I daresay we’ve heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honor. Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now. The reason you doubt there could be a glory to your life is because that glory has been the object of a long and brutal war.