Author: John Weathers

The Wrathful Dove (Part II)

/ John Weathers / 3 Comments

Last weekend, I purchased myself a domain for this blog, finally. It was actually part of an exercise in testing the practical length of time it takes for a DNS server change to propogate successfully. I had originally been planning on purchasing a different domain for a different purpose altogether, but I was sort of luke warm about it. However, my lovely and brilliant wife thought it made sense to buy one for this blog which I slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner – especially with domain prices on GoDaddy so cheap!

Now all my faithful readers (all 2-3 of you) can find me at http://wrathfuldove.org or http://www.wrathfuldove.org.

Hello Slicehost!

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Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own. Continue reading →

Trip to the Grenadines (From May)

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I’ve been a real slacker of late when it comes to posting anything to this blog…

What can I say? Life happens.

At any rate, back in late May, my wife Melinda and I went on a very nice and relaxing vacation trip on a Windjammer sailing cruise in the Grenadines. The idea for this trip has been hanging around in the back of our minds for quite some time now. Back when Melinda was in college at Georgia Tech, she was part of the sailing club and ever since she has been a big fan of sailing. While she was still at Tech, she saw an ad for the Windjammer cruises and thought that they sounded like a lot of fun. Fast forward a few years to when we got married in 2002: we were planning our honeymoon, and one of our top ideas was to take a Windjammer cruise. Ultimately, none of the cruise times synced up perfectly with our wedding dates, and instead, Melinda found us a nice package deal for a trip to Jamaica. We had a great honeymoon, but the idea of taking a Windjammer cruise at some point still lingered.

Every year since our honeymoon, we have done some sort of vacation trip to celebrate our anniversary whether it be a trip to Jamaica or a week in Asheville. For each trip, we have considered a Windjammer cruise, but increasingly it became clear that we would never find an ideal match between the Windjammer cruise schedules and our early September anniversary. Add to this situation the fact that Hurricane season is still in full swing during our anniversary… Let’s just say a Windjammer anniversary vacation simply isn’t in the cards for us.

Which brings us to early 2007. The first part of this year has been really stressful for the both of us at our jobs, but especially for Melinda. While I was at least gaining some job satisfaction during this period, she was mostly just gathering exhaustion and frustration. It was becoming very clear that she needed to take a vacation as soon as possible or she would crack. So one fateful day, I insisted that we take a Windjammer cruise like we had always planned, but that we do it then rather than put it off indefinitely. That was all it took to swing Melinda into gear. Shortly there after, she booked us a Windjammer cruise trip for the last week of May.
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