Moving on, Trying to Leave a Clean House

Well, today is the six month anniversary of Greasy PC. While I'm slightly surprised that this blog has lasted this long, the real achievement to me has been to average slightly more than one post per day for the entire duration. At almost 200 posts, that might even be the most number of blog posts made of any of my friends IRL, and some of them have maintained blogs/livejournals for years and years.

In truth, in addition to wanting to document all the various tweaks and customizations I've put into my computer over the past year, I also did this blog to prove to myself that I can commit to a project wholeheartedly and consistently over a long period of time. I hadn't worked on any of my own long term projects in God knows how long, but of what I've done on this blog I truly am proud.

In the interest of full disclosure, one of the reasons now's a better time than any for me to cash out, is because a week ago, I got myself an iMac. I know.

This was a purchase I'd been gunning for for months now. As an animator working in films, I'd always made great use of my PC. However, when it became more and more necessary for me to have access to Final Cut Pro and its codecs, my need for a new machine pointed me in the iMac's direction. It was the best option for the price (I might blog about that in the future still).

Don't worry though, I still love my PC. I've got Bootcamp successfully running Windows XP on the iMac (it runs Team Fortress 2 far better than my old PC did), and I've got Synergy allowing me to control both my mac and PC with the same keyboard and mouse over the network. I even recently successfully transferred my Firefox profile from the PC to the Mac.

So where does that leave us? Well, I'm making no promises, but I may turn out a few more posts here and there about making the smooth transition from using a PC to a Mac. Also, I'm going to try my best to organize this blog to stand the test of time: making sure all posts are tagged properly, creating some static "favorite" pages, and otherwise making it even easier for stublers-on to find what they're looking for.

So don't worry, Greasy PC will be greasing it up indefinitely. In the meantime though, hope to see you around on my other endeavors; you can always check my official site, which I'm hoping to update now that I've got a little more free time. Otherwise, good luck to everyone, and see you around!

Circuit City Web Order Follow Up

Remember my glowing review of online buying through Circuit City, back when I bought my Nyko Frontman Wii guitar? Well, for some reason or another, I don't know if it's standard practice for them, but those good folks felt like sending me a follow-up gift - a card worth for 10% off on my next purchase of $50 dollars or more. Maybe they wanted to woo me further upon seeing my original blog entry.



That seemed nice of them, although when I looked at the fine (very fine) print in the back of the card, it had a hefty list of products exempt from the discount:

Not valid on previous purchases. Offer expludes Bose, select Polk, Element Kicker, Nikon DSLR, Sony DSLR cameras, Sony camera accessories. Olevia, Viszio Toshiba televisions, Apple, game hardware, movies, music, laptops, desktops, software, Otlet, Red Dot clearance, PreOrder/Backorder products, firedog survices and Circuit City Gift Card purchases. This coupon also excludes the following television models: SON KDL40S4100, SON KDL465410, etc.

Where does that leave at? I think the only stuff left I can buy are car stereos (no thanks), cell phones (got one, thanks), and their various accessories. I'd consider maybe just buying 50 dollars worth of blank DVD's, except I haven't gone through my months old spindle yet.



The card expires July 12th, and I'm not buying a huge ticket item just to get 10% off. What do you think I should use it on?

Don't Use Your Web Host for Storage!

I read a Lifehacker article that warned users not to use their web hosts for file storage, and it wasn't something I treated particularly seriously. Until now.



A few days ago, I woke up to find an email from my otherwise awesome host, Hostmonster, (see my original review of them here), telling me my account had been suspended for Terms of Service violations. The site was down, which meant I also wasn't getting email.



I immediately called their toll-free number, which was answered immediately by a considerate and prompt tech support staff. They confirmed the reason why my site was taken down. Luckily, they let me bring it back up as soon as I deleted the offending files.



This was completely my fault, and they really didn't need to bring my site back up if they were so inclined, but that they were friendly about the incident makes me love them even more. Kinda sucks that I'll never be able to take advantage of all the 1.5 terabytes of space allotted to me, but the price is still worth it for their excellent tech support.

More Cheapo Hosting Drama: Ehost Email Blacklisted

Continuing in my unfortunately still-not-ended saga of dealing with cheapo web hosts, I am currently in the process of moving one of my clients for whom I maintain a website, from being hosted by eHost.net (remember them?), to finally Hostmonster (and then remember them?)*.

I'd recommended moving for her months before, but what finally prompted us to move was because it turns out eHost's mail server has been blacklisted by about half of the email servers out there for funneling out spam into peoples' unsuspecting inboxes. As such, emails sent from their mail server was being blocked by, in this case, Yahoo!. Whether this was because of eHost continuing to be the douchebags that they've been all this time, or more likely because of the hundreds of sites they host and share the mail server was ruining it for all the other hosted sites, this was unacceptable.

And I'd obviously realized that this was a problem they weren't going to fix anytime soon, if ever.
And so, I'm hoping that with this final hurrah, I never have to deal with any of these webhosts again, and I finally stop clogging up my own blog with horror stories. But let these articles stand for all time and serve as a warning to all else who consider paying for service from these guys.


* No, I did not take a commission. In fact I'm moving her site free of charge because I felt bad having turned her onto eHost to begin with.

OnsaleHost Issue Resolved: No Longer Suck

I went on a long tirade a while back about my awful experience with getting super-cheap web hosting on eBay, leading me to eventually breaking that addiction and finally ponying up to good, monthly web hosting.

One of the hosts I ranted against was OnSaleHost, mainly because the website I was working on stopped working and then they charged me for another year after I'd completely forgotten about them. I emailed them for a month asking for my money back or for more hosting (I really just wanted the money again), but had not heard from them at all, prompting the blog rant.

Well, a few days ago they DID get back to me, saying they'd read the blog post, and apologizing, explaining the web servers they'd lost all those months ago. They offered me a refund AND continued web hosting for the trouble. I took them up on the former, turned down the latter.

They also apologized that their website's email contact form was inoperable, leading much to the communication problem we'd had before.

Overall, better late than never. I still stand by my original assessment of super-cheap web hosting (you get what you pay for, bad tech support, don't entrust your important data and email with them), but I applaud OnSaleHost and Paul Ha for being proactive in righting their wrongs. They're much better than others I know out there.

Ask the Readers: Open in New Window, or Not?

Since this blog relies so heavily on linking to older posts and articles from other sites, I am faced with the dilemma about whether or not to set it so that links open either in the same window, or in a new window. I thought I had it figured out, but looking around online maybe I don't.

As it stands, I've set every link to open in its new window. Since some of the pages here don't load very quickly, and are very long to read, I fear that a person accidentally clicking a link will cause them to lose their spot in what they were reading originally. I fear this is especially true for people clicking on thumbnail links.



However, I've since read quite a few sites online that advocate giving readers the choice of opening in new windows/tabs as they wish. Since a vast majority of my users use Firefox, I would assume that most of you are smart enough to figure out how to middle click for new tabs if you wanted to. Many people are actually annoyed by the choice of browser window being made for them.

Unfortunately, as in almost all cases with design, websites are most likely designed to function for the lower end of the bell curve (i.e. lower resolution screens, lower colors, older browsers, and most especially, less experienced readers). So I am at quite a dilemma. What do you think?

Web Host Review: ixwebhosting

My anger at crappy, cheapo web hosts is by now well-documented. After five years of using those $9.95 a year, unlimited web space and bandwidth hosting services you can buy on eBay, I've come to realize that they're worth even less than the rock bottom price they go for, at least if you seriously depend on the uptime of your site. In my case, my main email address is connected to my domain, so if the host is down, I don't get email.

Finally, I buckled down and decided to go with a monthly paid, true customer service web host. I looked them up online, and tried to read as many reviews as possible, and weighed their various services, capacities, and bandwidths they offer.

At one point in late 2007, I actually went with ixwebhosting, which was a cheap host at 3.95 a month for unlimited capacity and bandwidth. I went with them mainly because they apparently had excellent customer support (they claim 24/7 phone support via an 800 number).

In fact, when I was setting my site up, it was during a long holiday weekend, and I needed to ask a question to get my email working. I called the number, and after a short holding period, I was put in touch with a well-spoken, genial customer service rep that answered my question easily. I was very impressed.

Unfortunately, IXwebhosting did not use CPanel, the web-based site management app that I and many other webmasters have come to rely upon to set up site services and track visitors. Ixwebhosting offered their own control panel, but it just didn't cut the mustard to my satisfaction. Likewise, IXwebhosting did not offer a MySQL database, which I needed to run my forum. These two things led me to eventually dump my service with them, for which I was able to get a full refund since I did it in the 30 day trial period. Even though it was my own stupid lack of making sure they offered everything I needed, they were still corteous and prompt at their response.

I've since checked out the site and it seems that while the price per month of ixwebhosting has gone up an extra dollar per hour at 4.95 a month, they have added MySQL support, and they seem to have updated their control panel to be more user-friendly.

I think what ixwebhosting offers now is a great deal for the price, mainly because of their stellar customer support service. However, if you feel you need the use of CPanel, don't be surprised to pay extra for it.

The problem with April Fools' sites

Yesterday being April Fools, there were more than a bunch of sites that took on pranky gimmicks (all of Gizmodo's posts yesterday were Mr. T, Wisebread claimed that getting an Apple tattoo gets you cash and Apple Store discounts, Newgrounds did crap, and of course you probably saw what Google and Youtube were up to).

All funny and cute, but the problem is, it's really only funny the first site you visit. It's not any of these sites' fault (okay, fine the Gizmodo thing got old pretty fast), since they can't help if they weren't the first site a person visits, but perhaps I'm really just that big of a fan of website pranks, or normal pranks.

OnSaleHost: Another Crappy Webhost

Pre-script: Sorry for the lack of updates the past two days, I was away on vacation. I did have the two articles ready to go and be published, but I did not have internet service when I thought I would. Here are the two articles that I had pre-written, but now post-published.

By the by, is there a way to have Blogger publish postdated articles automatically at the time they were postdated?

Sorry for yet another rant, but my recent experiences with these online eBay web hosts have given me little recourse but to at least warn people exactly what they're in for when they buy "unlimited web hosting" for 10 dollars a year.

I had bought hosting on OnSaleHost for a client that needed a small, quick, cheap website. I offered to buy the host and domain for them since they weren't too knowledgeable about such things. Well, that client turns out to be a little hard to please, and in the end I put way too much time for too little pay, and they ended up ditching my design altogether and going with some guy with templates.

In this case, OnSaleHost actually hasn't been that bad of a web host (since I was only in control of the site for about 2 weeks), although at one point they lost a server and needed me to update my info with their system to get me back online.

Anyway, the problem started a few weeks ago when I was notified by Paypal that my subscription with OnSaleHost had been renewed. After my previous experiences with Valethosting, I know that it's near impossible to get a refund on subscriptions. And it was completely my fault for not cancelling my subscription earlier. So +1 to them because of my ignorance.

And since the eBay auction was a year ago, I can't leave negative feedback (that's why these guys have as good feedback as they show!)

That being said, I tried to then log back into the account I had paid yet another year of hosting for, and did not get access with the username/password I had set up, nor any other password combos I had discussed with the original client.

I decided to contact OnSaleHost twice, through the original email they'd contacted me with to set the hosting up originally, and through the contact page on their site.

(Their site, by the way, is the same kind of underdeveloped template-y crap that offers no real information as all the other shared server hosts).

Anyway, no contact received from both instances, even after I threatened more official action in the second email.

All I'm looking for is either a refund of the small sum that I paid when my subscription got renewed, or at least access to the web server again, since I did pay for it, after all.

Now I'm gonna go and send this article to OnSaleHost through their email contact page and we'll see if I hear back from them. But even if no, if this article makes you at least stop and think (a bit longer) before shacking up with these guys, then I feel vindicated.

Screw Your Sucky Service, EHost.NET and ValetHosting!

For several years I'd coasted on cheap hosting by buying shared servers through eBay. They usually offered "unlimited" bandwidth and space, plus CPanel support and all the necessary CGI and PHP scripts, for just 10 dollars a YEAR.

The problem with these sites are they're run by guys like me who thought to make a quick buck by buying a bunch of server space that they could rent out themselves. As such, the tech support was pretty spotty, and if there was ever any downtime, their response always used to take forever.

I admit that I got what I paid for with these services, and I never complained too much. But the first really frustrating experience was with ValetHosting, essentially run by someone named Donovan Stewart from Washington state. One day his hosting service just went up and left, not giving me any access to my data, and as such I couldn't make a backup. I tried to get Paypal and eBay to intervene but I'd already left positive feedback and since the service was a subscription, I wasn't allowed to get a refund. Let it be known, Donovan Stewart is a shifty guy with whom one should not do business. This is after over a year of being his customer.

Luckily the company who hosted his server was very nice and were able to send me a semi-recent backup that let me set myself up at another place. But even they talked about how this guy just up and left (the number I'd found for him was the same number they had, which was the number he was not answering).

That place was eHost, which was another 10 bucks a year service, run by a guy named Cyrus Chow, also apparently from Washington state. I needed a server fast after ValetHosting went down and luckily I had bought this server for a client that fell through, so I just took it over.

These guys' service was even worse than ValetHosting's, and they would cop an attitude whenever I demanded my quick service (I admit I'd become quite verbal with these companies before, since they seem to act so lax with regards to tech support). Their website boasted 24/7 chat support, but even during normal business hours (for any US time zone), I never got anybody to answer on the other side. Worse, their servers would go down at a frequency that I found unacceptable, especially since I was using my email through their server.

The last straw that broke the camel's back, however, was when I suddenly got a form email from them saying that they would no longer be taking on new customers and were moving their servers to another company. This was after my site was down for almost a week with no proper response from them explaining why.

When I received access to my site again after a while I quickly made a full backup and moved to another server. I'll let you know about them in a future post, but rest assured I'm ditching these eBay guys forever.

As a final lesson, be wary of these guys' respectable feedback ratings. They are usually not too bad because people leave feedback less than a month after they pay for their server. I must admit setup was really simple through these guys. As such, by they time people realize how crappy the service was, it was already too late, and they had already left positive feedback.

FINALLY, though, from the looks of it Valethosting is now owned by someone else other than Donovan Stewart. I can't vouch for these new guys, but they probably could do without the previous company's baggage. As far as EHost is concerned, their website seems to be back up and they're still serving customers, and for those people I bid good luck.

Rant: Not Showing Message Content in "You've got a message" Emails

I just wanted to let off a bit of steam on a minor thing that I'm sure you all can relate to.

How annoying is it to receive emails that say things like "You've got a new message in your inbox" or "someone wrote on your wall" or "such and such has left a comment to your photo/video" but the email never actually shows what the message is?

I know it's supposed to be an incentive for you to log into your Facebook or Youtube or whatever accounts in order to actually read the message, but in the end my email inbox is just cluttered with notifier messages that serve no other purpose.

Facebook got part of the message with showing the contents of private messages inside the emails themselves, but haven't gotten around to showing what people wrote on my wall, or comments on photos (as far as I remember), etc. Why not? It's the same damn thing.

So if anybody in charge of those services hear me, we are all sick and tired of these fake-mysterious notifications of received comments! Show us the content in the emails!