Dixon-Ratzlaff Family Blogs

 In the Tall Grass: 

I am driving Dad's van and we head towards town. As we are pulling out of the drive, movements in the grass catch my attention; I start pleading with Hoss to pull over, even threatening to hurl myself from the moving vehicle I am so keen to investigate (apparently, I have forgotten I am driving...) I park behind a line of vehicles attending the carnival on the corner, and rush back to find two calico kittens and a beagle pup that have been abandoned. 

Americus has gone Euro:

There is still war damage marring the beautiful buildings in the town West and I am wishing I had money to invest to help with repairs. Something is amiss in the park and Lulu is angry because the bathrooms are out of order and the children must defecate in Wal-Mart sacks; and after all, "Our children are not dogs." Later, in the rain, a man is busted selling drugs and I am sad because Lulu missed the connection and won't be having any fun this evening. 

The Stowaway: 

Boudicca has stowed away in Mom's truck, again, and we are a bit miffed when she hops out of the back and strolls up Mainstreet. I scold her and scoop her up and she rides complacently in my arms purring loudly as I frantically rush between The Whistlestop and The Noose trying to get both opened and organized. I drop Bo off at the stufio and Blanche and Lucy commence to beat her up a little bit and I can't help thinking, "This is a nice turnabout -It's about time Bo got some payback."  

 An entire wall of our house has been dedicated to the most amazing sound system on the planet. From here, I am able to listen in on the private conversations of Tony Horton. Pointless images swirl around in my head while my brain takes a vacation to Europe. 

 An entire wall of our house has been dedicated to the most amazing sound system on the planet. From here, I am able to listen in on the private conversations of Tony Horton. Pointless images swirl around in my head while my brain takes a vacation to Europe. 

Bar Acrobatics: 

Becky gives two regulars I've never seen coupons for free fancy drinks with exotic flavors because we are out of the flavors they wanted that night. The fake regulars then proceed to go around trying to collect signatures from other patrons on their coupon sheets in attempts to get more free things they aren't entitled to; they hassle me and our Japanese owner who points to the kimonos on the wall in subtle attempts to let them know they're barking up the wrong tree. I go out back and proceed to do wondrous acrobatics on the chairs and tables in the beer garden. 

The Barbecue: 

We meet the DeVoe family out at The Ranch where we are all expected to dine on the single perch that is the only catch Mike was able to make that day. Mike works very hard to char the fish to ash in the oven because it will "go further". I am very angry at David because he refuses to take off my favorite dress and because he embarrassed me by urinating on the patio where everyone is sitting instead of using his tree like we asked him to.

Bar Acrobatics: 

Becky gives two regulars I've never seen coupons for free fancy drinks with exotic flavors because we are out of the flavors they wanted that night. The fake regulars then proceed to go around trying to collect signatures from other patrons on their coupon sheets in attempts to get more free things they aren't entitled to; they hassle me and our Japanese owner who points to the kimonos on the wall in subtle attempts to let them know they're barking up the wrong tree. I go out back and proceed to do wondrous acrobatics on the chairs and tables in the beer garden. 

The Barbecue: 

We meet the DeVoe family out at The Ranch where we are all expected to dine on the single perch that is the only catch Mike was able to make that day. Mike works very hard to char the fish to ash in the oven because it will "go further". I am very angry at David because he refuses to take off my favorite dress and because he embarrassed me by urinating on the patio where everyone is sitting instead of using his tree like we asked him to.

 Ran across this, very randomly, last night:

http://threesentencedreams.blogspot.com

Absolutely fell in love with the idea. It's just mesmerizing to me. Reminds me a bit of the whole beat movement. I just love the free-form weirdness. Mine prob. won't be half so well written, but they should still be interesting. :) 

Bing took over Yahoo Search a while back, in order to compete with Google. Why then is Google still the big frontrunner in Internet search? From my perspective, because they’re responsive and accurate.

We recently redesigned our website. It really needed it, we still had a frame-based layout with almost no search engine optimization, and quite a bit of the information was outdated. After the redesign, all the pages had new URLs, and the old links were no longer good.

I set the web server to generate user-friendly 404 errors, and set up 301 redirects for our “domain.com” to point to our “www.domain.com”, and did all the standard SEO stuff. We have a sitemap XML file that generates dynamically from our website structure, and robots.txt mentions it. We also have a news page that generates an RSS feed that’s published through FeedBurner.

I submitted the new sitemap url to both Google and Bing (and also through the old Yahoo SiteExplorer) 10 days ago. So far, all of our new URLs are showing up in Google search results, including our news articles. But Bing still returns all of our old URLs, very few of the new ones, and none of the news articles.

When I check on Bing’s Webmaster tools page, it still says my sitemap submission is “pending”, and when I check my web server logs, Bing’s robot has never fetched our new sitemap, even though it has fetched our new robots.txt file several times.

After seeing the inaccurate results that Bing returns for our site (pages that have been dead for 10+ days), I certainly wouldn’t be using it for my searches anytime soon. In my opinion, Bing will need to me a lot more responsive to changes in the web and be more accurate before they can ever hope to compete with Google in search.

First of all, when we first decided that Windows Backup was not going to be sufficient to back up our servers anymore, (specifically since 2008′s version doesn’t support tape drives anymore) we looked at several packages. Backup Exec (whoever owns it now) was the software I was most familiar with, but it’s almost the priciest package out there. Then we found NovaBACKUP from NovaStor.

NovaBACKUP did everything we needed – it backs up open files, SQL databases, and Exchange server. Then we learned about NovaStor’s storage server technology, which allows you to back up to a remote server in another location. Their Remote Workforce product incorporates all these features into a single solution. And it’s priced much lower than anything else I found.

So, we’ve been running this package for almost a year now. The “cloud” backups work using a technology NovaStor calls “FastBIT” which generates a patch file containing only the changes since the last backup, thereby minimizing the bandwidth required to perform the new backup. This worked great for us, as we wanted to locate our storage server in another location connected via T-1. The drawback to this technology is it requires quite a bit of free space to generate the patch files, and the process (especially for large files) is not exactly speedy. Backing up one of our large databases took just over an hour to complete.

With their new 12.1 version, they’ve included a new FastBIT algorithm which requires less disk space and works much more quickly. After performing the upgrade, that same database backup now only takes 20 minutes!

If you’re looking for a backup solution that supports local tape devices as well as several different online backup options, check out NovaStor.

 A "funny" thing about so many Christians in our society...

They can quote the bible by heart, when needed-

But they know nothing about God or love. 

Aim for this week: Made the Grade/Over, but okay/Maintenance /Over Maintenance

 

September 6^th to September 12^th 2010

Day	Target	Actual	Summary	Burn	Deficit
Mon	1500	1550	Went shopping. Good eats. (B+)	2550	1000
Tue	2000	2450	Work. Heavy eats. No carbs. Okish. (A-)	3400	950
Wed	1800	1600	Ok Eats. Brisk walk.  (A-)	2450	850
Thu	1900	1550	Good  eats. Work Day. Nice. (A)	3250	1700
Fri	1900	2000	Work day. Okay eats. (B+)	3400	1400
Sat	1500	1600	Had beet. Ooops. Still… (B+)	2400	800
Sun	1500	1170	Good eats. Mowed. (A)	3200	2030

 

Thoughts: Done with Week 1 of Phase 1. Feeling pretty good. Decent deficits all week. A bit disappointed with the beer splurge, Saturday, but life is short. Had a fun night. And at least packed my own dinner, so that was a bit of a victory.  

 

This week:

 

Did I get 30 + minutes of exercise 5 days this week? Yes.

Did I eat relatively healthy? Yes.

Did I keep my “free” day around maintenance calories? Yes!

Did I binge?  No!