Haylie Anne

This is Haylie Anne. She was born on Friday, August 28. I know you have been waiting for me to post this news, but hey, I've been busy taking care of a new little girl, her mother, and her sister and brothers.

Obviously she is adorable, but (and I write this knowing that I may be knocking on the door of Murphy) she is also a perfectly well behaved little baby. She only cries when she is hungry or needs to be changed. As soon as you take care of those things she gets a pleasant look on her face and sometimes even smiles. We do have to wake up with her during the night every 2 or 3 hours, but that's what babies do. And by "we" I mean that I wake up with Haylie long enough to check her diaper and hand her to her mother, then I go back to sleep.

That's the basics. More later... maybe. Until then, check out a few more pics below in the slide show.

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Get your own

A new puppy in the house

So this is Ashlyn and her new puppy. She saved up her money for over a year and scoured the local classifieds every day. She researched breeds and breed mixes and finally settled on this little guy: a Labrador/Poodle mix. Ashlyn named him Frankie (and, it seems, all of it's derivatives: Frank, Frankfurter, Frankenstein...)

Our other dog, Cookie, is a cockerspaniel/chiuahuah mix (looks like a miniature cockerspaniel. She's about 5 years old and doesn't have much patience for this fun-loving puppy, but she's learning to cope.

Everyone loves a puppy! (Except when he whines at 2am to go out to the bathroom). Ashlyn is a very responsible dog owner and is so happy to have her own dog. She loves all animals and currently wants to be veterinarian (oh yeah, and a rock star).

This brings our total household animal count to four: two dogs, a gerbil (or is it a hamster?) and a gecko.

Piper Down

So sometime last week the linux box that I use as my web server (among other things) gave up the ghost. I'd been having some troubles with it and over the past few weeks had to reboot several times. It's been running non-stop since about 2004 so it's been quite a work horse.

With my server gone I have to determine what I wanted to do for it's replacement:

1) Replace parts in the current box and revive it.

2) Retire the thing and buy a new desktop computer and turn my old desktop into a server.

3) Pay for a server on some hosting site.

4) Stop worrying about a server and just keep up my blog on Blogger.

As you can see (or maybe you can't because you're just getting this via an RSS feed), I have moved to Blogger for the time being. Already I miss the footnote capability of TextPattern.

The option I'd most like to choose is buying a new desktop and cycle the old one into a server. That option will take some capital though and so I'll have to postpone that until I can think up enough arguments to justify it to my wife. My current desktop has an AMD 2800 processor with 3 GB of RAM running WindowsXP. It's been a great machine with very few power cycles and lots of uptime. I've had it for about 9 years now and I've upgraded almost every internal organ it has during that time trying to keep it usable and up-to-date. I use it as a media server, a DVR, a video editor, and all the other stuff we all use our computer for. With HD video, new OSes, and new programs out there; its really at the end of it's life cycle though--at least as a desktop computer. As a server it would continue to be a great machine.

I don't think I have the "political will" to move forward with the revival option. As sturdy as my server has been over the last 4-5 years, I would have to replace too much to get it up and running again, not the least of which is a new motherboard.

The option of paying a hosting service for a virtual server is appealing except for the paying part. I'm seeing that cost being around $50/month for most service providers I've looked at and that's a hard pill to swallow when I was running my own machine for pennies a month.

So it comes down to using Blogger. It's fine for blogging I guess, but I used my server for more than blogging--for those of you that read my posts, you know that I rarely used it for my blog because of the all to infrequent posting. I'll try this out for the time being. Hopefully I come across a windfall soon and will be able to purchase that new computer. Until then, you'll find me here. Hopefully it wasn't much of a search since I was able to use my digitalsteve domain instead of the blogspot domain name.

UPDATE: It looks like the domain is the same, but RSS feeds are different. Wonder if I can modify where my feeds come from?

Double blog

This really isn't my blog... at least not yet. I currently use TextPattern on my own server to host my blog (digitalsteve.org), but I've been contemplating switching Blogger. I really like TextPattern, but keeping a server online at home has it's challenges. Because it's my own server I can load what I want to on it and customize it to my liking, but worry-free uptime on someone else's server has it's benefits as well.

I don't know when or if I'll take the leap, but this is where it will land if I do... until then, check out my day-to-day postings at www.digitalsteve.org