Last Thursday, as I mentioned on Friday, I made the leap from simple webhost to dedicated server.  More accurately, I called my webhost (1&1), got a few questions answered, and then ordered the Dedicated Server hosting service.  By Thursday evening, my server was ready.  I then started to move my wizards-palace domain from old host to new host.  This finished on Friday, although it disabled my email in the process.  This took some effort to restore–nevermind the details, but I succeeded in restoring it on Sunday.

 

Speaking of Sunday, it was an especially Good Day.  First, I took the day off.  Not just from work, but from church.  I just stayed home.  This was my goal, and for a change I actually succeeded.  Attempts in the past to just stay home have often found a need to go outside, but this past Sunday I went nowhere.

 

Sunday was Indy 500 race day.  Before and slightly during the race, I worked on my email problem and, as mentioned above, got everything functional again.  After the race, I set to work on restoring my websites.  This took less time than I thought it would.  Then I went into EverQuest.  Keeping in mind it was mid to late afternoon at this point, I accomplished a lot in EQ.  My friend Mags joined me on his chanter before I made my first pull.  Said chanter wanted to gain a level and was about thirty percent away.  So we churned away in my favorite experience-grinding spot.  Shaka and Dan both completed an AA line and got good starts on the next ones in their list, while Boom completed two AA lines.  Day off, Race, Email + Websites (full server migration complete!), EQ progress; amazingly good day!  Oh, and Mahe, Mags’ chanter, got his level.

 

Meanwhile, I bought an ebook about lucid dreaming last week.  Lucid dreaming is where you’re dreaming and you know you’re dreaming, so you can control your dream.  I have done it a couple of times before, and would like to do so regularly.  So I got this ebook and started to read it.  I came across an instruction I have seen many times before:  Start a dream journal.  I have resisted this idea before, although I can’t say why.  I bought a blank book, and on Tuesday I made my first entry in it.  Today I made another, somewhat lengthier entry.  We’ll see if it helps me have lucid dreams.

 

I also am making another attempt at starting an exercise program.  I did a routine on Tuesday morning which involved jumping jacks (yes, it shook the house a bit), crunches, squats and leg lifts.  As I have not yet repeated this routine, I can’t call it a habit yet, but hopefully I will motivate myself (see Tuesday’s post) to do so.  I am aiming for exercise freak in hopes of achieving daily exercise.

 

To make today’s post a circle, I will come back to my server upgrade.  The biggest advantage of having a dedicated server is root access to said server.  With my original hosting plan, I could upload all the data I wanted, but I couldn’t make the host server do anything more than host that data.  With my new hosting package, I can remotely log into my server and install / run things.  This is through what’s called an SSH interface, which is a new level of nerdiness for me.  I have long heard of Linux nerds doing all sorts of fun things through a command prompt; now I understand a little more about that as SSH is just that.

 

I am first endeavoring to get my server to do some things in Java.  There’s an interface for this called Tomcat, and that’s where the fun begins.  First, I had to figure out how to get Tomcat onto the server physically and unzip it.  Unzipping in Linux is a little different, but I figured it out.  I also installed the Java SDK for Linux so that Tomcat can do the Java thing it was designed to do.  So far, so good.  I ran the “install” for Tomcat, which complained there was no compiler on the system.  This should have been an alarm to me, but I am still a Linux newbie.  Tomcat recommended GCC, so I went and got that.  The configuration mechanism for this told me the same thing Tomcat did, that there wasn’t a compiler available.  That’s right, I need a compiler for my compiler.  Sigh.  That’s my task for today.  If I manage that, I’ll move onto getting Tomcat configured and maybe even creating a “servlet” (small application running on the server).

 

So it’s been a busy week.  Yesterday was, work wise, the height of this.  It was not back to back calls all day long, but there wasn’t more than a ten minute gap between calls when it wasn’t back to back, and usually it was much less than ten minutes.  That lasted right up to 10:25, five minutes before I left work.  No pattern, no big outage type problems, just random problems.  Ah, well.

 

Enough for today.  See you tomorrow.