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Fri.Nov.04.2005

2:17 am EST        41°F (5°C) in Seneca Falls, NY

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No, unfortunately, I’m not actually getting a chance to visit all of the great historical sites related to the women’s-rights movement in Seneca Falls. Those are all located in the town square itself, which is several miles south of where I am parked for the night — I am a stone’s throw off of the New York State Thruway, which I will be using to head into Massachusetts for a delivery just under 18 hours from now. It just so happens that according to the U.S. Postal Service, pretty much the whole northeastern quadrant of Seneca County is assigned Seneca Falls addresses.

The big news I have is that I have switched web hosts for this site. Since December 2000, I have used One on One Internet, Inc. to host this site, but as of yesterday, I have moved to the California-based Lunarpages. Why the switch? Well, it’s a bit of a long story, but I’m going to tell it anyway. It started at the end of January 2004, when I bought my Dell laptop and revived this site from the dead.

At that time, I did not have any kind of a bank account, and given that I had received notice that a credit-card company was attempting to sue me for debts incurred years ago, I obviously wasn’t going to be qualifying for any credit-card offers either. To speed the purchase of that Dell laptop, I stopped at the Rite Aid Pharmacy location in West Monroe, LA, and bought two prepaid MasterCard- enabled debit cards, putting the maximum allowed value of $500 on each. The computer set me back exactly $885, meaning I wiped out one of those two debit cards and was left with $115 on the other.

I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I am guessing (looking back on it now) that I must have used the card that still had the $115 on it to cover the hosting costs with One on One Internet. (Then again, seeing as I remember nothing of those two debit cards at this point, it might not have been either one of those, for all I know.) In any case, One on One Internet kept sending me e-mails every month saying that they had been successfully paid; however, I had no idea where they were getting the money from — it apparently was coming from some source of funds I didn’t know or remember that I had, or maybe they had something completely borked up in their billing systems. That said, because of the fact that I couldn’t positively identify where One on One Internet was getting its money from, I was getting what amounted to “free” hosting as far as I was concerned — even if that money was coming from me, I would have had no way at all to be aware of that.

When One on One Internet went to make its most recent debit to pay my account on October 26, whatever credit card they had been billing it to all along was declined — I have no idea whether that was due to lack of funds, or the expiration date having passed, or whatever reason. Suddenly, I found myself in the position of having to spend money that I did know I had, and after some looking around, I realized that One on One Internet’s $14 monthly price was a bit steep compared to other offers I could find. Lunarpages seemed to have the best deal I could find, and I am now getting an even better package in terms of storage and transfer limits for almost 45% less than what I would have paid with One on One Internet. (I flatly refuse to utilize any free hosting services because of the onerous storage and/or bandwidth limits they impose, and the very high likelihood that they will take a shit all over my beautiful pages by adding banner ads.)

At this point, I just have to wait for the process of worldwide DNS propagation to finish. That usually takes up to three days from the time a webmaster notifies his/her domain registrar of nameserver changes; for the time being, some ISPs will point “www.phatpage.org” to its new location at Lunarpages, while others will still yield the copy of the site located on One on One Internet’s servers. Eventually, as more DNS servers around the world are notified of my site’s new home, and make the necessary changes in their records (which many DNS servers do daily at midnight GMT, or 7:00 pm EST), every request for this site will go to Lunarpages.

Not long ago, I found out that my sister and her boyfriend of over four years broke up at some point late in this past summer, most likely right around the end of August. You may remember from my April 20 update that he had proposed to her in early April and that they were planning a summer 2007 wedding, so obviously, this came as a bit of a shock to me. I respect and trust my sister’s judgment, and I certainly don’t want to come across like I’m questioning her or saying she made a bad move or anything — that’s not my place at all; but I do have a thing or two to say about the young man in question. From my (admittedly limited) interaction with him, I could tell that he was a really intelligent guy who had character and integrity, and I also sensed that he was a good listener in conversation. Those are traits that I hope will serve him well as he goes forward in life, and also that I hope my sister will find in any potential future male companion(s). In a way, it’s a shame that it didn’t work out for them in the end, although as the French would say, c’est la vie — fate always has unexpected, unforeseen tricks and turns in store, it seems. That said, in any event, I wish him the best of luck in his future.

The ol’ eyelids are getting heavy, so hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to sleep I go.