Author: Jane Ullah

Some volunteerism in my life

I’ve found a worthy cause to volunteer my time to. The location is anywhere with the only caveat being high speed internet. I’ve got that and now, I just hope that I pass their rather rigorous screening process. The website belongs to Sage Leadership and the position is that of a Global Economy Associate and has several themes an associate can work under. They believe in a lot of things and Open Source, which is music to my ears, is one of those things. The ‘job’ requirements include knowledge of audio editing software (such as Audacity which I’ve tinkered with before, but now, I have Nero‘s WaveEditor) as well as becoming skilled in using a voice recorder. Score for me on both counts! 🙂 Now, I just need to find a way to channel all the goodness I have to give into an astounding cover letter. They also require knowledge of things such as blogging software and they use Vox as their example. Well, I’ve been a WordPress user for the longest while and just switched to Drupal as my content management system so I guess I’ll have to sign up with Vox and see how it stacks up. Interesting thing about Vox is its owners: the company (Six Apart) that owns LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Typepad, but Vox is being billed as “social networking” site (1). They ask that individuals be familiar with things like wikis and I’m up for the adventure. Now, let me get back to writing that cover letter.

  1. Vox Lifts Off and You’ll Love It Techcrunch.com 10/26/2006

Some videos are up!

Finally, my Gallery is accepting my video files! Head on over there and sign in to view the precious footage of my family.lol. I caught Daddy in the act of corrupting his mind with American TV (Judge Judy et. al) . Well, wish me luck. Life’s been more or less the same with my husband and I. It feels slightly surreal to think I’m married now, but I know that I’ve got a good man who respects my wishes just as I respect his. I don’t have a clue what to do about my website and right now, you could say I’m burned out w.r.t. to website building, etc. I want something manageable like Drupal or WordPress as well as flexible. For now, I’ll tinker with Drupal and Gallery and try to make both of them play nice. 🙂

Sweltering Summer

Life has been awesome with both my parents being with me. I finally had a reception thrown by Matt’s mom and aunties where both sides of the families were able to meet each other. It has been a blast. I hadn’t seen my mother in nearly 6 yrs and oddly enough, it was like yesterday. Well, I’ve been pigging out which is causing my mother some concern. lol. She’s the same old mother I left back in Nigeria, moles and all. My dad’s since returned to Nigeria with tons of footage from his brief stay here. However, they have rather long term visas so they’ll be able to come back whenever they feel like it.

More site updates

Alrighty, my gallery is up and powered by the wonderful Gallery2. It’s different from Coppermine, but being updated frequently. Coppermine’s development seems to have stalled. In any case, I’m have a little bit of trouble customizing it, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it in no time. Meanwhile, I’ve got a fresh Drupal installation up and running. I can tell the differences right away between my current webhosts and my old & evil webhosts (Awardspace). Even though I’d paid nearly $60 as a paid user, I believe I have received substandard service. From my ftp failing on me to not having helpful technicians, I think I will be better off in the future. Here are some things I love about Jumpline already:

  1. I can make backups of my account. This is awesome and a biggie for me.
  2. It’s a virtual dedicated hosting service which means I am sort of running in a sandbox with ‘root’ privileges, but insulated from causing harm to other people’s services even though we’re all installed on the same box.
  3. Even though I have a small 2GB harddrive space, I find that doing memory intensive things on the server are a snap compared to the constant php memory being exhausted nearly all the time with Awardspace.

I could go on and on, but I’m only on the 4th day with Jumpline. That’s all for now and here’s wishing my parents a safe flight!!

Viva la revolucion!

Sorry to have such a dramatic title. Well, I have switched webhosts again. The circumstances were less than optimal, but I’ll repost a brief recap. of all that transpired. Essentially, my plan with Awardspace expired on the 13th of June, 2007. I emailed support asking to be reverted to the free plan pending my decision to upgrade or not to upgrade. I was essentially told to either poney up the money or say buh-bye to my data. Their response was: Sorry but we cannot convert your account from paid to free, so if you do not renew it we will have to close it when it expires (which is today). Please create free account and move your files there if you want to continue using our hosting services.If you have any other questions do not hesitate to contact us again. Sorry for the inconvenience. I was teed off and disappointed. Needless to say, I emailed support back telling them, requesting a few days to get my data offline.

And this time, someone else responded with the “complex technicalities” involved in moving from free to paid: Our clustered system is designed in that way so we move the entire account from the FREE server to a different one – PAID physically. The account is not just upgraded but moved to a different server physically. In case of non payment (renewal) of your account there is no way at this stage, to move back the account. You can still continue using our service if you sign up for a FREE account again and move your site there. We hope you understand our policy as we have never wrote or stated that in case of upgrade, next year if you decide to quit the service we move back the account on a FREE server. As per your request you have 5 business days to download your web site. Thank you for reading. No shit, Sherlock. I am positive that if I had pushed my case, Awardspace would have capitulated because their technicians admit not having anything of that sort in their terms of service agreement.

To make a long sojourn short, I found another webhost that has a free year of hosting whereafter I may decide to stick with them. Their price tag is pretty steep, but if they don’t give me any trouble, they might earn my money. I am currently on the J2-VDS hosting plan with Jumpline for a year of free service. So wish me luck in navigating this new system. In the meantime, I am preparing for my parents to come all the way from Nigeria to see me and my husband, pretty soon. My post-wedding reception is coming up on the 23rd of June and I’ll get to eat/drink/have fun. Mark your calendars!! Oh, lest I forget, check out my gallery which is slowly being repopulated with the mass of pictures I had before.