Today is the shortest day of the year (sunlight wise that is – the earth rotational rate does not noticeably change on any given day.) It may be short but it is a bright and sunny day here in Newark, NJ. This is also the first daily post to be written completely with the new WordPress 2.0.5 interface. Yippee!
Today is also my work from home day this week. Not that being at home made the day more relaxed. Just the opposite in fact. Oreo and I had a much busier day today that if you took my entire week and wrapped it all up together.
Rochester’s Fast Ferry is scheduled to leave the Port of Rochester on its voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia tonight. Everyone will be partying down in Rochester tonight. Talk about a great Christmas present to the people of Rochester.
I spent the day prepping the new web server in Scranton to be able to transfer SGL up there. This is my first time migrating a WordPress site so there was a little learning curve but the process was very simple and practically painless. I had to move the site itself and move the database but that was easy. Once the site was moved and I had tested it I used the WordPress upgrade process to upgrade the site from the old WP 1.x series to the very latest WP 2.0.5 so now the site has new features and capabilities and, supposedly, runs a little faster too. Our readers should notice a bit of an increase in speed when reading the site. Even though our new server is not as fast as the old one from a processor standpoint we now have dual processors (not cores, real processors), more memory, 10K rpm hard drives (instead of 7,200 rpm drives) and a much faster Internet connection. Let us know what you think.
My favourite new site feature is the Akismet comment spam filter that checks the incoming comments for spam. That was a major problem with the old system. I was getting hundreds of fake comments a day and I was spending a lot of time dealing with it and it caused a lot of real comments to get lost in the process as I would often have to go through hundreds or even thousands of fake comments at a time looking for the off chance that a real one might have been in there somewhere.
Dominica got home and we immediately ran out to do some last minute Christmas shopping. There was one major item for her that she knew that she was getting but I wasn’t able to find it without her very easily so we just went up and picked it up. It is a new Keurig B60 coffee system. It doesn’t make coffee nearly as well as our really awesome coffee maker but it makes coffee one cup at a time which she really enjoys. So this one is going to be here in Newark while the other coffee maker goes to Geneseo.
My evening was spent working on getting everything up and running in the Scranton Data Centre. There was a lot of work to be done and I had to do a lot of coordination with the data centre staff. I ended up being stuck working until almost three in the morning. It was a long night but after a lot of work everything appears to be working as it is supposed to be in Scranton and we are in good shape. People should be seeing SGL being hosted from Scranton sometime tomorrow depending on when your local DNS servers get the new address propagated down to them.