So, the important thing first: my sister-in-law had the baby on May 30 and so I now have two amazing nephews, Henry (the eldest) and Louis (who, in case you didn’t figure it out, is the newborn.)

Freaking adorable.

Apart from that, my search for a job has been somewhat fruitful. I start a trial period for a remote job on June 12th, so that’s exciting. Working remote! It’s what I did for four years in the late 90s and I’ve been trying desperately to get back to that for the last, uh, 15+ years. Relatedly, I just did up my budget for June. OUCH. Since I got laid off from my last position, I’m receiving EI, so losing those payments and then having to invoice my new client (for now — hopefully my employer!) at the end of the month is going to mean that June is gonna be tight. I went through a spreadsheet, organized all my payments and expenses and stuff and was like “huh, this isn’t going to be too bad,” when I then came to the startling realization that I had forgotten to factor in things like groceries. Eesh. To think I didn’t want the credit line my bank offered me a couple of years ago…!? I guess there will be no impromptu visit to Ottawa for Canada Day, which is a bit sad-making because it’s Canada’s 150th! I’ve only ever been to Ottawa once on Canada Day and that was in 2010 when my mom and I (yes — my mother. And me. Together. In a car. For two hours there, two hours back and several hours in Ottawa) went because the Queen and Prince Philip were there. (As was Barenaked Ladies, unbeknownst to me. When One Week started playing and I started sinigng along, my mom was like “you KNOW this music?!?!”) Anyway, it’s a shame I’ll miss Alanis, who’s performing this year, and BNL again, but hey. Gotta be responsible, right? Right.

As to class, class is getting… better? I understand how to connect to an SQL database with Java! And we’re starting to play with the GUI, which is all CSS-based, so that’s outstanding. I did skip class to go meet Louis on Tuesday night, though. No regrets! It was, however, the first time I skipped a class out of the 10 weeks of HTML, the 5 weeks of SQL and the 8 previous weeks of Java. Go me.

Finally, all the migrations got done last weekend. Every last site I have (that I’m going to keep) has been migrated to my new host and I couldn’t be happier that it’s all over with. Overall, it went well. Working at my last place of employment taught me a lot about migrations and DNS in general, so it was nice to be able to use some of that knowledge when it came to my own projects. What a giant relief it is that it’s all done, though. Whew!

The next week is gonna be rough:

• Finish Java Assignment 2 ASAFP
• Study for Java final exam which is on Thursday
• Start Java Assignment 3, due within the two weeks following the final exam
• Get up to speed on stuff for work!
• Probably see parents, once they’ve returned from their shitstorm of a cruise (delayed in dock at the start, missing two stops, then a fire on board that caused a delay, so they’ll miss another port)
• Hopefully get to see the nephews again
• Start work on Monday the 12th!

I’m supposed to see the nephews tomorrow, actually. Well. Today. It’s almost 5am and I’m supposed to probably be picked up at 10:30am? But I’m not sure? I might have to go steal my mom’s car and drive out on my own. The things I do to see my nephew. Well, nephews, now, I guess. :) It’s just that Henry is so damn delightful and says the CUTEST THINGS that are so incongruous coming from him, as opposed to from any adult. “Be right back, guys!” he’ll exclaim, for example. It’s adorable.

Anyway. If I want to be at all conscious, I should head to bed.

Bonne nuit.

I’m feeling productive. This weekend, I did the two biggest migrations from my old webhost to my new webhost. One was rough. Copying a phpBB (ughhhhhhhhhh) forum and its database and its settings etc etc and copying a WP install I couldn’t even access any longer? Both difficult. It was over 24 hours from the moment I put the forum into maintenance ’till when I took it out at the new host.

I mean, I slept. But it was still rough.

The other one, was my dear old GoodChatting.com. I’ve run the IRC server there since, uh, February of 2001. It’s still running. The website had not been touched since, uh, like, 2003? 2004? So, rather than migrate it, I redid the whole damn thing. Of course, I downloaded everything to my hard drive first and I threw in a ton of 301 redirects for various chatroom links, etc, that would have died otherwise. I should probably run Google Webmaster Tools on it, too. Oh, and insert my analytics code. Crap.

Anyway. GoodChatting is moved and that’s one less headache.

Coming up on two weeks until the old host goes away, so I’m really pleased with the efforts of the weekend.

Also, really pleased that my MySQL skillz came in handy! I was able to edit stuff in the MySQL shell and also in phpMyAdmin AND I KNEW WHAT IT MEANT. I was able to query stuff! I felt pretty awesome.

Speaking of skillzzzzz, class is okay. I’m in the midst of Fundamentals of Java Programming and it is kind of kicking my ass. I understand most of the concepts, but the code still looks weirdly foreign to me. It makes me miss MySQL. MySQL made sense! Logical sense! To me! Still, doing Java has helped me in at least one job application, so there’s that.

In other news, my parents are going to Europe for a couple of weeks this coming Sunday. Due in just under two weeks is my second nephew. My sister-in-law gave birth to my first nephew five weeks early and this little guy is apparently quite content right where he is. We missed out on being birthday twins, alas. Maybe the next one?

And on that note, I need to finish getting ready for Mother’s Day dinner with the family. I cherish time with my nephew. He’s such a cute little stinker.

Ah, new beginnings.

It has been years since I’ve posted on this domain. Actual years. I was running WordPress 2.0.5 and there wasn’t any auto-update or export function, so we’re starting from scratch. No great loss; there were only eleven entries on the previous incarnation of this site.

I’m hoping I’ll actually post on this thing. It’s certainly my intent. I just don’t know if I’ll stick to it. I definitely need an outlet, though.

So what’s new with me? I’m looking for work and, while I do so, I’m taking classes at one of the local universities, working towards a diploma in web programming. I’ve already taken the HTML/CSS class (I was conversant with HTML and CSS up to versions 3 and 1 respectively and now am nicely up to date — I can make responsive websites! All hail media queries.) and the SQL class and am now somewhat suffering through Fundamentals of Java Programming.

As geeky as I’ve always been, I’ve never learned a formal programming language. This shit is hard, yo. I mean, it’s slowly coming together, but it’s still hard. Methods, classes, user input and keyboard buffers… Some of it is just like “wtf am I actually doing??” and some of it is “oh, well that makes sense”. Week four of my ten week class is now done and I’ve got about a week to finish up my first assignment. At least I feel that I’ve made some progress on it. I think I understand all the parts of it separately. Now I just need to incorporate them all together. Should be fine, right? … right?

In the meantime, I’m migrating all kinds of crap over to a new host, this blog included. I might actually try to post some photos and such, but in the meantime, you can check out my Instagram. (All of that gets cross-posted to my Flickr and Twitter, too.)

So yeah, I host something like 20ish sites and I’ve moved four of them entirely, two of them partially and another is sort of in limbo because I don’t want to go backup the database, but I’m going to have to force myself to do so at some point. I’m glad I gave myself a full month to do all this.

Hilariously, I actually had given myself six weeks to do it, but my new webhost was inaccessible from my home ISP. Worked fine on my cell network. Worked fine at school. Anyone I asked was able to access it, unless they were using the same ISP as I am. My brother? No luck, either on his home wifi or his cell network (both using my ISP). After two weeks of lots of phone calls, trying to discern what the issue was, the webhost and I figured out that my ISP is blocking the specific IP address my webhost had assigned to my account. This after my ISP was insistent it was an issue with my host, of course.

I swear, as soon as fibre is available in my neighbourhood, I’m switching from my current ISP. Of course, I’m not certain it’ll ever be available here. Every six months, a rep from the company who offers fibre calls me and is like “hey, you should come back to us!”

And I’m like “so do you have fibre in my area yet?”

“We should.”

“I’m betting you don’t. Can you double-check?”

“Oh, but I’m almost certain we do offer it there.”

“No, seriously. Go check.”

The invariably go to check and then come back and apologize.

I guess there’s just not enough demand in the area, which is ridiculous, but I do acknowledge I live in an area where there are a lot of older people, so that might have something to do with it.

Well, I think that’s a sufficient amount of ranting for the first blog post here since, uh, December of 2007.

Feel free to say hi. :)