Luna TailAnxiety, Dogs, and Life

Okay.. I am still trying to understand and use OpenIDs. At long last, I think I finally understand.

So an OpenID has to be in the form of a URL. Big thing that was tripping me up, lol. And there are places where you can register your OpenID and they kinda are like an OpenID host. You sign up with them and they give you an OpenID that you can use to log into various websites that support OpenID.

I like Beemba so far. I have my own Beemba OpenID. So when I go to various websites, I use my Beemba OpenID to log in (yes, I have to log into Beemba so you can’t, even if you know my Beemba OpenID) and then voila, I’m in via OpenID.

And if you click the link to see my Beemba OpenID, you’ll see various information about me, too. And this is what I’ve been wanting! Instead of clicking my OpenID and seeing just a site, with nothing about me, that’s boring. This lists my FriendFeed info, Twitter, Del.icio.us info, and my website address and my picture of Tatum.

So far, so good!

And now for my relaxing weekend… ha! Well, not so much. Maybe Sunday afternoon. I reserved some books from the library… gonna check out Dennis C Carey too, see what he’s all about. I want some books on CD too to take with me when I got to Laramie the weekend after the 24th of July, so maybe they’ll be some good ones!

Not in my human brain.. fortunately. Well, actually, that’s just about gone and I have a hard time remembering things anyway. But specifically I’m talking about the RAM Memory on my VPS.

Figuring a Bob stroller won’t really help my memory problems, I pulled up Google (Yeah it’s evil, but it’s the best) and started to have a look around.

Looks like Apache is my biggest memory hog. And figuring my VPS is only used for web things, that is understandable. I don’t use the VPS for anything else other than a web server! So it’s time to tune up Apache, and maybe MySQL, to see if that helps my memory issues.

Right now, after a bit of tuning, my WebMin reports:
512 MB total, 348.22 MB used

I’ve been getting up to 500MB used, which is bad. And I’m getting Out Of Memory errors and my blogs are slowing down. So… in order to help this out, I changed some settings in Apache:
StartServers 6
MinSpareServers 3
MaxSpareServers 10

From what I’ve been reading, this should help. Originally it was set ti 8 4 and 20, respectively. I really would like processes killed off (MaxSpreServers) when they are idle. Instead of being held to see if they will be used again. I am not sure how important this is for my blogs, but I guess I’ll find out.

So far, so good… I still am at
512 MB total, 348.55 MB used

So I’ll be watching this for a bit to see how if it helps. I hope so.

For a long time now I’ve included the www. in my domain name URLs. Recently… probably less than a month ago, I decided that I would get rid of the www and see how I liked it.

I have my server set up so that if you put the www in, it’ll still find my websites. So no one will get lost! But I really, really like having no www on my domain names. The www is just messy, more to type, and takes up too much room in the domain name.

So it’s gone! What do you think? Do you keep the www or do you drop it on your domains?

Now that my blogs are upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress, my emails are cleaned out (I have over 600 in my trash… ugh) and I’ve posted a post or two, time to go watch a movie and wish I had wall mounted home theater speakers to go along with my HDTV!

I’m a member of both Entrecard and SezWho. I joined up with SezWho about a month or so ago because I saw a post about it over on Eyespi20 and it looked like a good commenting system. And I’d already played around with Intense Debate and Disqus, as you might know if you read my blog off and on.

Well I didn’t like that Intense Debate and Disqus stored my comments off my blog. I like having ownership of my own comments. Maybe I’m a bit of a control freak… okay, I know I’m a bit of a control freak. So I like to have my comments stored here, on my server, with my blog. And so I switched to SezWho.

I like the idea of having a commenting community, and SezWho provides that in a good way. They are growing, too, and I hope to be able to meet and keep friends lists on SezWho. I really don’t like their Red Carpet Widget, though, it’s big and cumbersome, so i am not using that on my blogs. But I like the SezWho environment and community.

So I think it’s great that Entrecard and SezWho have partnered. Now if you post a comment on a SezWho enabled blog, you earn Entrecard Credits. Which is very cool! Though I post comments on other blogs regarldess of that. But hrm.. maybe it will inspire me to post more comments on those blogs!

I have a ton of Wordpress Plugins on my blogs. I even have a plugin that shows all my plugins. If you want to see my plugins:

Here’s my plugin page

I’m writing this mainly because I just installed another plugin… I reply to my comments whenever I can, whenever I remember, and whenever I have time. Which is most of the time, I hope! Anyway… I like my comment plugins, I have more of them than any other, and I wanted a way to thread the comments so I can see my replies to the comments near the comment itself.

So I found Yet another threaded Comments plugin. And it works with my Comment Email Responder. I hope it works okay with the rest of my comment plugins too… I haven’t actually tested it yet. But I’ll go have a look!

Please let me know if you have any problems commenting. You can email me at web at tiptail dot com.

Well, I did it. Finally ended up having to reinstall Vista. And guess what… I have sound! LOL I like sound. It’s amazing how much I missed it when I didn’t have it. I’ve had to reinstall all my applications, but that’s not a big deal. It’s actually good for me to clean out my laptop every year or so, get rid of all the crap. It’s like being a good idea to move every five years just to clear the crap out of your house.

I’m also going through all my old photograph backups that I’m able to find. I found a few from 1999 when Levi was a puppy… though I wish I had more of those. I also found a number from 2002 and 2003. This one is from when I was hiking in the fall of 2003. I look young, and it was only five years ago!

I love pictures. I’m going to arrange them all and back them all up so they are organized. Then I’ll keep a few backups in different locations so they won’t be destroyed. Pictures mean so much to me. Memories are very important.

One of my doggie friends online, Johann the Dog, was twittering the other day and said he was checking out Yoono. So curiousity always gets the better of me when I hear of things like this so I had to go check it out.

It’s a Firefox Extention for social networking. I tried Flock for a while, the social networking browser, but I still like Firefox better. And Yoono actually provides a lot of what Flock does.

Yoono is a bit complicated but the more I figure it out, the more I like it. I was using Twirl as my twitter client, but Yoono incorporates Twitter right inside and now that I can view the updates, I like it! And they only update every 3 minutes because of the Twitter limits. Where Twirl just kinda sits there and says it’s going to try again, and sometimes it’s longer than 3 minutes, I like how Yoono has it set up instead.

I can also include Flickr and Facebook (though I don’t use Facebook much and it’s blocked from my work anyway) and I can load up my blogs so I can post to them.. and I LOVE the little sidebar that opens up when I hover my mouse on it.

So far, so good, for Yoono. And I even have my own Yoono page.

I have been with Steadcom.com for my VPS services for at least six months now. Before Steadcom I was expanding the number of domains I had on my shared host, and found that the shared host was lacking what I needed to run them all. Having eight wordpress blogs, a forum and a wiki, in addition to a photo gallery, I needed more reliable hosting. So I found Steadcom and started my first VPS.

My package is unmanaged, but Steadcom has be invaluable in the help they have given me over the last few months. If I am having a problem setting up a portion of the server, or I’m getting error messages, the support group has been willing to help me in a pleasant way even though my VPS is not managed. And I do try to keep my questions to the bare minimum!

The quality of up-time on my Steadcom VPS is exceptional. I have only noticed downtime once in the months I have been with them. I would have liked to have received notification during the outage, or followup information after, but I didn’t receive any. Even Steadcom.com was down, so it must have been a big outage for them. The outage, however, didn’t last more than about three hours and so it wasn’t too intense.

Overall the website navigation they provide, the forum help, and the ticket system is reliable and well managed. I’m happy with Steadcom and I plan on being with them for years to come!

Okay I bought Roxio a while ago now and I feel like I have used it enough to write up a short review about what I think of it.

Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 Suite, if you don’t know, is basically a media management package that allows you to make movies from movie files, import video and pictures, arrange them on disc and in the Roxio software itself, and do a number of other things.

The reason I bought it in the first place was because I wanted to make DVDs playable on my DVD player at home that had a menu. I like menus, I need menus, I want menus. I video a lot of my dog sports, agility and flyball and obedience too, and I wanted to be able to build a menu to make it easy to view these videos.

The menu feature that I use is in MyDVD. It is an okay DVD creation program… figuring it’s the only one I’ve ever used, I have nothing to compare against. But it is slow.. beastly slow, when adding multiple movies. And when agility runs are a minute or less, and I have a bunch of them, the software just drags down and is terribly slow, unfortunately.

It arranges the various clips in the right area and you can add them under a menu item, which would be nice if it weren’t so beastly slow. And perhaps there’s a better way to do this. I would like to think so.

I also use the Roxio data writing portion that writes data to various discs. Not too bad, I can see how much is going onto the disc and then burn the disc. For photo backups and such.

Video Wave isn’t all that great. It’s okay… but Windows Movie Maker is, actually, nicer and easier to use, even though I really don’t like Microsoft products and I try to stay away from them when I can. But heck it’s free with the laptop so I use it.

Roxio Media Manager is another application that is terribly slow. It is rather nice to use to arrange videos and pictures on the hard drive. But I haven’t been using it much. I just open up a Windows Explorer window and do my arranging that way.

Anyway… Roxio, is it worth it? Well, I wouldn’t buy it again, I’ll tell you that.

I am tired… sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I was in St. George, Utah for a Flyball Tournament with Chase. It was awesome fun. Long days, got home today, have to go back to work tomorrow.

I’m copying the DVDs on my laptop now that I recorded on my video camera over the weekend. Three discs. I do wish that the mini discs held more footage, because I am just doing a disc copy and I think all three of the mini discs would fit on one or two regular DVDs. But I have too much to do to arrange things with a menu and such. I just do a disc copy and am done with it.

I am tired, I’ll write more later!