i am a butterfly…

Archive for the ‘Workin' Like A Dog’ Category

First off, Scott’s mother is not in a medically induced coma, as it turns out. The information we’ve been getting from family members on the scene has been altered as people put their own take on it and as a certain family member spins it to cause the most feelings of guilt in those who aren’t there. Scott’s brother arrives in Pittsburgh today, so I expect to start getting more accurate information. Or at least less altered information.

We going to drive out on Thursday or Friday now, depending on what his brother says when we speak to him later today.

Second, the shared SSL thing at my Web host has been resolved. I woke up to find an email apologizing for the way it was handled and the news that they renewed the shared SSL certificate for another year. So now I still have to set up a few clients with their own SSL certs, but we have time to do it correctly instead of making it a mad scramble because the sites are down without it.

Third, one of the sites that was going down, which was why all those sites got moved to another server, went down again today. But the good news is that the other sites did not go down with it, and also it seemed to resolve on its own without having to reset IIS. Hopefully that was just an isolated incident, but I’m keeping a close eye on things.

All in all, today is a much better day. A little bad, but mostly it doesn’t suck as thoroughly as yesterday. There’s hope for everything.

Several of my clients’ Web sites were supposed to be moved to a new server Saturday night. The server they were on kept crashing, and my host’s tech support thought it might be because of a particular very high-volume site they shared my sites shared the server with. So the idea was to move the sites to a new server and see what happened. Most of the sites in question had dynamic IPs and moving them would result in just a few minutes of downtime, but one has a static IP and moving that one was going to result in several hours of downtime. That was why Saturday late night was selected for the move.

Sunday morning, I got up and everything was running along swimmingly. All the sites were up and running and there were no problems at all that needed fixing. I know enough about technology to be suspicious of such a miracle, but I shoved that deep down and tried to pretend it was all good.

As it turns out, the reason the sites were all running along swimmingly was that the switch didn’t happen Saturday night. It happened last night. And when I got up this morning, one site was not running along swimmingly at all. It had a zillion things wrong that needed fixing. However, I took it all in stride and with the support of a simply outstanding tech support guy, we got everything fixed and working and it was good. Seriously, I can’t say enough good things about Nate, who dealt with all of this mishegas and was patient and thorough and a pleasure to work with.

Then, I got email from a client whose site had nothing to do with this mess saying her customers were getting weird security errors on her site when trying to checkout. It turned out that the shared SSL certificate her site used had expired, so I notified my hosting company and asked them to renew it. The reply I got back – not from the aforementioned Nate, I should say – said, in not quite so many words:

“Oh, yeah. We broke your sites 4 days ago without warning, but we’ll be glad to let you pay us for the privilege of getting them working again.”

They decided to discontinue shared SSL, you see, and so they let the shared SSL certificate expire. This would have all been well and good. I’ve no problem with talking this particular client into her own SSL certificate. She’s been in business for a long time and it’s a good step for her. The problem is, they did this with no warning whatsoever. Instead of telling me with 6 or 3 or even 1 month notice, they told me 4 days after the fact when I found out the site was broken.

And now it’s going to stay broken until we can get a the site owner her own SSL certificate, which can take a few days with all the paperwork involved. And not only will her checkout process be broken in that time, but guess who’s going to eat the cost of the first year for the certificate? Yeah. Me. Because I give my clients better customer service than my host is currently giving me.

As I’m dealing with this mess, stressing out that this is going to take a few days of dealing with to get straightened out and knowing that I’m not going to be in my office for the next two days as we spend 12 hours on the road to and from Pittsburgh to see my sick mother-in-law, Scott calls to tell me that his mother has been re-intubated and put into a medically-induced coma, because she couldn’t breathe on her own anymore. The coma is because she kept fighting the tube – and really, who can blame her? – so they had to knock her out so she wouldn’t pull it out. The result of this is that when we got there tomorrow, she wouldn’t even know we were there.

The doctors say they can leave her intubated for 4 more days. Her living will says she doesn’t want to go on like that, so on Friday they take out the tube and see if she can breathe on her own.  This left Scott, and me, in a wash of confusion, trying to figure out what the hell we should do. Do we still go to Pittsburgh tomorrow and have her not know we’re even there, then have her wake up Friday after we’re gone and say, “Where’s Scott?” Or worse, have hew not wake up on Friday and have Scott not be there?

In the end, we decided to postpone the trip until Friday morning. This way, whatever happens, Scott will be there when they pull out the tube. He sounded a lot more peaceful after that decision was made, so I know it’s the right one.

Today has been the most godsawful day from the moment I opened my eyes, going from bad to much worse. Grown up stuff really sucks.

Sometime in 1993 or late 1992, one of my housemates, John, in the Hippie Hut – aka then and now as “the Norwood house” – got onto an online service called GEnie. He wanted to be on GEnie specifically, as opposed to Compuserve or whatever else was around back then, because he wanted to play Battletech and GEnie had it. We’re talking the way early days of online gaming, and GEnie was the place to be. I used to watch over his shoulder when he played and chat with the guys – because they were all guys – he chatted with.

After a while on GEnie, John discovered a text-based RPG call GemStone, and G is definitely for GemStone. It was when he started playing GS that I decided that I really wanted to get online, because I really wanted to play. So sometime in 1994, I rolled up my first GemStone character. Her name was Rhiana and she didn’t last long. Later that year, I rolled up my bard, Warble Singsong – go ahead, make fun of the name – and she still exists to this day.

It was because of Warble and my time in GS that I reached two of the most significant turning points in my life. First was that I met Scott there. It’s kind of funny, because John’s character got married in game, and Kyrion (aka Scott) and Warble were the best man and maid of honor at the wedding. That was where we met, and it still makes me laugh that the real world cliche of a best man and maid of honor getting together took this crazy virtual world twist for me and Scott. Our characters became pretty good friends after that meeting, and we did quite a bit of chatting as Kim and Scott, too. Eventually we met in person and the rest is history.

The second turning point was that it was because of GemStone that I became a Web developer. I made a friend in game who liked me so much that she hired me as her assistant for a gaming site she was launing. She was a mentor to me, teaching me about project management and HTML. Though the Game Grotto – two more G’s – had its plug pulled after just a year or so, that was the beginning of a career path for me.

So I owe my marriage and my work to a game. Hey, that’s another G.

In fact, I’m feeling a lot of hate right now. Hate for my Web host. And that makes me sad, because I’ve been with them for years and always loved them deeply. Lately, though, not so much.

First, they change the procedure for adding new accounts to my reseller account without telling me about the change. So when I submit a request for a new account the old way, I end up waiting a day with nothing happening. Then I submit a support ticket to ask about it, and I get “oh, you’re lucky we even checked that email box, we never do anymore, you need to make the request by filling out this form.” It turns out that the form is the normal new account form that any new customer uses. which means that every time I add a new domain to my account, they expect me to fill out all my contact and billing information. That’s information they already have on file. When I contact them to question this procedure, I don’t receive a reply. It’s been 24 hours since I sent that email and no one has responded.

Then, when they finally do get the new account set up for me, the FrontPage login doesn’t work. We’ve been going back and forth with that all morning, with tech support insisting that I’m not entering the username and password correctly and me saying no, I don’t even get a chance to enter the username and password, so that’s NOT the fucking problem. So I end up being the one to Google the error and discover that it’s a problem with the Web server authentication setup.  Why am I the one finding this out instead of them? Isn’t that what SUPPORT is supposed to do?

I don’t use FrontPage myself, but my client does, and it’s important that this work. Tech support has been incredibly UNsupportive about this, and that makes me even sadder. When I first transferred to this host several years ago, I loved their tech support people so much that I sent them homemade truffles for Christmas! That’s how awesome they were. Now? Not so much with the awesome.

Update: Well, my faith in the tech support department is restored, at least. They kept working on it and did everything they could to fix it, for which I’m grateful.

Send email that says:

“I tried to do X, but it didn’t work. HELP! Please fix it!”

Don’t include any other details.