The MacDeskBlog

I’m sorry for 12-24 hour downtime Thursday night/Friday. Someone set up a new server using the same IP address, which triggered some serious problems. Then, to make matters worse, I had an obscure misconfiguration in the server which took me about 10 hours to identify. Ultimately, I had to switch an ‘off’ to ‘on’ in a Mac OS X Server specific configuration file (“/etc/mysqlManager.plist”) which I didn’t know about. You learn something new every day. And twice as much when something blows up in your face.

Fundamentally, I didn’t test the server thoroughly enough before I put it into production. I should have uncovered this problem then. Oh well.

A special thanks goes to Eric Swinson of Visual Seed who is recovering from surgery yet still managed to mobilize resources to identify and resolve the IP conflict. Eric provides the Mac mini which hosts the site. The image server didn’t have any problems, and for that I also thankful to Eric at Import GSM.

Again, my apologies for the downtime. I hope not to repeat that for quite some time.

Michelle and I bought a new townhouse. We close today and move in tomorrow! I’m very excited. We purchased one of the model homes at a new development. When we signed the purchase agreement in January, the developer insisted upon a 60 day close, though pledged to try to close sooner. We put some mild pressure on them (just enough to convey that we truly wanted to close sooner), and they managed to deliver in a month and half instead of two.

The new place comes fully furnished, most of which we will be able to use. Living in the tiny house next to the money pit, we never were able to unpack. Though that situation made living there rather uncomfortable and inconvenient, it should make the move extremely easy. A few friends and family coming to help out will make it even easier.

The money pit still has a few more months of work before completion. After two and half years of it being six months from completion, we simply can’t keep our lives on hold any longer.

Montclair Construction is doing some great work, on a timely and financially reasonable basis. They wouldn’t sign up for the entire remainder of the project though, so additional work will need to be completed once Montclair finishes. Things like the kitchen, bathrooms, painting, and flooring all need to be installed. Not exactly minor tasks.

We started looking for a new place last fall. We looked at a couple dozen older homes in Oakland, El Cerrito and Albany, getting as far as putting offers in on two of them. We were one of only two offers on the first place, and one of three on the second, but didn’t get either. The first house is over a century old (like the money pit) and the competing offer had no contingencies, not even for inspection. Insane. That still boggles my mind. Anyway, the main point being that by the time we signed the contract with Montclair, we were pretty sure that we would never actually live in the house.

So, we’re moving in Saturday, and couldn’t be happier about it.