-
Unsupported MacBook Pro RAM upgrade
As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to get more performance out of my 2 year old MacBook Pro. When I purchased machine, I got it installed with the maximum amount of RAM that I could, 4 GB. Newer machines support up to 8 GB of RAM and I'll definitely get 8 GB when I get a new machine. I had read reports of people putting 6 GB of RAM in my vintage machine and as RAM is one of the limiting factors in performance, I did a little investigating and everything I read said that there were no issues. Typically putting more RAM in a machine than the hardware supports leads to kernel panics and random crashes.
-
Three months of self employment
It's now been 3 months since I left my job and became self employed. As I wrote after my first month of being self employed, things are still going quite well. I really like my projects and even though I was recently put on a rush project, I like being able to show something for what I do every day. It should have been no surprise to me that enjoying work affects my whole life, but it is quite easy to forget it as I've been wrapped up in my work for my entire career.
-
You get what you pay for
When I sold ReceiptWallet (now Paperless), I no longer had a real need for a VPS (virtual private server) as all it hosted was this blog. So I decided to shop for something cheaper (I was paying about $40/month). I found one site and paid maybe $15/month, but after an extended outage and poor support, I switched to another provider, costing less than $11/month. I stuck with them for awhile after a number of outages and IP address changes. Last week, they changed my IP address again and not until I received an alert from the monitoring service I use, did I know they had done this. That was fine as I quickly changed my DNS, but then they had a few hour outage yesterday and the explanation was that they had a networking problem. Enough with the problems!
-
Self employment, six months later
Six months ago, I left my job to become self employed, again. The last time I became self employed was seven and a half years ago, when I mutually agreed to leave that job due to lack of work and due to my boredom. This time was a bit different as I made the decision completely by myself to leave. Last time, I was quite nervous the first couple of months as I wasn't guaranteed steady income and didn't know if I'd have enough work. This time, I was nervous the 2 weeks before I left my job because I didn't have any work lined up, but luckily all the pieces came together and I landed an ongoing monthly contract.