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Email and DNS Services turned off!
I'm pleased to say that I'm out of the DNS and email services businesses. I'm now relying on GoDaddy for DNS and some of my email forwarding and Google/Gmail for email. While it may seem risky to rely on Google's free service and GoDaddy's low cost service for stuff as important as mail, but I'm confident that things will be fine. Gmail did have some slowness yesterday, but it cleared up today. The only hiccup is that my brother-in-law couldn't send mail when he got home. After asking my sister a bunch of questions to nail down the problem, I discovered that Cox blocks outbound connections on port 25 which is great of them to try to prevent spam from originating from customer machines. Luckily, Gmail also accepts outbound mail on port 587, so a quick change got around the problem.
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One year of selling ReceiptWallet
Yesterday marked the 1st anniversary of ReceiptWallet! When I started ReceiptWallet, it was simply out of my own desire for a program to keep track of my receipts. A lot has happened in one year and I'm quite pleased with how mature the product has come as well as the number of users using it. I hope that the next year brings as much success as the first year and then some!
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Outrageous sales tax rate
We were in the Chicago airport yesterday and had lunch. I almost fell off my chair (that seems to happen often with me) when I saw the tax on the bill. It was 10.22%. Wow, that is like VAT in Europe, but I think the highest I've ever seen in the US, except for hotel taxes.
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The end of running my own server
After many years of running my own server, it is finally time for me to wind things down and let the professionals maintain my server tasks. Monday, while away in New Jersey, my mail server stopped responding. I tried to ping it, but the neither the cable modem nor the server responded which lead me to believe that the cable modem hiccuped. Luckily my father was able to goto my house and reboot the cable modem and life was grand again (my server has been running constantly for 4 months, so the issue was connectivity). However, this was the last straw in running my own server. In August, I moved all my web services to a virtual server at VPSLink and it has been running flawlessly. As my virtual server has limited RAM and space, I decided to leave mail running on my own server and since SMTP has automatic retries when mail delivery fails due to connectivity issues, downtime wasn't a big deal, or so I thought. While the mail wouldn't be lost, it would be delayed which I now realize is just as problematic.