Toll Roads are your friends

Yesterday I had to drive up to Santa Monica, a drive that could range anywhere from about 2 hours 15 minutes to 3 hours 10 minutes according to Google Maps. Google Maps said to take state route 73 which is a toll road for part of the way. I usually avoid toll roads because of the cost, but decided that if I could stay out of some traffic and shave some time off my drive, it was worth it. It cost me $4.25 each way (I went at off peak hours; peak is $5 each way) and it is definitely something I'll use in the future if I have to go up that way again. While it may sound like a lot of money, the drive is extremely pleasant (it is very under utilized) and scenic (if you can call driving through Orange County scenic). I always thought toll roads were a bad thing because I'm used to east coast toll roads where you pay a fortune and they carry a fair amount of traffic; toll roads around here seem to be avoided even though time really is money!

The only thing I'd do different if I drive up there more often is I'll get a FasTrak transponder to save $0.75 each way and save time by not having to slow down. I'd basically have to drive the toll road once a month to make FasTrak viable as they charge $1 per month to have the transponder.

Virtual Server - Day 2

I managed to move over most of my domains to the virtual server and am pleased so far. However, I had to jump up to their next plan because I was running out of memory. So due to the limited amount of memory (512 MB with no disk swap), I've decided to leave mail on my server as SMTP has built in retries so if my server goes down, my store and website don't do down with it.

So going back to my post about servers, I now get the best of both worlds, but pay a higher price. My virtual server has 3 IP addresses (I'm not sure what to do with the other 2) and has 500 GB of monthly bandwidth which is more than plenty for me. The bandwidth is also significantly faster than my current connection, so people should see better performance. I still have to keep my server running for mail, music server, and source control, but I now feel better knowing that I have a backup in case my cable modem goes down or my server decides to die again.

Trying a virtual server

After the 2 hour downtime for my cable modem, I've decided to try out a virtual server. I decided to try VPSLink and managed to get up and running in nothing flat; there automated system worked well. So far I've migrated over a few sites including this blog. I still have to figure out backups and move some of the bigger pieces over including email, but I'll start with the websites and see how things go. Hopefully this will keep me from pulling my hair out when my net connection dies again.

UI has gone to the birds

A new app called Pixelmator has gone into private beta according to TUAW and while it looks like it could be a replacement for Photoshop Elements, the screenshots in their gallery make it look like the developers went overboard with the semi transparent look. I have no idea how the app will actually work, but when everything is semi transparent, it looks like it could be a mess. In this screenshot, this is a sheet upon on a window. It's a bit difficult to see where the sheet ends and the window begins. I've seen this trend in other apps such as Disco and just don't understand. While I'm not an old geezer, I can't imagine how people who are my father's age can use this as some people already have problems seeing the display.

Please developers, if you want to have this look, make it an option to turn it off.