It’s been a while since my last post, about a year in fact.  This will come as no surprise to those who’ve followed my blog before.  In my defense, it wasn’t entirely my fault.  Back when I decided to convert my static weblog over to a proper blog platform, (and being cheap) I decided to host it myself with a free dynamic domain service.  For the most part, this worked great until one day that company decided to stop providing some of the domains for free.  I didn’t want to pay $15/year for a single hostname when I could have multiple domains for the same money.  I looked at other free solutions, but I just couldn’t trust that these domains would stick around.

Fast forward to today:  My trusty Compaq Evo, while tiny and very power efficient (try 35W @ idle running a Pentium 4 CPU) just wasn’t cutting it.  I wanted a new machine with multiple cores, SATA and GigE.  I had an AMD Phenom x3 CPU collecting dust in my computer room, so I decided to order up a new motherboard, and a pair of 2TB drives.  The new machine definitely eats more power, but it’s also got to keep 4 disks spinning.  I’ve also broken with tradition and installed Linux on this server.  (my previous servers have always been at the latest version of Microsoft’s server OS to give me extra practice before implementing at work…)  Hosting this blog on a WIMP platform has been an experience in frustration at times, so switching to LAMP was already a desirable option.  The last piece of the puzzle was to find a domain I liked that was cheap and easy to remember… and that brings us full circle.  I definitely should’ve done this sooner.