I slept in today, precisely because I could. It’s my last vacation day from IBM since just before the middle of December.
I spent a good portion of today working on mitigating the imminent loss of my NCSU web hosting space, which currently houses my home page.
Toward that end, I purchased a domain name of my own and some commercial web hosting space from aplus.net. For my domain name, I chose nematome.info (instead of nematome.com), because 1) JohnMartin.com and JohnMartin.info were not both available, and 2) the .info domain was 75% cheaper than the .com domain.
I got the two-year, business package, as it was cheaper (per year) to buy two years at once, and the business package offered 170 GB of storage, while the personal package only offered 500 MB.
Of course, my current space offered free by NCSU only has 60 MB of storage, so 500 would probably have been enough. But, I don’t want to worry about running out of space (especially if I add a lot more photos to my home page, which I hope to); and well, hey, I can afford the business package. I live my life on the Internet—might as well have a nice hangout.
The next fun was to download a shareware FTP client that would work with the APlus set up, as the one I already had, WinSCP, wouldn’t work with it—at least I couldn’t get it to work with it. I settled on WinFtp.
After that I uploaded a copy of my current space from my desktop machine to my new domain—approximately 20 minutes to transfer 60 MB. However, once done, I realized that some of the pages were regressed, because I have newer copies of some of the pages on my laptop. Grrrr!
On my laptop, I downloaded everything from my current web space first, to make sure I had the latest and greatest copy of everything, but when I tried to upload it to the new domain using WinFtp on this machine, I got a “shareware license has expired” message.
A wasted hour then ensued trying to get a “free” or “shareware” version of FTP that was compatible with APlus, as I was determined to find the WS_FTP file that was “holding” the “start date” of my shareware license. After uninstalling at least three times, deleting all directories Ipswitch and deleting all registry entries Ipswitch, it still could tell that I’d had a previous shareware version on my machine that was now expired. I hate being defeated by a machine.
Enough of that until another day.
Dancing was okay tonight—the exercise is always good. The bar, however, was dead. Obviously, it’s back-to-work time.