I can access my sites via FTP, but I’m getting nothing on HTTP. It seems like every few days there has been some morning outtages. I mentioned this in my last service ticket. For now though, please get me back up as soon as possible.

This is an excerpt from an email I sent to support at my current webhost this morning. My site was down for about an hour. They responded relatively quickly, restarted apache, apologized, and I was back online again but I’m tired of it already. There’s usually never a really long outtage, just short annoying ones. AM downtimes, server slowdowns, and occasional MySQL connection issues are the most common. I’ve said before that I’m getting what I paid for, and I still agree. I will never decide on a webhost again based on price. From now on, if I plan to switch hosts, I’ll choose based on user recommendation.

In the recommendation department, there seems to be one blindingly obvious choice: Dreamhost. I’m really not one to follow crowds…well, maybe I am…but a lot of people have placed their chips and their honest word on this host:

• D. Keith Robinson - Web Hosting
• Scrivs - Dreamhost
• Mike Davidson - Why I Use Dreamhost

Now I know that most people who recommend Dreamhost do so inserting their own referral links (like I just did there), but I am honestly interested in finding a host that suits my needs which I can rely on. I can fix most anything I can break, so as long as the servers aren’t failing (flailing?) on their own, then I don’t care so much about support. From what I’ve read on Dreamhost’s website and from various review sites, they seem like the perfect host for me. If anyone has any negative experience with them and would like to point me in another direction, please feel fee to try. Otherwise, I’ll be switching come November when my prepaid year with my current host runs out.

Back to the crowd following thing… I saw the MIT Weblog Survey link on Clagnut and decided to participate. I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

I was assigned to design a couple 2-page print ads in Adobe InDesign on Friday. Even though I haven’t done any print work in a while, and haven’t used InDesign to develop anything that has actually gone to print, it wasn’t all that hard. Having a Quark background, and a ton of experience with Adobe’s other Creative Suite apps made working my design out a breeze, but when I was told it had to be compatible with InDesign CS I was a little confused. Illustrator CS2 lets you chose which versions you would like your document to be compatible with. Photoshop has that annoying “Maximize Compatibility” popup that lets you know the CS users will be able to work with you file. InDesign though, offers no hint on save whether or not an InDesign CS user will be able to open your work.

A little Googling revealed that InDesign CS2 is compatible with CS through the interchange format. Rather than just saving your file, you have to export it as an InDesign Interchange (inx) file. As long as the CS user has the plugin from Adobe, everything should be gravy. I emphasize should because this IS print design. Some designers are more leery of web design with all its little inconsistencies…not I. I’d much rather push around pixels than worry about how they will look in ink.

In other news, I have an official press release over at Erickson Marketing to go along with my official title of “Senior Designer”. It’s a little humbling to see “Mr. Beaird” spoken of so highly, but I really do look forward to growing into the 10-gallon boots they’ve given me to fill.

As a married couple, there’s something inspiring and invigorating about being a part of a wedding. This last weekend Katie Lohuis, one of our best friends, was married happily ever after to Matt Stott. Amy was actually a bridesmaid so the last few weeks have been busy for her with the bridal shower, bachlorette party, and rehersals. All the planning and arrangements payed off though, as the ceremony was breathtaking and the reception was a blast.

I had a chance to write down some words of encouragement and advice for them at the rehersal dinner, but I used up my piece of paper saying how excited I was to see this day come and how they could stay with Amy and I any time. I don’t regret the words that I wrote, but thinking about it in retrospect, I wish I had passed along a little more advice. If I could sum up all the things I’ve learned so far in marriage into one statement, that would be “Don’t expect to fix everything”. There have been so many times in Amy and I’s relationship when Amy has presented a problem or an issue that I’ve wasted time trying to fix. Most of the time, communication isn’t about hearing a problem and trying to solve it, but about listening, feeling, and communicating back. In many ways, Amy and I are the opposite of typical couples. She’s the organizer, the brains, and as far as our job roles go, she wears the boots in the family. I work at home, I’m a creative, and I tend to take a very non-systematic approach to most tasks. When it comes to communication though, I fall into the same male pitfalls as all of our other young-married friends. That is, I fail to communicate.

Take tonight’s problem for instance. Amy wanted to play Word Racer on the mac for a few minutes tonight. It used to work fine in Firefox, but now it crashes the browser. Since the last time she played, I’ve upgraded Firefox from 1.0 to 1.0.4 and upgraded the Mac OS to Tiger. It does work in Safari, but all the letters become incoherent blobs for some reason. Well, I’ve been working on trying to “fix” that problem now for several hours and although Amy definitely wants to be able to play Word Racer on the mac, she probably would have preferred that I stuck to some kind of deadline so we could have spent time together working on a project that we need to get done. If I had just spent 30 minutes to an hour and told her that I’d come back to it later it would have been fine, but instead I’ve wasted most of the night trying to fix a problem rather than communicating. I’m such a creature of habit.

PS: If anybody has had any luck playing Word Racer in OSX Tiger, please let me know. After spending all this time, I’m still frustrated that I haven’t been able to get it to work.

Postion is not how you spell position. I thought I would note that fact as a public service at the top of this post for those finding it at google via “css postion”, “postion available”, “cursor postion”, or any other misspelled phrase using the word postion. I do not condone, nor support the use of the word postion. Bad postion may lead to sever side-effects, including headache, nausea, and swelling of the proboscis. Use postion with care. Hopefully this paragraph will move up in it’s search engine postion and prevent future misspelling of the actual word: Position.

Ok, I’m satisfied now. Back to the post.

Things are off to a good start with my new job. I’m learning a lot about CVS, OSX, and Command Line Unix that I didn’t know before. I was working on a logo for a custom motorcycle company yesterday and today I was excited today to get started on a XHTML layout for a new site.

Since they already have an approved storyboard for the site that defines the basic layout, I took a different approach to the project than my usual “Photoshop it up, and break it down into XHTML” approach. Instead, I’ve coded out the basic layout without touching Photoshop, and I’ll go back in and design the content images and backgrounds after it’s done.

In doing so, I’ve run into a problem that has plagued me since I first started with CSS. The word “position”. I can’t spell it. Unless I’m conciously aware that position is “p-o-s-i-t-i-o-n”, I’ll skip the first i and spell it “postion”. For the 5 times I used the position property in the css of this project, I initially spelled it wrong 3 of those times. At one point, I kept bouncing between the browser and the code wondering what went wrong. I felt really dumb after all that…until I Googled “postion”. There are over 695,000 misspelled instances of the word position. There was even a sponsored link titled “Light w/3 Postion Switch”. Thanks Google! I feel much better now.

During the course of the day today, I gathered together my Wacom tablet, usb webcam, picture of Amy, desktop organization kit, and desk toys. Tomorrow is actually my last day with Acceleration, but since Amy and I aren’t going home tomorrow before going up to Columbia for the weekend, I decided to bring home my accumulation of stuff today. After almost 2 years of working there, it’s hard to leave. My desk, with it’s well-worn chair, amidst those of the Acceleration Programmers is as much home as Amy and I’s Maguire Village apartment. I don’t know how working from home is going to go without the programmers’ code help, Russ’ explitory outbursts, and Ramon’s unpredictable behavior, but I know it won’t be the same.

On the brighter side of things, I start working from home for my new employer on Monday. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining the team at Erickson Marketing Studio doing exactly what I love to do: XHTML/CSS Website Design. Although I’ll miss my dual 19 inch monitors, I’m looking forward to working full-time from home on the 20-inch iMac. For some reason the design industry makes you feel like you’re not a real designer unless you do all your work on a mac. I think I’ve proved those people wrong enough to go ahead and switch.

In other news, Amy and I may actually make an offer on a hizzouse this weekend. We weren’t planning on going up to Columbia again for a couple more weeks, but decided to make the trek this weekend because of few sweet looking homes on the market. First though, I’ve got to make it through a sad final day at Acceleration. I love everybody there like family, so as I said before, it’s going to be hard.