Having recently been upgraded by NTL to a reasonable 3Mbps cable modem and enjoyed a hefty speed increase, we decided to sign up for one of those 8Mbps Bulldog ADSL accounts at the end of last week. After a week of waiting for the results of the line test, I got a phonecall from them tonight.
Category: Personal
New mobile phone
I just recently switched my old Orange number back from a pay-as-you-go to a contract and got a free new phone into the bargain. Having tried a load of phones out in various shops, I finally settled on the Nokia 6822.
Nothing special you might think, it’s just a phone.. but then..
Server gone
I finally decommissioned my old server today. Everything is on the new one which is behaving fine (probably jinxed it now!) I brought the old one home as it’s just a little desktop machine and just right for the kids to use.
Migration of sites
Well, on the whole the migration of the sites from the old server to the new server went relatively smoothly. Just a few minor hiccups with missing Perl modules and permissions on files. I’ve got some pretty looking bandwidth graphs using rrdtool but nothing’s appearing on the mail stats graphs yet.
New server
Due to various reasons, I ordered a dedicated server today from PoundHost. Quite a good spec, plenty of disk space, and 850GB of data transfer per month. Compare that with the current server – limited disk space, was a good spec 2 years ago, and 30GB of data transfer.
The only thing is the 850GB of data includes both inbound and outbound traffic unlike the previous hosting company that only counts outbound traffic.
So far, I’ve been quite impressed by the speed at which the server was setup and how helpful the guys at PoundHost have been. I suspect it’ll be a while before I’m done setting the server up as I’m intending to do things right this time.
Jetlagged?
Even after the 9 hour flight back from Dallas to the UK, I can’t believe I’m still jetlagged, or at least have my internal clock screwed up. Bed at 6am, up at 2pm.. not good considering that I have work tomorrow and it’s almost 3am and I’m not that tired yet.
There are some more pictures that I have still to put online from the holiday, but I’m not sure whether to add extra entries in the for the days that I took the pictures, or just add an entry, at whatever time/date I get around to it, that has the pictures and bits of information about them. I suspect the latter would be best as then if you’ve read the older entries already you won’t miss anything.
The journey back to Texarkana
Thanks to not looking at the map on the way back but relying on signposts, we ended up missing the turning from I-10 back onto I-49 and went about 80 miles too far along I-10 ending up in Westlake, LA. Instead of going all the way back to Lafayette, we turned north onto US-171 and then cut across back onto I-49. In all the whole trip back was about 8 hours long in spite of the wrong turning.
Bourbon Street
Walk out from Margaritaville away from the river and most of the shops seem to make way for what appears to be residential, with the odd shop advertising voodoo, tarot and other kinds of mystical services.
A few blocks down and we’re on Bourbon Street, pretty quiet road with mostly apartments etc. Is this the right place? We headed back down Bourbon Street towards the hotel and suddenly there are bars opening onto the street, great crowds of people and lots of noise.
If anything, it was too crowded for my liking but it looked like everyone was having fun. Given some of the things that were going on there, I was very surprised to see several young kids with their parents and several older kids (I guess in their early teens) doing tricks, dancing, etc on the pavement.
Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville
Although we found the restaurant on friday evening, we didn’t eat there until saturday evening. They have a queuing system that during busy times conveniently places you in front of the bar for about 10-30 minutes before you get to sit down and eat.
We had a nice meal and then went for a walk down into the French Quarter a bit more to find Bourbon Street.
Aquarium of the Americas
One major attraction in New Orleans is the Aquarium of the Americas. It’s got sharks, jellyfish, and all kinds of other fish. There’s also a section that has parrots, an alligator and turtles.
This is a lionfish that was at the aquarium.
Here is one of the seadragons, there were several of these swimming round in one of the tanks. There were also some ‘leafy seadragons’ which were very strange looking things much like the one below but it had some small leaf-like bits to help camouflage it.
Right next door is an IMAX theatre showing fishy movies – Sharks, Ocean wonderland, Volcanoes of the deep sea and Into the deep. They’re in 3D and the 3D effect is really neat. Fish swimming out of the screen towards you, quite a few of the kids in the audience were being a bit silly and reaching out trying to grab them.