Life, serve-you.net, and everything else

It would seem a few months have passed since my last substantive post, so here we are again….

Not a lot of exciting stuff to report these days. Life has been pretty routine, which is not a bad thing. I end up working a lot of odd hours at my new job, but never more than the normal ~40 hours a week. We just have to do software deployments during certain windows, so I come in early/leave early, or come in late/leave late.

Outside of my day job, I’ve been spending most of my free time working on my hosting company, serve-you.net. I recently decided to switch billing applications from ModernBill, which I had been using for about 7 years to WHMCS. This was a huge undertaking, as when I started out I didn’t really know how I wanted to do things. On top of that, there were severe limitations in what the product could actually do. So my DB was a mess, making an automated import worthless. I ended up having to import only client/billing info, then manually recreating all of the packages, and associating them with the customers, and their domains.

On top of that, we had to do some redesign work to integrate the new cart with the site. Steph also did a refresh of the homepage, and a slight refresh on the overall template. I’m pretty happy with the results. We now have everything integrated into our template, and it makes things a lot easier to navigate. Now I’m working on getting all of the code up to XHTML standards, which is quite an undertaking in itself, due to the fact that most of the site has just been bastardized by me for the past 8 years. There’s a lot of open tags that need to be closed, a lot of UPPERCASE tags that need to be converted to lowercase, and a lot of stuff that should be converted to CSS.

In other business news, I’m finally getting serve-you.net incorporated. I say I’m going to do it every year, then I don’t because it’s too late in the year, etc. I actually filled out all the paper work about a month ago, so I’m just waiting for the fine business state of Nevada to process it.

I went to see Metallica a couple of weeks ago, and they were awesome! They really brought the rock. I was really expecting them to just be adequate, but I was happily surprised. I’m only bummed that Lamb Of God didn’t open for them on our leg of the tour, but they’ll be around again soon enough. Can’t wait for the new album to come out this month. AND new Mastodon next month!

Still no idea when we’ll be able to make a trip out to California yet. I’m hoping for late spring, but I’m just not sure yet. I like to be there for my birthday week, but I don’t know if I want to wait that long. I’d like to also go to OBX this year, but money may not happen for the both.

What’s new with you?