Weddings

Everybody seems to be getting married lately!  Well maybe not everyone, but a good chunk of them...  A couple of weeks ago we went to a wedding that had a full Chinese 12 course banquet dinner which was pretty crazy but also quite lovely.  (Pictures of said dishes are in a album Melisa uploaded to facebook for those that are interested and have access)  Yesterday evening we got back from a 6 hour trek to the interior of BC after spending a weekend attending another lovely wedding and visiting some wineries.  Something new I learned, people from that area refer to the Vancouver region as "the coast", as in "I don't really feel like driving to The Coast" which I thought was pretty funny, certainly not something you'd ever think to call if when you live here.  In a couple of weeks we're heading back out to the interior for another friend's wedding right before flying out to New York so we've got a lot of things on the go (mixed with work being super busy now that students are back at UBC).  I thought 3 weddings in 2 months was a lot but one of our friends is going to five! so that's kinda crazy.  Fun times though all around. Noticed that wordpress switched over to their new jetpack service so I enabled that on the backend, from a user perspective you won't really notice anything different except for the twitter feed on the right is a bit cleaner looking now as it's integrated into wordpress itself and no longer relying on a third party plugin and there should be a couple of new sharing buttons on the bottom of this post which again are integrated into the site now.  Well another thing you'll notice is that there is a new post on the page, so there's that.  Maybe there will be more to come.

Site additions

Small update today. I fixed a couple things that were bothering me and cleaned up the right frames a bit.  The big new feature is that I've added my twitter to the page (oooo aaaaah).  So that is kinda neat, there is a pretty decent plugin to wordpress that snaps right in.

I also added the my blogroll back onto the right side, that was giving me problems a couple of weeks ago but today I realized what I was doing wrong and boy do I feel silly.   In any case now there is a link to say Ben's page, my sentiment in the post below still stands.

Hosting Change

So this is the second time I've had to post this because I'm an idiot and somehow published it originally while stripping out all of the text.  Pretty annoying.  To that end this is the short version. So on the recommendation of a friend i switched to Gandi for my hosting a year ago when I was looking for a new host.  They were just launching their hosting service and were only charging $7.50 a month for it.  This seemed pretty good and although it was a 'beta' featured they seemed to be on top of things.  Unfortunately although things started good on Gandi they had a huge datacentre failure early on and my server never seemed to recover.  Gandi support claimed everything was fine but it wasn't and there were serious 24/7 slowness issues with it.  They recently announced that their beta period was over and starting in January they would be changing the price to $16 a month.  This was the straw that broke the camel's back and I immediately decided it was time for a new host.

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Gallery is back up!

So I finally got unlazy and set my gallery back up.  Once of the side effects of this server change is that I got to set up everything myself this time, which means instead of doing www.website.com/gallery I changed it to gallery.thebigv.org which I prefer.  (not that anyone else cares about this, but who cares about those people) I'm using Gallery2 again, which seems to basically be the defacto standard.  At some point I'll have to play around with the hundreds of modules out there that you can use for gallery2, for now it's quite vanilla, but it's very functional which is the main thing.  Now I just need to import my pictures back in there, there aren't too many though.

Back Again (again)

Well that was interesting.  Tyler decided he didn't really want to be the admin of a server for our little group of guys, and really I can't blame him so it was finally time to get my own server.  I settled on Gandi as my new host and you may have noticed the blog was down for a bit and then back up last week for a short time.  Well unfortunately a 2 days after I set this puppy back up Gandi suffered a massive failure (to their credit they are working very hard to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, I got very good support from them, and they gave me a refund for the month) which was incredibly annoying. In any case that is all behind us now and the site is back up again.  Maybe this time I'll even update it!  I forgot to back up my old uhh.. post(s) so a fresh start it is!