Last Friday evening (2006-03-24), as some of you may have noticed, disaster struck! This site went down and the WHOIS registry for my domain name said Status: PENDINGDELETE. That means the domain name’s lease had technically expired. However, this was not supposed to happen, it’s not due for renewal until February 2007.

After several phone calls and e-mails to my domain registrar, I finally managed to get the domain re-activated, and I can only hope this never happens again. However, the site being down was not the only problem. This domain is also used for my primary e-mail account and I was without regular e-mail since Friday. So if you had tried to contact me then you may have received a failure notice; in which case, just e-mail me again now that it’s all back to normal.

As some of you may have also noticed, this blog is currently undergoing a redesign to match the template used on the rest of the site. It’s been a long time coming and I finally got so sick of the awful default WordPress template; I just had to do something about it. It’s taking a little while to finish for several reasons, primarily because I’m so extremely busy at the moment. I’ve got so many companies wanting my fabulous services to build and/or fix web sites for them and so little time to do it.

For those of you that don’t know, I’m actually back at HotHouse as a contractor (after leaving my full time position last October) and have been building 4 sites for them since January. Edentiti is also requesting me to do some more work for them and I’ll be doing a couple of days per week in between all the HotHouse work. Beyond that, there are a few other smaller projects for me to take a look at and give quotes for.

In other news, I’m switching my internet connection from Telstra Bigpond Cable (up to around 6Mbps/128kbps (download/upload), shaped to 64kbps after 10GB per month) to iiNet’s ADSL2+ with VoIP phone (up to 24Mbps/1Mbps (download/upload) shaped after approx. 20GB/20GB per month (peak/offpeak time)). The shaping sucks, but there’s not much choice in Australia, without paying excessive download charges. During the transfer process, I’ll be without internet connection for a few days. My cable will be cut this Friday morning and the ADSL2+ will be connected some time next week.

Finally, another of my hard drives died yesterday. It’s a Western Digital 200GB IDE drive. Actually, this is the 2nd replacement disk, after the original arrived dead and had to be replaced immediately back in June 2005. The first replacement disk had a serious disk error after a few months and Scan Disk ended up wiping the whole directory structure, thus losing all of the data. This final one was received in January and now the same kind of disk error occurred. Only this time, instead of letting scan disk wipe all the data, I cancelled it. I was able to copy the few files from it that weren’t already backed up, but couldn’t modify it at all. The disk is now completely unusable, I can’t even format it. I’m never buying another Western Digital drive again, so I just hope they’ll let me switch it for another brand.