Email stopped coming in.<\/p>\n
I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to use gmail. Not on a $33 a month service … in 2008.”<\/p>\n
So, poor asuka (aka tranzoa.net) almost worked its aged, 128meg, 200mhz Pentium II heart out hosting tranzoa.com.<\/p>\n
gina (aka bran) overflew its 1 gig system disk and floundered its powerhouse, dual Pentium II 250mhz, 512mb trying to process email to the tune of 20k – 30k spams a day. It’s amazing what a 9 year old, $100 Boeing Surplus machine can do in a pinch.<\/p>\n
The old ViewSonic 21″ secondary monitor faded to dark.<\/p>\n
The replacement box, spring, took a week to find a working motherboard from Fry’s and had a hard disk failure in a month (power outage – maybe not something to even notice except that it failed on some data needed to boot).<\/p>\n
To get spring running I managed to toast MegaSystem’s motherboard. This was not well timed.<\/p>\n
For perhaps good reasons, perhaps not, spring’s OS is Ubuntu H 64. The new Megasystem XP runs in a VMWare box. That’s the theory. In practice, I have spent a boatload of time moving much of my personal computing operation to spring’s Ubuntu. Browser, email, IM, picture editing and much of the housekeeping stuff built over years.<\/p>\n
This would be the fun part of computing if I were a computer person. Remember the verified, 70’s observation: “Normal people expect computers to treat them badly. Computer people demand<\/strong> it.”<\/p>\n I am not even a normal person. Computers exist for me, not the other way around. At 10 years old, I claimed as much while half-stepping arithmetic homework. And, I claimed right.<\/p>\n This has not been the fun part of computing.<\/p>\n Ah, well. I lied. There was one fun part. Since MegaSystem was dead, its 3 gig of RAM fit rather nicely in Scott’s old “tara” box with the Auburn VO stickers and all. So, to keep the status quo, asuka is still<\/strong> running on antiquated hardware. It’s just running on 10x the CPU and 20x the RAM. Makes a difference. Doesn’t take 5 minutes to deliver a web page, for instance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Email stopped coming in. I dropped the 11+ year tranzoa.com web hoster. What I said to the guys at AZC.com: “You don’t shut off someone’s email without telling them, dictionary spam surge or no. And, you don’t tell them to … Continue reading