• On my way to pick up the girls from day care!! Yay for another week done!! #

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If you’re like me, you hate it when something unknown takes your website down and you don’t know about it until its too late. On my other site, linuxtracker.org, the members are pretty quick to shoot me a twitter or an IM to let me know the site has gone tits up, however, on this one, its pretty much up to me hitting the site every so often to make sure that mysql and apache haven’t bogged down the server. Until now.

I was cruising around the web (its what I do) and I came across a great offer of Server Monitoring & Alerts from Just Uptime. The first month is completely free (for one site) and after that its a low $9.95 a month for monitoring. They’ll send me an email, they’ll shoot me a sms message, they let me know the site is down (I haven’t figured out how to make it play a strongbad song yet, but I’m working on it).

Now, I could work out something myself using the two servers I have to check each other, but what if, for some strange reason, they both decide to crash? Who’s checking who then?? Do I bother getting a third server to monitor the other two? Hardly. Its way easier to let someone else do it for me.

Besides, this way, I’m free to do other stuff. Who’s watching your server??

Also, I wanted to remind everyone of the ENTRECARD GIVEAWAY in progress where I’m giving away 2000 EC Credits to some lucky individuals. Follow the Link to find out how to win!!!

Ever since I was in high school I’ve wanted to be able to play the banjo. Most teenagers want to play something cool, the drums, guitar or saxaphone. Not me, I wanted to play the five string banjo like Earl Scruggs. I think it goes back to my first trip to Philmont and just sitting on the porch at Crooked Creek and listening to the camp staff pick away at the banjo in the rain. Something about that was cool (not to mention the suave plaid jacket in the album cover to the left!).

I finally got a banjo for Christmas two years ago and I picked up a couple of books on how to play and slowly tried to learn. However, being the non-musically inclined oaf that I am, I quickly got frustrated and finally convinced my love to sign me up for Banjo lessons.

I’ve been taking lessons from Jody Hughes for about 8 months now and while I am not the best, nor have I ever been accused of practicing too much (something I need to remedy) I get a little better each week. Below is a tune called Doug’s Tune. It was written by Doug Dillard and has been played everywhere (ok, on the Andy Grifith Show). If you want to hear what it really sounds like check out some of the other videos after my clip.