I haven’t had a good rant in a long time.  Trust me, I’ve had plenty to bitch about but I’m old and tired, and Cole keeps me occupied enough that I just don’t feel like spending the time.  But, after moderating another round of spam comments I thought I’d pipe up.

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UrbanPotato got tiring.  It’s tiring to look at and tiring to manage.  Comments died long ago due to spam.  Uploading pictures and editing content is a chore.  So it languished and I moved most of my updates to Facebook.  But Facebook has its limitations.  It’s hard to write witty prose in your status updates.  It’s hard to have a creative outlet when your look and feel is dictated by someone else.  With Facebook, I belong to one of the many.  It’s great to be part of the group, but it’s hard to have a unique voice.

Today, UrbanPotato gets an update.  Gone is the hand-crafted-in-another-life “LiveCast” blog engine I wrote so many moons ago.  I’m too busy these days to update that code.  In its place I’m now running the excellent BlogEngine.NET, originally written by Mads Kristensen and now maintained a horde of talented developers. It's flexible and simple enough that I could easily make it do what I want, and I can post using Word or Live Writer instead of a bad web interface.

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I have a confession: I'm a closet iPhone user. And I just waited in line six hours for a new one.

I've been using Windows Mobile devices for years -- all the way back to when they were called "Palm-Sized PC". They had better screen resolution and more power than my existing Palm Pilot, so the better technology won me over.

That same transition happend last year when I donned dark glasses and a hat and entered an Apple store for the very first time. Seven minutes later (they are efficient), I walked out with a new iPhone. I've never experienced the retail packaging nirvana that comes from opening an Apple product. It's just clean. I like that attention to detail. The iPhone turned out to be an amazing device. Although defficient in many features that my former Windows Mobile phone had, what it provided worked well, and most importantly, was a joy to use.

I had this great idea for laying down a new pair of servers as virtual servers running on some reasonably decent hardware. I’ve been fiddling nonstop for the last three weeks with this beast (ask Danna; she’s ready to disown me). I’ve learned a lot about how Virtual Server works. Enough to know that what I was trying to do would never work.

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Five Nine's I'm not. In fact, I don't even think I'm one nine. This site, and several others, have been running nonstop on a pair of Shuttle PC's running 1.7Ghz Celeron processors for the last three years. Besides a couple of power supply failures I've never had to touch the Shuttles. They -- and Windows Server for that matter -- have been rock solid.

All of my web site content, and all of my shared files that reside behind my firewall are stored on external USB hard drives, however, and these have been anything but reliable. I get a controller error about once a week. It gets hot in my media room in the summer and even though the drives all have built-in fans I still burn through about two hard drives a summer.