disparate.info

I have 15 Google Wave invitations to give away. Know before you participate that these are not invitations in the typical sense. Google instead allows current Wave users to nominate others to receive invitations. Of the few I’ve sent so far, all have been accepted within a few days. That being said, I cannot guarantee that you will receive an invitation immediately.

To participate, you can either:

• Comment on three (3) posts from three (3) different categories, not including this or previous contest announcements, or;
• Comment on one (1) post (not including this or previous contest announcements), follow me on Twitter (@ethitter), and tweet* about the post you commented on. Be sure to include your Twitter handle in your comment. If you do not include your Twitter handle, I have no way of verifying that you met the contest requirements.

The first fifteen people to participate and meet the requirements, regardless of the method chosen, will be nominated to receive Google Wave invitations.

*Note that the Share/Save button at the bottom of each post includes a Twitter option.

The following is the third of four parts recounting my trip to Georgia. For the first two parts, see “My Southern Excursion, Part 1” and “Part 2.”

After spending the night in Cleveland, TN, I set off on US-64 for the Cherokee and Nantahala National Forests, and ultimately, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With hundreds of miles of roads crisscrossing these forests in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, I planned to spend the entire day wandering through the woods. Just before sunrise, my first stop along the way found me at Ocoee Dam #1, part of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) system. This dam, the first of three, impounds Parksville Reservoir and is one of the oldest hydroelectric dams in the TVA system. US-64, portions of which are marked as the Ocoee Scenic Byway, follows the northern perimeter of the reservoir, affording many views of the Parkville Reservoir and the river that feeds it. The Ocoee River, home to some spectacular rapids, was the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics’ canoeing, kayaking, and slalom events and is now home to the Ocoee River Whitewater Center. As I continued along the Ocoee Scenic Byway, I encountered numerous scenic overlooks and an assortment of recreation areas that provide access to the river and its famed rapids. Stopping for pictures along the route can be treacherous in some places, however, as an overlook may be no wider than a car, placing one very close to traffic along this two-lane byway. After exiting the Cherokee National Forest just shy of the Tennessee-North Carolina border, I headed north on TN-68 out of Ducktown.

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My web host, DreamHost, recently moved its operations to a new datacenter, resulting in major outages and headaches for myself and its many other customers (see “Regarding My Site’s Downtime” and “Ongoing Server Problems Test My Patience, Hamper Productivity“). So overwhelmed with complaints was its support staff that the company resorted to canned responses to customers’ inquiries.

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I’ve begun planning my next road trip, which will take me to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, the West Coast, and more. I’ve laid out a tentative route at http://disparate.info/wb. Any suggestions and input from people living on the West Coast is definitely appreciated. Also, if you’re living out west, let me know. I’d definitely like to meet up with anyone who’s available.

Either leave a comment here (with a valid email address) or use the Contact Me form. You can also call me via Google Voice from the Contact Me page.

Complete details, including my itinerary, reports along the trip, and pictures, will be available at http://disparate.info/westwardbound/.

After not hearing from my host for more than 24 hours, I received the response quoted below. To DreamHost’s credit, the company was amidst a datacenter relocation, which only exacerbated the issues I experienced. Responses like this are among the reasons why I have continued to use DreamHost over the last four years. In the company’s defense, since the issues were resolved, my sites have responded with surprising speed. While I threatened to move to a competitor, DreamHost’s resolution of my complaints demonstrats why I will continue my relationship with the host.

Hello,

Sorry about the downtime experienced yesterday morning as well as the lack of response. We have separated all messages regarding this issue to a special support team that was handling and making sure your issue got the attention it needed. We have been experiencing network problems since we moved new machine to this data center from our previous location. We made a few major changes after yesterday mornings problems once we realized that the downtime occurred at the same time each day. Our network experts changed the way we were routing some key services that were accessed by your machine via the network. We also adjusted some scheduled updates that were running near that time as well and spread those out. Unfortunately we did not contact you yesterday as we wanted to see if the changes we made had any impact this morning. Thankfully they did have an impact. We did not have the massive downtime we were seeing at 630am PST time. So we are excited to report that we act
ually feel we have this issue resolved.

On a side note we notice the network was still not 100% perfect like we want it to be so we have further behind the scenes maintenance scheduled for Monday but your service should be stable throughout.

If you are still having problems please let us know as your issue will not be related to this. Sorry if we missed your issue.

Thank you for your patience and support of DreamHost during this tough data center migration period. The major parts of the move are complete and we have finally wrapped up the majority of 6 months of planning, then executing the migration.

Thanks,
DreamHost

Just as the FCC moved its most recent and controversial initiative to the public-comment phase, the agency began what will likely be an even more contentious process to reallocate the nation’s broadcast spectrum. With the goal of providing more spectrum for broadband internet services, the Commission proposed that television broadcasters relinquish a portion of the frequencies they control in exchange for a share of the proceeds the FCC would receive when it auctioned of the spectrum. Considering the expense broadcasters incurred preparing for this past summer’s digital television transition, the organizations were understandably resistant to the proposal. Further complicating the proposal, it is unclear how much spectrum the FCC is seeking.

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After recently losing a number of blog posts due to server errors, I decided to purchase blog editing software for my Mac. Having tested both ecto and MarsEdit, I settled on the former because it seemed to have more features and better reviews. Unfortunately, I failed to check the ecto support forums before making my purchase.

Tonight, after completing a forthcoming post, I saved my work and closed ecto. When I reopened ecto later in the evening, a substantial portion of the post was missing. Much to my dismay, data loss is a known problem with ecto, one that is widely reported on its creator’s support forums.

Unfortunately, I learned a painful lesson about the importance of thoroughly researching one’s purchases. At least it only cost me $20.

Needless to say, I’ve abandoned ecto and strongly recommend against its use.

As visitors may have noticed, disparate.info has suffered a number of outages over the last few days. My host, DreamHost, has experienced a number of problems with the servers powering this site (and many others) since it began moving its equipment to a new location. The recurring issues are disconcerting because, on more than one occasion, DreamHost has announced that it had resolved the problems only to discover that it hadn’t. I’ve been a customer for four years, but never before have I experienced problems of this magnitude, and the ongoing issues are testing my patience.

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Yesterday, I released version 1.0 of the Tag Dropdown Widget plugin for WordPress. The plugin allows WordPress users to display their tags as a dropdown menu rather than in the standard tag cloud.

In addition to letting the user specify the dropdown’s label, the plugin allows a user to trim long tag names to fit theme constraints. Today, I updated the plugin to extend the trimming feature beyond the widget. Now, when the plugin is implemented using the makeTagDropdown() function, the maximum tag length can be specified. This change, while minor, offers greater flexibility when including the tag dropdown outside of the sidebar or in themes that either do not utilize a sidebar or widgets.

The new version, numbered 1.1, is available on the Tag Dropdown Widget page or in the WordPress plugins directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tag-dropdown-widget/.

After struggling to find a solution to the problem of unwieldy tag clouds, I created a WordPress plugin to display my tags as a dropdown list. You can see it in action in my sidebar.

Version 1.0 is now available for download. For more information, or to download a copy, visit http://disparate.info/tagdropdown/.