One of the features that they have is an RSS-to-Email generator. Up until now I’ve been using Feedburner’s RSS-to-Email generator, but that doesn’t give me the information that I keep telling people that they need to have in order to do email correctly. So, I’m going to follow my own good advice.

Feedburner does tell me that there are a few of you out there who are subscribed to get posts by email. I’ll be turning that function off here in the next couple of days. So, march on over to the right here on the site, and sign up for the new mailing list!

Did Spamtacular close? Obviously not. But since you’re curious enough to have read this far, I’ll lay it all out for you.

Even though Spamtacular is run by me personally, the company I’m President & CEO of graciously allows me to host it on the company’s server. It is, after all, nice to be the king. That server has been hosted by a provider in Longview, Texas, owned by the father-in-law of a friend of mine. The server is old. When it was bought, it came with RedHat Linux 10 installed on it. Yeah, it’s that old.

On Sunday evening, the server essentially froze. I could ping the IP address and I could traceroute to it, but I couldn’t get a response from it. It was restarted on Monday morning but froze again a few hours later. It was restarted again and froze again at 4:26 a.m., Tuesday morning showing that the swap partition was completely full.

Now, as it happens, I have another server here at the house. So, I slapped a brand new install of CentOS 5.3 on it, copied over the relevant files and databases from the nightly backups that we keep here. And drove the server to Longview on Tuesday afternoon.

After I installed the server and got back home, it began to suffer from I/O errors on its disk drives and it froze as well. Total time up: four hours.

Tuesday evening was spent examining the original server to discover the source of the failure. I looked at what I could and came up pretty empty. Eventually, thanks to the help of Steve Atkins, it was decided that the cause was likely to be the death of either the RAID controller or one of the hard drives. The suggested solution: ditch RAID and copy the filesystem to an IDE drive (remember, the server is old enough that it doesn’t have SATA ports) and just use that.

Wednesday, my wife took the server back to Longview and to a computer store. They took the data from the drives and copied the data onto a new 500G EIDE drive. In theory, she was going to just take the server from the shop to the facility and we’d be done with it. But, when they did a test boot, they got a screen which said, and I quote: “GRUB”. I was told that the server booted “to grub but no further.” Since the repair folks were Windows weenies, they were at a loss. I wasn’t willing to pay them to research the problem, so I did some research and found a potential solution while my wife brings the server home.

Wednesday night I get my hands on the server at 9:30. That’s when I discovered that it got to the word “GRUB” not to the grub splash/menu screen. My researched solution (basically: rebuild the initrd) went out the window, but hey, if I found that solution, I can find another one! So, back to research.

About an hour later I discovered the answer: re-install grub. So, that was done and the machine boots. To bed!

Thursday morning, I get up and take the machine back to the facility where it lives (after getting appropriate approvals from my boss at my day job). After dealing with a couple of configuration issues, I leave and come home.

Thursday afternoon, server load climbed to 25 and swap space was getting really low for some reason, but we were able to get in a reboot command before it froze completely. Things have been stable since.

As I write this, the server has been up for 1 day, 2 hour, 25 minutes. It only needs to stay up for about 6 more weeks. Then we’ll be bringing it home since we’ll have our own T1 line into the home office.

The best part is that my GPA went up this time. I graduated with a 3.67 GPA.

When I started this thing, I did it to give myself some credentials to use to get some more work consulting for attorneys, either as an expert witness or to help with discovery issues related to Internet cases. I knew what I needed to know before, but now I have a degree that says that I’ve got some training in computer-related things. So, if you need a consultant, maybe I’m your man.

But, it also means that I’ve got a bit more time for things. Like the kids. For 3 years now they have been living in a one parent family for far too much of the time. It’s seemed like the only time that they’ve seen their dad was when they had been bad and I needed to discipline them. Now I’ll have more time for them. I’m really looking forward to that.

I will also have time for blogging and working on other projects that I’ve given some commitments to (I haven’t forgotten about you guys). And perhaps most importantly to the business stuff (and relating back to the comment about consulting work), I’m going to start doing some commentary on Spam Suite. If you’re surprised that I would do this from the standpoint of an anti-spammer then I’m not sure what you’re doing here at all.

Still. I just had to share!

Part of that routine happens when I let them out of the car. I always tell them to “have a great day and learn a lot.” This morning, Timothy, who usually just responds with “you, too, Dad”, said something that I originally thought to be kind of silly but that becomes more profound the more that I think about it. He said, “Make money that’s worth it!” as he bounded from the car and toward the door of the school.

Now think about that for a moment. Let it roll around in your head for a bit.

Make money that’s worth it.

You know, we live in a world full of people who are making money and are miserable doing it. And today, as I thought more and more about what he said, I thought more and more about the things that I do and why I’m doing them.

What makes the money that I’m making worth it?

I work in Internet abuse. Well, more precisely, I work at preventing abuse. I work as the Director of ISP Relations for Informz, an e-mail marketing company. A great deal of my job involves responding to incidents where clients are doing something that results in their email not getting through. A great deal of my job also involves advocating for the rest of the Internet within the company.

Now, why get into that? Perhaps it’s because I still remember how I felt coming home to an inbox full of spam.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I can’t stop spam for everyone. But, that’s what makes what I’m doing worth it, you see. While I cannot stop it for everyone, what I can do is help to police one small corner of it. I can make sure that what my clients do isn’t abusive. So, in my own way, I’m making a difference, and getting paid for it. That’s making money that’s worth it.

But, as much as I like that, I don’t want to do this forever. No one really wants to work for someone else forever, and I have this company, Whizardries, that could always use more attention. We do some great things there, too. We started the Stitchery Mall as a favor for a friend. It hasn’t grown to the point that it’s supporting the whole family yet, but it’s growing, it’s not draining money anymore, and we’re able to make a lot of people happy. That, also, is money that’s worth it.

Usually under the aegis of Whizardries, I also do some development work for friends, former co-workers, or even myself (I still need to get around to finishing up this ColdFusion frontend to rbldnsd that I’ve been keeping to myself for two years now). And even though no money usually changes hands, the work is worth every moment that I put into it even when I don’t particularly feel like doing it. Both from the standpoint of helping others/paying forward, and building and reaffirming those relationships.

There are some things, though that probably aren’t worth it. One of those is something that I’ll look back on with pride in two or three years: finishing graduate school. I just finished the fall semester and lack just one more semester of work on my Masters of Science in Computer Information Systems. I started that degree so that I might be able to find some consulting work as an expert witness. But, that was before starting work at Informz. So, now I’ve got all of this other stuff that I’m doing in addition everything else that I do. And it takes up a lot of my time. And this semester I (Carol would probably add “finally” here) noticed that it’s making me pretty cranky, especially toward the end of a term. A lot of that is because I feel like I’ve not been really being a father to my kids. I’m working and going to school and then collapsing to watch some late night TV before starting it all again the next morning. Really, I can’t say at this point whether the money that I’ll potentially make as a result of the schooling will be enough to say that it’s worth what I’m having to put in. But, I also don’t feel that I should just quit with one semester left to finish. But, time will tell.

I don’t attach religious significance to Christmas. As a result, Christmas has always been an “ending the year” time for me, and that strikes me as a good time for reflections like this. And now you’ve seen pretty a whole day’s worth of reflection on this one subject.

If you haven’t done so yourself, let me also encourage you to take some time to ask yourself the question: Is the money I’m making worth it?