Oh the fun of being slightly available.

Ok, so all five of you who read this no doubt know by now that I'm having technical problems with the server. It's up from about 6pm when I restart it, till about 9 am the next day. Perfect viewing time for all my constituants. Mrs. Austin has officially had it with my moping and skulking about, heavy exasperated sighs and feelings of doom and dread because I can't get the freakin thing to stay connected. She wants me to call a technician or spend more money on getting a more stable line. She's sweet that way. Whatever we can do to make it work, just do it. Her analogy was effective as well, something about a flute and a toothpick.

Anyway, I've got a few more things I can try, then it's the official call to tech support. I'm not going to say I'm rigging my system to work, I'm using actual factory issued equipment and licensed services, software and firmware. The issue is, I'm trying to run a website on a line that's not static, so part of the setup requires some translation and monitoring and, shoot, it's just not clicking. I'm finding out it may be the router that doesn't do well with this setup, it may be that my ISP doesn't handle client routers well, at this point I'm guessing. The problem with calling a tech and having them come out is I'm sure they're not going to be really happy about helping me setup a web server instead of using one of there hosting services, or getting around the dynamic IP instead of paying for a static. But I mean seriously, $30 extra a month for 1 IP I'd use and 4 I won't? I don't know, I may have to take a bullet for the team, (team being me and my sanity) and call them up and just do whatever they tell me. It's admitting defeat and it's accepting that I'm weak and stupid and can't learn enough to make this work, but such is life. I feel like that most days at work anyway.

I'd like to take this moment to wish my cousin Hillary, Happy Birthday.

This picture will be up for a couple hours I'm sure, but please check back in the evenings as it should be up after 6pm. This is a family portrait drawn by Lil Miss Austin. She's gradually gone from scribbles, to circles, to circles with dots in the middle, to more than one circle together, then connected with a stick, and now rudamentary human figures. She's got almost the whole family, but here's what I have so far.





My comic book friends have already said she needs to work on her anatomy and perspective, so we're doing that. I think it's neat that she's drawing. I'm always trying to give her some scrap paper to doodle on, and hopefully she will wile away the hours in school perfecting her craft and become an artist like her father, grandmother, uncle and late grandpa. That'd be cool.

Of course it'd also be cool if she just kept growing and learning and being friendly, I won't set the bar so high.

More late.