Lest Blood Be Shed

Well, I've quit my job, sold all my stuff (made over $1000), and moved out of my place. I fly out to NYC May 20th @ 10am. Yikes! Help me make the transition!

This past Monday I decided I needed to start moving my websites to a more permanent location. Before that time I hosted and maintained my own servers for both imagodirt.net and metaphysicalfarms.com. I've never dealt with a webhosting company before and so this was a new experience. I looked around and most sites seemed similar. I did some research, as much as I could, and was bombarded by fancy sales pitches and the like. I talked to a few sales reps via a web chat and I ended up settling on siteground.com. The sales rep was very nice and they offered to transfer my current website (they would do it) for free. The rep also showed me a demo of the interface I would have to interact with my sites. The thing that sold me in the demo was the ability to turn on ssh access.

Reality is always so much more muted than desire.

I purchased the service $84 for a year with a $10 discount for each domain. The total was $148/year. Not too bad for ssh access and ssl support I told myself... well when I logged in I discovered the horrid truth. I had no ssh access. I could only access my databases via some stupid web interface (pgsqlAdmin mysqlAdmin or some such nonsense). So, it takes them 3 days to transfer my site... apparently they NEED web interfaces to access databases and website files to do the transfer quickly. I sent them ftp logins and opened up the databases so they could use command line tools to dump the database. They were completely clueless on how to use postgres and I actually had to give them the commands to dump the database. Now, here comes the deal breaker. I can deal with incompetents in IT. I do every day. Google-Checkout, which I use for metaphysicalfarms.com to handle shopping carts, requires an authority signed SSLv2 certificate to handle callback and notifications between my website and the google. I purchased one such certificate and it had been working flawlessly. It cost me $30 for 2 years. I figured I wouldn't be able to use the cert at the new hosting site but when I was doing my research and talking to the sales rep they mentioned that there was a free shared ssl cert for all accounts. Come to find out the cert is self-signed and worthless. I'd have to pay an extra $75/year to get something that worked... or if I wanted to use my cert that I already had it would cost $60/year. Fuck That! I moved my sites back to where they had been happily and canceled my account (fortunately with my money back less setup fees).

There is happy news though. Determined to find what I wanted for a reasonable about of money, I went to searching the Internet again. I wasn't pulling any punches and I now knew some of the tricks the companies played to get you to make a purchase. I really just wanted a machine with power and internet. I could do the rest. Those were expensive. Starting @ $130/month, I didn't think I was going to get it. That is until I stumbled upon vpslink.com. They offered VPS (Virtual Private Servers) in which I had complete control! I could have root!!!! No one else was on the virtual machine but me! They offered almost every flavor of linux you could imagine. The pricing for such machines started @ $6/month!!!! Can you believe it?! I went with the $12.458333333/month package. I payed for my account and in 3 minutes I had a public IP address and a blank virtual HD. I logged into the website and selected to install Slackware 11.0. Another 3 minutes later I ssh'ed into my new vps. It took me only 9 hours to get the server up and running with my websites and ssl certs. I had to install mysql, pgsql, apache, php and then various libraries--usually downloading them at speeds I had never imagined possible (2.16M/s). In fact you are reading this post from my new hosting company. I love having root!!!! (for only 12/month)

This is a quick video to show the process I went through to create a very nice soap with lavender flowers embedded in it. The soap is made with milk (heavy whipping cream) and then palm oil, coconut oil, soybean oil and cocoa butter. I added Vitamin E, Peach coloring and Lotus Blossom fragrance after the soap reached trace.

In this lecture I refute what Dr. Nichols and Dr. Egan say about Paul. Rather I claim their statements for what they are: modern interpretations developed in the evolution of Christian history. Highly influenced by the work of Martain Luther. After stripping away this interpretation we go back and look at what Paul might have really been talking about. Jews and Gentiles in the same church of Jesus christ worshiping in different ways. Enjoy.

I haven't been posting other stuff because I've been devoting all my time to these lectures and preaching. I finally found time to get these in digital format. Enjoy this lecture and more to come.

Church was canceled yesterday because of the foot of snow we got. I took the chance to shovel the snow in my driveway. Enjoy the show... it has a surprise ending

To Follow is a step-by-step guide for making your own homemade soap. You can find full written instructions on my metaphysicalfarms.com website. Because of the 10minute restrictions on youtube.com I've had to break the video up into two parts. Enjoy making your own homemade soap!

Part 1


Part 2