I love bikes. I like riding bike but I love bikes. There have been times when I have ridden every day and commuted to work on a bike and there have been times lately that I have gone months without getting on one. Anyway I have long had a dream of having a wife and kids in a long train of bike starting with the wife and I on a tandem followed by as many trail-a-bike's and/or kid trailers as it takes to have the entire family on what amounts to one bike. This weekend I took two steps forward and one step back in seeing that dream become a reality. After haunting craigslist for months to no avail, Kelly and I invested in family togetherness in a big way by purchasing a brand shiny new, blue 2008 Raleigh Companion tandem. It is a the cheapest of the “nice bikes” on the market. I actually did seriously consider a $279 one from Wal-Mart but in the end I was just afraid that it would be such a maintenance problem and such a heavy pig that it would just collect dust in the garage. I expect this bike to be a part of my kids memories of childhood and I expect that I will pass it on to one of them some day as a family heirloom. The step back was that my sister Angela sent me a link to a web site that made the case fairly passionately that kids under the age of one are still just too small and immature to ride even in a trailer. I was really looking forward to Roko riding behind us in gleeful style. Angela recounted her experience with her kids bobbling heads in bike trailers though, and when I'm honest the reality of the bumpy ride combined with the fact that nobody even makes helmets for kids that small got me to put off plans for Roko to get in on the fun until next spring. We ended up leaving the bike at Kelly's folks house so we could ride it in their nicely paved neighborhood and with a built in baby sitting service. We took it for some nice short rides around the neighborhood and we both agree that we like it. Commence the family train. At least we now have the locomotive!
I have been a 1&1 customer as long as they have been doing business in the US. I understand they started in Europe before opening their doors in the US. As a promotion they offered a very nice shared hosing package for free for 3 years. I signed up for one for personal use and one for a small company I work for. At free ninety nine there was clearly nothing to complain about but even at a premium price it would have been a good deal. In those three years I never had one single outage, not one problem with server performance. There was one small problem with the billing (for extra usage) that took a few calls to get resolved but I was sold. I sung the praises of 1&1 to everyone I could. I know for a face that at least three other accounts were bought on my recommendation. When the three years expired they rolled me over to a paying account that was about $5 a month. I was so happy with them I upgraded both accounts to the $9.99 business account. Things were smooth with the rollover and by the next year or so I had several professional sites running on the two packages. I'm only using a small fraction of the resources that come with the package. Two months ago I would still have told you that 1and1 is the world's best. Then one day I get an email for one of my site owners that the site is acting up. I take a look and sure enough it is loading pages really slow or not at all. I can't reach the FTP side either. So I call tech support. After explaining the problem to them they put me on hold for a few minutes then come back and tell me that they talked with the guys who run the server and that they are aware of the problem and should have it fixed within one hour. He also said that he would have them email me if anything changed or when the problem was resolved. I hung up that phone still feeling I had the best hosting provider in the world. After five years of prefect server performance I do finally have a problem but it is handled very quickly and in a professional way.
That was the last time I felt that way.
An hour went by and the site was still down and no email. Two hours. Four… The next morning it was still down and I had never gotten as email. So I call them back. Why is my site still down? Again, she this time, putts me on hold and then comes back and tells me she has talked with the server guys and they know about the problem and should have it back up in less than an hour. I ask why I didn't get the email? She said the request was still on my account and that I would get an email when the server was back up. I told her that would be fine but what I needed was an email if the site was not going to be back up, "if anything changed", like the first tech support person had promised. She confirmed that I would get one if anything changed. I ask why I didn't get one about the extended delay for the first estimate of 1 hour. All she could tell me was the request was on my account. An hour later the site was still not up. About two hours later it finally was after about 18 hours but I never did get an email.
At this point I'm thinking well computer problems do happen I've been doing this with them for a long time an 18 hr outage is crap but not worth a switch. The tech support was a joke but if the next problem is in five years I am still going to stay here. Not two week later this whole story repeats. The site goes down and I get almost word for word the same BS for the guy who answers the phone. I increasingly suspect that the tech support office in somewhere far way has no real connection with the technicians who either are or are not working on the problem with my server. I wonder if the two minutes they put me on hold for is really used to answer another call or go get a donut? After all if the guy who is working on the server has to answer the phone from the call center calling him every time I call the call center, why not cut cost and just let me talk to the guy who fixes servers. What seems more likely given the disconnect between the call centers story and the reality is that the call center is just a farce that is there to give me the feeling I had the first time I hung up with them.
Anyway this time it's ONLY down for a few hours. I am convinced that I should be moving my stuff to a better host but I don't know who. If 1and1 the biggest and best regarded web host in the world can't do better than this, where can I turn?
Now it's four week later and again yesterday the site goes down again sometime before 2:30. I call. Same BS. It will be back up in an hour, we will email you if anything changes. Now I have two accounts with them if you recall so I ask the call center guy why I only have problems with this one and I never have problems with the other one. He takes both my customer number and says he will look into it and see if there is anything I am doing that could be the problem or if there is any difference in how the two servers are set up. 5:30 it comes back up and I don't get any email.
This morning I call them just to see what they will say when challenged on the face that they told me something and it never happened. All I can get from them is some explanation about how port 80 was not working and now it's fixed and how I should have received an email because it was listed on my account. He promised to email me like was promised yesterday. I ask when? Within the next 20 minutes? and he says within 5 minutes. 15 minutes later I get an email from him. My first ever from a tech support person from 1and1 and all it says is the same crap about port 80.
It's official I'm in the market for a better hosting provider. If you know of one please let me know.
There is this local 4x4 club called the Gold Hills Posse. I have wheeled with them a few times and they are good guys. I haunt their forum from time to time to see what they are up to. One of the cool things about them is that they work with the forest service to take care of one of my favorite trails. The trail is called Strawberry, or maybe Strawberry Creek. I took Kelly on it on our second date. Anyway when I read their forum I always read up on the trail and I caught a post about how there was a really big tree blocking part of the trail and causing users to have to go around it. Now you may not think that would be a big deal but there is wilderness area on both sides of the trail and there are certain groups that would like nothing more than to have a reason to close the trail all together. So I have this buddy who is into chain saws (and jeeps) and I figured he would jump at the chance to go clear this big tree. I figured right and so we set out this morning to go take care of it. It was a fun day of wheeling and nice to get a chance to put some work into protecting a trail I love. Scroll through these pics and if you want to see more click here. Sorry Roko spotters, he stayed home with mom on this one.
There is this local 4x4 club called the Gold Hills Posse. I have wheeled with them a few times and they are good guys. I haunt their forum from time to time to see what they are up to. One of the cool things about them is that they work with the forest service to take care of one of my favorite trails. The trail is called Strawberry, or maybe Strawberry Creek. I took Kelly on it on our second date. Anyway when I read their forum I always read up on the trail and I caught a post about how there was a really big tree blocking part of the trail and causing users to have to go around it. Now you may not think that would be a big deal but there is wilderness area on both sides of the trail and there are certain groups that would like nothing more than to have a reason to close the trail all together. So I have this buddy who is into chain saws (and jeeps) and I figured he would jump at the chance to go clear this big tree. I figured right and so we set out this morning to go take care of it. It was a fun day of wheeling and nice to get a chance to put some work into protecting a trail I love. Scroll through these pics and if you want to see more click here. Sorry Roko spotters, he stayed home with mom on this one.
When I was a youngster, maybe 6 or so, I remember in that funny snapshot way of distant memories, accompanying my dad into some thick woods to capture some wild bees. I remember him lighting his smoker, and explaining why he would smoke the bees. I remember him breaking large chunks of the tree trunk out to get to the bees inside. I remember thinking about the Berenstain Bears. I guess bees = honey = Berenstain Bears? I also remember being back home and him having a big white styrofoam cooler full of honey comb and giving me a piece to eat . Latter when I was a teenager a guy down the street had some bees and my Dad got into helping him some. I'm not really sure how good any of these memories are. But as memories they are real and therefore a part of who I am and part of my Fathers imprint on me.
My Dad grew up in a community where farming was common. His dad while he did a lot of things to make a living I believe would call himself a farmer. My Dad also got a degree in entomology and as far as I can tell that was what he wanted to do “when he grew up”. Anyone can tell you that even getting the degree is no guarantee you will do what you wanted to when you were a kid. He ended up as a programmer.
A few years ago Dad started Keeping bees again. He had picked up woodworking along the way and sort of parlayed that into experimenting with unconventional beehive designs. Mostly out of admiration for him I think, I expressed a some desire to have a hive of my own. Now, he lives in Texas and I'm out here in California but we met up in Utah at Angela's house for a family reunion I think and he brought me one of his Top Bar Hive boxes. Even after that it sat around for at least a year. Last year I hooked up with Lenny Taylor, who is my Mom's, brother's, Wife's, brother, or if you prefer my dad's beekeeping and general mayhem friend's brother. At any rate Lenny lives out here in Sacramento and at some point offered me a box of bees that came from a captured swarm. He already had them in conventional Langstroth frames and so they would not fit in the box my Dad had made without really tearing into them. A few weeks later he gave me another one. Then a few weeks later he and I met up to remove a swarm that had settled into someones front tree. On that one I finally got to use the Top Bar Hive. So by the end of last spring I had Three small hives going. Two in conventional Langstroth equipment and the third in my Dad's hive.
I found keeping bees very rewarding. It filled my mind for weeks last spring. I made a lot of mistakes though being new. It turned out that those weak little hives needed a bit more care from me and by the end of the summer I had lost one hive to absconding and the other I think starved because of relentless ant raids and the loss of a Queen mid summer for some reason. The colony in the Top Bar Hive was the lone surviver going into the winter. This spring it's numbers were down to only a ball about the size of a grapefruit, but I figured it was spring so they would be okay. But rather than take off they continued to dwindle again plagued by ant raids as the weather warmed and the plants began to bloom. My first Son was born this spring so it's possible that if I had been paying a bit more attention to them I could have kept the ants out and got them to take some sugar water thereby keeping them alive. Anyway my Dad came out for Roko's blessing when he was about three week old and that weekend we saw that queen alive for the last time. She only had about ten or fifteen worker left and we found her cold and alone in one corner of the box. A year after I began keeping bees and I was back to where I began. An empty box.
That was two weeks ago. This morning I picked up my second swarm of the year. I have decided to leave the Top Bar empty for now and perhaps even rework it into a Langstroth. I got my self on the list of a local beekeeping supply store where people often call if they have a swarm land in there yard. I have had four calls but my schedule is fairly full so I haven't been fast enough to get to two of them before they moved on. The two I have done have been really cool. My plan this year is to get up to six swarms and then toward the end of the summer or as needed combine weak ones with strong ones so as to keep them building up all summer.
Roko will be a month old tomorrow. It has been a fun month with visitors from Kelly's family and mine. He has grown into his body and put on a good layer of body fat. I have spent countless hours just holding him and grazing into his perfect face. We love him.
A conflict is circling in my mind about him thought. At my age I am well older than my parent were when they began having their six kids. The time for me to have a big family like that may have passed forever from posibility. It seems the family I will have will be a smaller one. Though Roko's past month has been filled with firsts I am so exited for the firsts that are yet to come. I can't wait for him to grow up. I can't wait to come home and see his face light up at the site of dady. I can't wait for our first camping trip together. I can't wait for him to learn to ride a bike and follow me around the neighborhood. From his first time rolling over by himself to his first day of school, to his first drivers licence, to his first child. I know I need to savor each moment of his life and I plan to. But life is also long .I will be an old man when he has his family. His life will be a big part of my life from now on. I look forward to all the times to come.
Kelly is going the Docs several times a week now to make sure Roko is doing everything he should be. So far he is a top performer. His weight seems to be right on, not too big or too small, and he excels in moving around. For the tests that they run twice a week they watch for correlation between his movement and his hart rate. If the baby wont move around they can't get a good test, and it can drag out for hours if the kid won't wake up and play. Roko does not have that problem! He loves to play. Kelly is also doing a home test every night where she has to lie down in a certain way and see how long it takes for him to move 10 times. It can take between 5 and 20 minutes they say. But I guess Roko is still learning to understand talking because he just does it in 3 minutes. Cheeky little guy. And speaking of Cheeks these picture are from the ultrasound today and those bulges are in fact his big cheeks. He's a good boy!
In other news we have pretty much decided to name him Roko David Teller Ashurst. Roko after his great great grandfather. David after his great grandfather as well as after his uncle David and his uncle Joesph David. And lastly, Teller after another great great grandfather. We reason that this will give him lots of choices about what to go by. Roko may be kind of edgy but David is safe and Teller is something in between maybe. So take your pick Roko but I think I will just call you Rocky.