As you can see, I haven't updated the news in a long while. Most of this news had to do with my network and the things I was doing on it. Since this has basically turned into ICUHost, I have been updating the news file there with this info. If anything pertains explicitly to this site, I'll update that here, but for the latest news, always check ICUHost.Net

Today would have been my brother Bill's 44th birthday. Wombat ...

Updated the "About" page ... Now you know we're on a Pentium III and are connected via T1. So now you know we're broke.

For some unknown reason, Mister Server wasn't cooperating and joining the domain. So, to turn our back on him, we just said, 'Okay, screw ya then!' ... We put up a brand new server and moved all accounts over to it. This is a major change, and certainly deserves to be tested thoroughly. Only problem is, from the inside, everything looks good ... From the outside, could be a different story ... As long as this seems to be working okay, we will give Mister Server his due, and blow his HD all away to oblivion ... That will teach Mister Server, eh? In the midst of all these changes, we're trying to make sure that everything is functioning properly. If you stumble upon anything that just doesn't seem right, please let us know immediately. Thank you in advance! Also, with this addition of another server, we now have capacity to host 2,400 web sites. they're going quick! We will eventually begin working on displaying our bandwidth stats and letting you in on all the nifty features that are installed here. Just who has the time when all we do is move onward and upward. Time to take a break, eh?

Active Directory sucks! (sorry Microsoft, but it does) ... We don't see any reason to make these things so much more complicated than they already are ... What the heck is {31B2F340-016D-11D2-645F-00C04FB984F9} supposed to be? What happened to naming things with Englishlike names ... Anyway .. we're just a little perturbed about it right now. When it works, we will know it and love it all the same. ~*~

We've come to the realization that we can't be as explicit as we have been in the past when it comes to what we've been up to here. We think everything that goes along with setting up the network and implementing it is very interesting, but sharing the information could help people to hurt us. It's a shame that there's people out there who are malicious for fun, but they do exist. For that reason, we're pretty much bottling up the information here.
For other news ... we've had to boot occaisionally making various changes to the running systems. We apologize for any inconvenience, but this will certainly end at some point when we feel the network and all configurations are stable to better serve our goals. If you've ever viewed our past uptime record, you will see that we meet the 5 9's ... just that with the changes that have come about since our T1 install, we've also had to make some operational changes ... Everything will be ironed out soon.

Eureka! (No, not the vacuum or what I often hear from Italians) ... I made what I consider a breakthrough in provisioning web sites. Anyway, I'm impressed. This may come as a total shock to most of you, but a lot of hair has been removed from the ol' noggin ... Okay, that was all first person, now back to anonymity ... We did a lot of testing with the new switch installed and compared our response by pinging (using an outside source) all known web sites to be hosted on other servers and we average out quite well in our opinion (pat on back) ... This leads us to believe there is optimism in growth potential. We need to continue to monitor this on an ongoing basis. This was also an education. A lot of popular hosts have erradic ping times whereas some, including us, were right on the money each ping. You're free to do your own testing and share those results.

PROBLEM: Now as this is typed, on the phone with the upstream due to the line now crawling. They say it's our internal hub. We went and purchased a new switch, not a hub, and replaced the hub with this new switch at approximately 7pm. Is it better now? Does anyone read this? If you do, please report problems as they occur. The expense here is great, and we don't want anything less than what we're paying for.

Testing, reconfiguring, more testing ... can't tell you all the things we've been doing. We've run a CounterStrike game server with 10 Counter Terrorists fighting 10 Terrorists. We've run Half Life deathmatch. both have performed extremely well not even maxing out our line. The first couple days with the line we experienced some bouncing and some outages. After those first couple days everything seemed to straighten out.

After trying different scenarios on how to set up the line and connection we've finally narrowed it down to how it needs to be implemented for the way we want to use it. If that's vague, it's because it has to be. Now as I type this, the spankin' new T1 line is DOWN! Sheesh ... Went down about 3:45pm. Trouble ticket placed. Now we sit . . . . . and . . . . . wait . . . Back up ... 5:15pm. It's a long story, but it shouldn't go down again.

DSL went down 3/6 ... T1 installed 3/20 ... active 3/21 around 1pm. We're back!

Installed a new service that required a re-boot of the server. Apologies to anyone logged in here approximately 9pm. We went to the Microsoft seminar today. More on that later. Shortly there after, upgraded IE and that required a re-boot as well.

Set up form for web based adding to Wombat's Web Elist. T1 installation postponed until March 7, 2001. What, scared of a little snow?

Installed the evaluation version of Imail 6.x today. After using the product and reading all the reviews, this is probably a definite migration which will lead to the registered version.

Our SDSL connection dropouts have progressed to longer downtimes. Where it used to be for a minute to a minute and a half, it's now lasting longer. Sometimes even a sporadic 20 minutes. So, it's definitely getting worse. Imagine our relief when the Delivery Committment was received today. T1 is scheduled for install 02/22, and our network connection should be completed within 5 days following. Of course we're gonna have to lay out the big bucks after that, so start contacting us about hosting your sites here (when it becomes ICUHost.Net). Thanks!

Registered gfabonline.com. Saved $40 using directNIC instead of NetSol.

That semi-gray background color wasn't doing it anymore, so changed back to strictly black. Finished main page layout so now there is room for something else on the main page. In other news, the directNIC dnAPI seems to be working now that we got Perl set up properly. Soon you will be able to register domain names directly from our servers. Also, we were invited to the Microsoft TechNet when they're coming to town, so we're looking forward to completing that workshop. We're looking forward to satisfying all the requests that have been coming in for a place on our new network. Still waiting, but until then we still have to deal with the SDSL connection and the 3rd party servers. Oh, and we got Mead Bold back! Cisco router arrived today.

Finally got around to the bios on The Turnstyles page. ASP of course.

Successfully installed Perl 5.6 and PHP4 on the production server.

Minor tweaking here and there on the main page and tried to consolidate to make room for some other things. Been working on other sites as well. Also, have to start planning for ICUHost ... Oh, and while in making changes to the main page, made it dynamically update this News file's date, so no worrying about updating that anymore ...

Re-did the look of the main page. Will consolidate more, but this initial change was a headache.

Registered hugheslightingsolutions.com. Saved $40 using directNIC instead of NetSol. Installed Perl 5.6 on test machine and all seems to be working well. Still can't get extensions to activate in PHP. Also, set the server to run the Active Directory in Native mode. Ever moving forward, optimistic. Received Web Hosting Package from Microsoft today. That was quick!

2PM: Apparently, there was an outage of service. We don't know when it started, but it seemed to resolve itself without a support call at 1:30PM today. With the ongoing crisis of DSL service, we have no idea if this was part of that dilemma or what? In the coming days, we'll find out, but if there's another outage we'll make the call. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this was beyond our control. Another point in the T1 column. By the way, if it's not clear already, this connection currently is via Northpoint DSL. Northpoint is currently in Chapter 11. They don't have to pay past bills, but if they don't pay Verizon the current bill, we will be shut off regardless. This is what went through our minds earlier today... We don't know when the end may come.

6AM: We have come to know the sheer horror that people actually read this stuff! Some good news from Microsoft that we received 01/30/2001 but we neglected to mention ... Here is a quote from the email:
Congratulations! Your application for membership in the Windows Web Hoster Program has been approved! Your company's Welcome Kit will be sent to your company's mailing address as listed on your application form (please allow 2-3 weeks for delivery).
Isn't this great news?! So the T1 and the new hosting methods should all fall into place in about the same time frame. We are simply pleased.

Server down approximately 8AM to do a database install.

Setup pranksterband.com.

Registered pranksterband.com. Saved $40 using directNIC instead of NetSol.

Ordered T1 line. Should be installed in 30 to 45 days.

Did some testing with icuhost.net ... our internal DNS sends us to our server. The outside world is still redirected to icuhost.com.

Booted server in the wee hours after applying service pack and ... it's somebody's birthday! Happy Birthday to me!

Registered icuhost.net in preparation for some plans that may or may not come to fruition. Well, actually, these plans will go through, just the rate of accomplishment is in question. Right now, this is redirected to icuhost.com. We saved $40 using directNIC.

Added "Flash Stuff" link to main page. Links to a summary of Flash intros I've created as well as some neat Flash files. Check it out.

A ton of things have happened I suppose, but of the major has been a replacement of the hard drives in two of our systems. The 6G in the Web Server started reporting failures, and we could hear it failing more often than was being reported. That definitely needed replacing, but New Year's Day we came into our computer room and heard the slave drive on Igor crying. Sounded like the bearings needed oil, and that drive wasn't that old at all. We replaced both drives with Western Digital 40G drives. (We missed the Maxtor sale at CompUSA 'While supplies last') ... It must have taken about 14 hours to replace the drive in the web server! We set up Ivan to tell the world what we were doing by changing its IP address to the server's that would be down. This comes with the lack of experience required to install a new boot drive in the server environment. For the most part, we tried booting with the new drive installed as a slave. Then using the XCOPY command to copy everything from the boot drive to the new drive. As the copy was taking place from the system drive, we saw some "sharing violations" go by, so we knew that wouldn't do. We tried several different methods to get past this, but they didn't work. Then we tried a re-install of Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server and it was going to write over everything that was on the drive, so we bagged that. Then, a brainstorm. We bought 2 new drives, and the one was just sitting there, so we brought Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional up on the new drive. Then installed the two drives, the failing boot drive and what was to be the new boot drive. Then did the XCOPY without any sharing violations. That brought us the closest! The server still would not boot due to some Active Directory stuff, so .. what we finally ended up doing. Booted off the failing HD with the new drive as slave. Ran NTBACKUP to backup the boot drive to the extended partition on the new drive. Took out the failing boot drive and put in the 40G as Master. Installed a vanilla Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with no extra software installed. Once that booted good, we restored the backup from the extended partition. That put us back in business ... Then email would not flow. The registry settings for email were not restored for whatever reasons. We think it's because they're not used anymore by W2K, but what's odd is that the parameters were there, just empty.
For Igor, replacement was much simpler due to the fact that it wasn't the boot drive. We just copied everything from that drive to a directory on the new drive in the server. Installed the new 40G (that had a nicely working Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional operating system on it) and copied the files back. Thank goodness both of these drives were not caput! Keeping this in mind, we're looking into some sort of RAID system for our small SDSL network here. So we don't have to go through this again! *whew!* Not to worry, all Hosted sites via ICUHost are all RAID protected.

Some of the news that used to be reported here are now being reported on those individual sites. If you visit those sites and read the news then you will be informed there. If you read the news here and didn't care about the other sites, now you will no longer have to read about external sites! Regardless, we made this change to better server all those involved. With the holidays and various other events around this time, there has been no news, but that's not to say that there hasn't been any activity. If anything is remembered that is worth mentioning, we will update the news. Happy New Year! We did make another Flash Movie. It is in the beta stage, but you can view it here!

Registered IMeanHey.Com. Saved $40 using directNIC.

Changed the entire site so that Terry and others who are resolutionally challenged can view the site without moving side to side. Updated Bernie's schedule, and of course, uploaded last night's pics ...

Finished my first full length feature Flash film! It's pretty cool I think ... Check out the Weekend at Bernie's link on the site here. There's a link to it there ... I received a message from directNIC. where I'll be able to register domain names directly from my web sites. Can't wait to dive into that! But, was busy with the Flash film and nothing else seemed to matter. :-)

Downloaded Flash 5 Trial Version.

Worked on Ed's Music by adding Online Store database. Worked on Ma Barker by adding 3 databases; Guest Book, Hit List and Schedule so they can edit as they like.

Reset Wombat's Web tracker, links coming up too slow. Fixed Guest Book section of ICU Host. My son pointed out that once you delved into that area, all links got messed up and you could no longer navigate.

Worked on ICU Host All information is current and up to date. Added the Site Manager for customers to gain access to their Domain Manager directly from the hosting site.
Worked on Ed's Music

Made a lot of changes to Weekend at Bernie's section. Added counter, number of photos, logo, schedule and some links.

New hosting servers acquired. All information will be posted on ICU Host in the coming days.

Overhauled Out On the Town's web site, but the simple ASP counter cannot write to the specified directory. Checked, all writeable, or should be writeable directories aren't working. Called support. Went back to FastCounter until this is finished. Check out the new OOT site!

Updated GSS TOURS web site (basically began setup of the web based portion) ... Added a guestbook, a news item page with the admin to go along with it using simple security.

Here's one for you; Got a call from the owner of the Out On the Town site and he tells me his site has been hacked by HardWoodFloors.Com! I type in ootweb.com and sure enough, up comes a hard wood floors site. I got to the site via FTP and all the files are there as they should be, so, I type in the IP address of the site, and I still get HardWoodFloors.Com. I call support and explain the situation ... After they see the same results as I did, they tell me that they'll talk to an NT Admin and get it fixed as soon as possible. I'd say in a bout 10 minutes checking the site, Out On the Town was back up. Do you see why we're switching?

Made the call and ordered new hosting for ALL sites.

Got a call from the webmaster of the Wyld Studios web site. He called to tell me that the Out On the Town website had been hacked. It was coming up with something similiar to "Hello, my name is NT32" and some other silly stuff. Well, I had seen this before with another site hosted on our external servers. I thought it was the customer attempting their own design. This time, I called the support number immediately and reported this problem. They said they'd fix it. I asked how this happened, and they responded with "I don't know." Well, can you say 'straw that broke the camel's back'? The support guy said that this usually happens after making a change to the site. Well, I did make a change to the site ... the day before and it was simply to put up the new cover and update the issue dates. My changes were viewed on the web immediately to verify them. This problem happened within 12 and 24 hours later.

Set up Ed's Music Store site.

Took pictures for Ed's Music Store.

Set up Weekend at Bernie's link on main page. All pictures from the Weekend at Bernie's show taken that night will be posted here. If your pic doesn't make the Bernie's site, it will be here.

Went to Russ Whitney's Internet seminar. Don't waste your time or money ... Everything we're already doing was covered, they just wanted you to do it through them with a $1600 sign-up for a 3 day class, and then $29.95 a month after that to host your web site. We offer complete hosting for $20.00 a month. This is all covered on the ICUHost Site. They also want you to register through Network Solutions ... We use direct NIC and save you a ton of cash. At least a $40.00 savings per domain name!

Registered the-turnstyles.com via direct NIC and set them up with a hosting account. Saved $40 using directNIC.Uploaded their current site to the new site. Will begin working on a new layout for them ...

Rearranged layout yet again. This is to allow banner ads to show up on just about every page. Don't click on them unless you're interested. In other words, it's our way of saying that there's no pressure like you might get on other sites that threaten their non-existence unless you click on at least one ad. The ads are provided for your interest, and if you do click on them, their intended goal may be reached. You know what that is? 'course you do ... To re-invent us as millionaires while we sleep or sit on our behinds surfing the web! Isn't that what it's all about anyway? The ads remain on the main pages, but cycle in the framed Classifieds section. If you want another ad, just hit reload, and another ad will be selected for display. Wrote all this in ASP to track number of displays and click-thrus. The only problem with this is that it didn't leave much room for a Wombat's Web logo in the header. Hopefully this is just a vanity thing. Let us know ... Added banner ads to Guestbook and Links pages.

Changed colors on the main page again and throughout the site. Changed font, but always came back to Arial. Many updates to Out On the Town's website in the past few days. Will be working on a new layout for better organization and more the look of professionalism. Also, Ed's Music Store work needs to begin as soon as possible. As far as hosting ... still problems, and I really don't think it's related to ASP at all. Still connectivity problems, and traces still work properly. I got NeoTrace for testing connectivity, and trace always completes. Still obvious that it is hosting servers that have the problems, and no response from hosting contact. What to do?

Downloaded and tested the new Netscape 6. They said it's a complete re-write from the bottom up to their software. Well, they put the mistakes in the same places cause it crashes just where the old one does. One thing though, they finally implemented style sheets so that any IE site will come up okay that uses the hover option. That seems to be about it, besides the fact that the browser runs way slower than the old one. JavaScript rollovers are horrendous in this browser.

Registered psychosweb.com Saved $40 using directNIC.

A breakthrough? Today, I clicked on my ICUHost link on my Wombat's Web Main page. The browser sat and sat and gave no response but the world kept turning. I look at my Web Checker running on the other computer on my desk. ICUHost last checked OK. So I immediately call the support number (I'm being dramatic since I've been having this problem forever). I amazingly get someone on the support number immediately. I talk fast, and I name drop his boss (it could have been him for all I know). Of course he immediately blames my connection or ISP and I'm prepared with all the trace information from the past months and my Web Checker has been running dutifully 24/7. So he says let me run some tests .. and I interrupt ... Don't you have a browser? (thinking he could just type the domain name in and see the failure) ... and he obviously thinks I'm annoying and says that a browser is one of the tools he will be using. He comes back and verifies that the site is not responding for him either. The strange thing is, that out of all the sites on this particular server only the 3 I have on this server are down. Do I use ASP? Why yes, why else would I be hosting on Microsoft Windows NT Servers? Hey, guess what? ASP went down on the server. I'm informed that he'll go upstairs and reboot it ... While typing in this news, Web Checker reports OK for the 3 sites that were previously down. To be honest, I can't believe that out of how ever many sites on this server that I'm the only customer utilizing ASP on their main page. In fact, I think that several other sites that have reported outages don't use ASP on their main page. For right now, this could be a temporary answer, but the more I thought about it after hanging up the support line connection, there must be something else to this, the ASP server may only be one answer. Will keep you posted.

Added Ed's Music Store to hosting. The domain was registered by Ed through the link on the main page here on Wombat's Web for direct NIC. He saved $40 using directNIC.

Changed the site's text colors and added the direct NIC search and link to the main page.

Server Recycled. Seems to have been early evening DNS problems noticed when mail flow was stopped. I don't know, so I recycled ... It fixed it.

Early AM Server Cycled. My brother Bill died 3 years ago tonight. He would have been so into everything I'm doing here.

Investigation begun to track intermittent downtime of hosted sites. If you experience any downtime, if you could run a trace route and email it to us, this will certainly help. Any questions about this, please contact us. So far, I only know of a handful of reports about the downtime, and even one was requested. I have noticed non-responsiveness from the sites at times. If you do experience this, or have in the past, please report this to us. Thank you.

Today would have been my brother Bill's 43rd birthday. Wombat ...

This item is not necessarily news, but more of a thought. It seems to us that this news not only shows the chronological development of this and other related sites, it also serves to tell you where time was spent on certain days. It shows where our effort may have been on a particular day when you may have been expecting something of us for your site, business or whatever. We would just like to justify that anything we do on our sites serves to accomplish many tasks all at the same time, but for the most part the learning that goes into each new endeavor. It is because of this desire to make changes or add new things that makes us better at what we do, and in turn you benefit from it. Please keep that in mind when expecting something of us. We didn't get to this point by doing nothing, and no one held our hand or just simply handed this knowledge over to us. We have spent countless hours reading, testing and learning all the different methods for web development and the many Windows Operating Systems. This delves further into hardware as well to support the many different areas where we now have come to specialize in. We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Trouble ticket with NorthPoint closed about the degradation of bandwidth. It is believed that the problem has been fixed with a new DSLAM. So, we left the ticket to be closed, but we always have the option of opening a new one.

Before heading down to Tom n Jerry's, pretty much finished the new YUMM! eMailing List. Now there's a method to serve eMails via the web rather than a stock freebie such as ListBot or OneList. The Wombat strikes again ...

Added click counting of banner ads using a new method. Will try this for a while, but wish to implement impression counts. Most packages utilize random banner display while we would like to keep the weighted impressions active. We're going to have to write our own it seems. After this is put in place then we will utilize email to send results to advertisers.

Created ad gif images for icuhost.com.

Added Guest Book to icuhost.com.

Massive work on icuhost.com.

Added DebiJaye.Com to hosting, did not use Network Solutions. Saved $40 using directNIC.

Added 3 sites to hosting, did not use Network Solutions. Saved $120 using directNIC. OOTPipeline.Com, CintioliMusic.Com and ICUHost.Com. Info to follow when they're active on the web.

Network Solutions declined us. Here is and excerpt of their message:
"Thank you for your interest in Network Solutions' Business Account Program. Unfortunately, we are unable to approve your participation in the program at this time. The Network Solutions' Business Account Program was designed for Internet Service companies that expect to regularly register a higher volume of domain names than the number you noted on your application."
We specified '0' as the number of expected registrations per month because we have no idea how many we'll have at any given time. We don't know if they humanly responded to the message, or some program did. It's quite odd that they didn't persue an answer or explanation. What we've decided to do is use directNIC for all of our domain registering needs. Along with saving more than half on each domain registration, we no longer support Network Solutions at all. We think they're a little greedy? :-) We didn't even want the percentage that they'd give for registering through them. We simply wanted the ease of registering a domain name for our clients. Now we offer domain names for $15 per year via directNIC instead of Network Solutions' $35 per year.

Out On the Town change confirmed. New servers are being accessed. WHOIS databse does not yet reflect this change. This means we have to fit the entire revamp of the site in with everything else we're doing. We can't wait until we can get the GSS TOURS network up and active on the Internet. That is consuming almost every available moment.

Connection seemed slow last two days, both directions. Thought it may have been due to the heat wave of the last two days. Confirmed with other people by the simple 'Hey, check out my site' ... Half Life Server also was more laggy for the players. Connection seems back to normal now. Note that our hosted sites do not reside on our little 'experimental' server here. We're thinking that it may be a good idea to separate the hosting portion of this site to give a true impression of the speed of the hosting servers. In doing so, we would put most of the site on the T1/T3 connections that we use for hosting. That would make better sense, wouldn't it? We also applied today as a Network Solutions Business Affiliate. If accepted, we can take domain registrations via the web and have access to their WHOIS database directly. This would be a great addition to our site, but we don't know if our volume will impress them.

Hosting set up for Out On the Town. Domain transfer to use Wombat's Web hosting submitted as well. Entire site mirrored on new host to make a seamless change. This change from the Unix host to the NT host will allow the site to be self sufficient and a lot of enhancements are planned for the site. Added mark to navigation frame to see when the DNS points to the new server.

Ma Barker stopped by (taking a break from crime I guess?) to settle up a little on the hosting and design and also with changes to Out On the Town and site. They expressed the same thing I noticed on 5/01 that the site is sometimes unavailable to the web. Still not sure if this maintenance is due to this particular problem. Will have to get an answer to this. The site is hosted on a different IP block than the others, so it could very well be that this is a new server that may have been brought up a little premature.

Well, all the updating that was done on 4/28/2000 did not stop the error from occurring once again. This time I was determined to find its cause. It turns out that it was done on purpose! ...and to think, I assumed that everyone would play nice on a free classifieds server? The thought baffles me ... Anyway, the culprit was tracked down (WE LOG EVERYTHING, right Kevin?) and their ISP has been notified. So this time, I handled the error from the back end, so now it will not effect the display of all ads at one pop. Happy buying & selling!

In the wee hours of the morning, I did my normal surfing around all the sites that I either host or design, and some of the hosted sites did not respond! Noone had called me to report this, so I picked up the phone immediately (about 3:30am) and quickly got an answer as to what was going on. I was told that it was "server maintenance" and that the site could be down for a minute, 5 minutes or even up to 3 hours. This is routine, happens every once in a while, and they normally try to do it in off peak hours... I guess this is the 0.01% of the guaranteed 99.9% 24/7 uptime?

Changed Classifieds to do massive checking on placing an ad and enter data in all the fields if left blank or possibly invalid. There have been some errors recently of incomplete entries or something that haven't been reported and it wasn't possible to tell exactly where these errors may or may not have occurred. It is hoped that these changes will avoid future errors.

Uploaded Monkey Bus site to new MilleniaNet host and added Real Audio Streaming of their two songs from the Summer of '99 CD.

Host: Setup Ma Barker web site

Every time Todd comes into the room with the computers, one of them acts funny. Installed Half Life on the server to enable game play on several machines in the same room, and the server needed to be booted. This was approximately 1:30am if you were one of the people trying to get through at that time. The server wouldn't boot while Todd stood near it.

Set up another machine on the network to serve as a Half Life Server. The Half Life Server doesn't run on the same machine as the web and mail services, but I can imagine the bandwidth is all screwed up when that machine is active. I've not been able to test this since W2K disabled the use of my modems.

GSS TOURS server setup

Dentist appointment ... GSS TOURS server setup

GSS TOURS server setup

Host: Setup Rainbow Lighting web site

Established hosting capabilities on NT servers that have redundant connections to the backbone, diesel UPS, tape backup ... all that fun stuff. It is clear that no sites should be hosted on our server. It's simply not practical given the volatility of the DSL connection.

Connection back up at 2:08pm. NorthPoint problem. Maybe this is the reason VoiceNet dumped NorthPoint back in November? Reports from various vendors don't give NorthPoint's Customer Service very high marks, and that's putting it nicely. Okay, so I'm a little disappointed my connection was down for at least 13.5 hours.

Went down sometime after the Oscars started. Placed call to FastNet at 1am. They cannot get to the NorthPoint site. Assumed to be a NorthPoint problem. This file updated 3:25am. So much for DSL, huh? Going to bed ...

Disabled reverse DNS lookup within the trackers because IPs with no resolution would give an error and not forward the visitor to the site. Until a replacement can be found, no more reverse lookups.

Announcement message sent to everyone in my Eudora Address Book. Included in my address book was the entry for the IMS Elist. ISPs and people from around the world all got a copy of this message, and in minutes I was labeled a spammer! I sent out individual apologies to each person that sent me their piece of mind, and also sent an apology within the IMS Elist. Some people really take their spam seriously, and just think that I basically "spammed" an Elist that is design to prevent just that sort of thing! Shows to go you, you really have to pay particular attention in everything you do.

Finished header/footer updates. Fixed some classifieds bugs. Changed linktous page. All pages basically uniform. Fixed IMS email problem, thanks to the IMS elist! W2KS left some registry entries blank. Scary editing the registry! So, indirectly a DNS problem, but ultimately a W2KS problem. If you're running IMS, these fixes are posted on the support site.

Changed look of site a little. Added headers and footer so future updates will be much simpler.

All kinds of things have happened and I'll try to update this file as I remember. The entire network here has been upgraded to 2000 and the mail system has decided not to send mail. It appears to be a DNS problem.

Added links to this site via all other pages we manage via animated GIF file promoting the classifieds

This news section created and racking my brain to remember where and when we did what ...

HTML and ASP pages created for AspEmail
Guest book paging implemented

AspEmail implemented for YUMM! and Feedback

Played with virtual sites and high order domain aliasing. Got it to work, but outside people could not access the site using the IP number anymore so I had to disable it. Need to get wombatsweb.com in the DNS of the world.

DNS configuration put in place, DNS server IP put in all machines to use local DNS

Gave up on Bell. NorthPoint worked around Bell's installation and made the SDSL connection to the Internet

Book purchasing trip to Barnes & Noble. After researching all the titles that I was interested in at Amazon.Com, I wrote down all the ISBN numbers and bought them at Barnes & Noble. Applied for a credit card immediately when hit with the bill at Barnes & Noble in person. Amazon was on average $10 cheaper per book. I've never believed in credit cards, but in today's world, it seems to save money, you need to buy online.

Go to Amazon Now!

Purchased Microsoft Office 2000 Professional and a Que book covering a little bit about each component. Microsoft seems to think that their high priced software does not require any documentation. They should save the money on the pretty packages and just sell the CDs.

Spoke to someone else from Fast.Net. The first guy never got back to me. Paperwork faxed to me the next day.

Spoke to Fast.Net. My father told me of their DSL advertisements on KYW News Radio

Called VoiceNet to arrange DSL installation ... Oops! DSL is no longer available in my area. VoiceNet terminated agreements with a "certain" DSL provider. Sorry.

Purchased Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 and LinkSys 10/100 network starter kit. Very disappointed with Microsoft documentation!