So last year I picked up a second domain for myself, www.coreytess.net, more of a personal fun site, pics and things from my RC racing and other stuff. When I got that hosting I did not put it on A Small Orange (now my old host). I had recently purchased an unlimited storage and bandwidth package from Dreamhost for my girlfriend’s site, www.lovejessicaalways.com. Because that is an unlimited host, and they are very easy to work with, I decided to move this site under that same hosting account. That changeover is complete, albeit with some site downtime because I did not do it in the right order. No biggie, the handful of folks that hit this site, probably never noticed. Regardless, now the site is at Dreamhost, under the same account as my other sites and domains. I did have some fun moving this Wordpress installation over because I did not know that Dreamhost has a utility that will connect to a cPanel driven host, log in, and basically import the entire site for you. That left me doing this all by hand. Not a big deal, and the database part was a little hairy because of the differences in the way A Small Orange manages the sites. Obviously I worked it out, and everything is good to go now. So hopefully now that everything is in one spot I can manage it all easier, and make updates here more often.

Speaking of updates, have shelved my education in Ruby on Rails for now. I have stepped back and decided to learn PHP so I can then move on to working with Drupal and Joomla, and hopefully making modules. Now you might say, “Why keep the www.coreyonrails.com name then?”, and to reply, I would simply say, “Because I paid for the domain.”. I have no reason to let the domain go, they’re cheap enuff to keep around in the event I want to use it. I do own several other domain names as well. People always think they have a domain someone might want to buy from them for millions later on, I am no different. I know it’ll never happen, but I liked the ones I bought, and maybe one day I’ll use them.

Well I am off for now, head on over to www.coreytess.net to check out some awesome photos from my RC racing, and whatever else I am up to.

So Windows 7 is out, and the copy of Home Premium, for my girlfriend’s netbook, showed up today. I was excited, hey I’m a geek, to get this setup, and was really curious to see how painful an upgrade from XP Home to Windows 7 Home Premium would be. I played nice and did the upgrade according to Microsoft’s steps, with only 1 minor change.

I started by downloading the Windows Easy Transfer utility. It was a quick download and install, and is pretty simple to use. It’s purpose is to make a backup, proprietary .MIG format, of your “important” data. By default this includes any user directories on the system, plus the shared folders. The netbook doesn’t have a whole lot going on, other than a small iTunes library so the scan portion of the utility was pretty quick. It found around 6.8 GB if data to backup, the afforementioned user directory was small, but the iTunes folder linked to from “My Music” was around 5GB alone. The interface lets you customize the backup, remove some folders add others, right down to files. The next step in the process is to tell the utility where you want to put the backup. I was provided 3 options, USB Easy Transfer Cable, Network Connection, External Drive or USB Drive. There is a 4th option to use a CD/DVD burner, which I believe was not shown as I did not have one attached. I don’t have an “Easy Transfer Cable”, I didn’t know such a thing existed honestly. My plan was to send the backup to my desktop across my home network. When I tried to that however I found the program did not allow anything other than an IP, and it did not like me trying to access the share for some reason. This could be my fault, my experience with networking between XP and Vista has been nothing short of a nightmare. With that option exhausted I decided to cheat. I mapped a network drive to the share, and put the backup there. It was no big deal, just a little odd that the “Network Location” option did not seem to like the share. Once I selected that, the program started doing it’s thing, and about 45 minutes later I had a 6 GB .MIG file on my computer. I would like to have seen some sort of compression on this, and maybe the program would run better if it made the backup, then transferred it to the storage location, but I am not Microsoft, I am sure they had they reason for doing it this way ;) With the backup safely on my desktop, I deviated from the Microsoft steps. I made my own backups as well. I copied basically the same thing the Transfer tool did, but as I have never used this tool, and know how backups can fail, I wanted to be sure I did not lose my girlfriend’s music. Girlfriend aggro is never a good thing, even more so when I ran an upgrade she never asked for :)

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I bit the bullet recently and paid to join a site with some premium themes. The site is Elegant Themes, and for $20 a year you get access to a lot of nice looking themes. They have their own options and most have multiple layout and color options. The themes are very nice looking and well put together, the designer/developer did a great job here, and at $20 for a year, access to all the themes you can want to choose from, and potentially more themes, it’s a great deal.

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