If you live in an area long enough you just get to know what’s best around you. You’ve got your favorite pizza parlor, burger joint, Mexican restaurant, movie theatre, and if you don’t know anything else you know the best amusement park! If you’re in new Jersey the best Amusement Park around is going to have to be Morey’s Piers hands down! Whether you’re just visiting New Jersey, or live their the place for an exciting weekend will always be Morey’s.

Oh wow, I’m so freakin excited!  I’ve been up all night working on ApplyMyWay.com and it’s looking good!  Yeah I know, here I am like a year later FINALLY putting the site up, but that’s okay.  Things are coming along smoothly, and if everything continues looking how it does… we’re talking 2-3 weeks before everyone can make their own applications and host them for free!  Be it you own a business and need to hire some new employees that you’d like to screen with an application first, or you want to get into the dating scene and found some people online that maybe you’re less likely to ask some questions directly too but need to know some things.  The application process features unlimited questions, unlimited choices for answers (along with essay style, short answer, check all that apply, and multiple choice).  You’ll also get your own profile where you can display what applications you’ve created, which you’ve taken, a picture of yourself, and a short bio.

The site is basically just awesome… I can’t wait to get it up and rolling!  It honestly shouldn’t be too long before it’s ready… just needs to go up!  When I get it up though, I highly expect lots of peoples help in promoting, testing, and just generally using the site.  Have fun, and get those signed up for your ninja forces.

You guys know that with my now 18 sites that I run (and growing at least on a monthly basis if not daily) it’s important that I have über reliable service when it comes to web hosting! Especially with recently moving to a new dual core 2.2ghz, 2 gigs RAM, 250GB raid 1 hdd I’ve spent a LOT and I mean a lot of time on web hosting review sites, and on hosting forums. Yeah, it’s important to get a good price, but that’s the least of my concerns if I can’t get reliable service, well reliable and powerful service. This silly blog gets nearly 600 people a day to it so it’s necessary that I get as much bandwidth as possible, since this site is just a personal blog, and my other sites have a much higher audience as they’re my money making sites!

“I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5

That’s not the whole verse, but that is what I’ve been reminded of throughout this week.  Actually, the entire verse is much more ironic and appropriate for my situation.  I know the original short verse ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.” comes from Deuteronomy but the verse from Hebrews is much more appropriate as when Jesus is quoting that verse he is speaking of marriage… something that for myself I’ve considered to be at least a year or more out before I had to worry about it.

I’ve been kind of silent on here, and there’s good reason for that.  The news I have to bear is something that I’d prefer to tell my friends and family in person, so if you’re close to me and not heard anything of my life recently, stop reading now!  haha, no but seriously this is the kind of thing best heard in person, so if you don’t know, just ask the next time you see me.

My Bible translates that passage as “I will never leave you, nor forget you.”  something that us humans have a hard time comprehending, because we forget about people all the time, and can’t be around everyone at every moment.  We’ve got plenty of examples in the Bible of God not forgetting His people… and yet we still doubt.  God has always been faithful, but we don’t quite comprehend that either.  I see a lot from people online, visiting the many social networking sites that I frequent there seems to be more debate about religion than ever… one question that comes up often is “If God is this (fill in the blank loving, compassionate, just, etc.) why does he allow (fill in the blank death, disease, murder, etc.)” the general Christian response isn’t bad, most of the time going along the lines of “well God gives us the choice to either live in sin, or live in His Grace” not incorrect… but it also leaves out a key element.  We live in a world at war.

In Daniel there’s a story of how Daniel had a dream or something that he couldn’t quite interpret.  He started fasting and praying more intensely for the meaning… it didn’t come to him for 21 days.  On the 21st day an angel appears to him out of breath and barely able to speak the message he came to deliver.  The angel starts out by apologizing for taking so long, The Lord had sent him the first day of his fast, but he ran into a very powerful demon who delayed him.  The angel fought for days before going back to Heaven to get Michael to help him break through the lines.  We’re in a world at war… and the greatest trick of the enemy is to get us to believe that everything is how it should be.

Even in all of this The Lord will never leave us, nor forget us.  It’s a good thing too, you don’t realize how comforting those words are until you’re in a situation where you actually see the invisible war of this world.  Recently I’ve been in a position to more clearly see the danger of the world around me.  A little more than a week ago I got the news that Rose is pregnant… It’s not the worst of news, but certainly on the scary end of things.  Never-the-less God has managed to provide just as the time is right.  In fact, because of how God has been taking care of things I’m more excited about being a father than scared of how things could turn out with the situation.

haha, so I was at ZLB Plasma donation center earlier today.  Long story, but one day I was telling Rose about how I used to go all the time when I didn’t have a job (see that’s the problem with freelance work, some days you’ll have a job, others you simply won’t).  She’s just out of nursing school so of course wants to get into nursing, well in the mean time she’s been watching her bank account slowly dwindle down.  In an effort to help her keep afloat and paying for groceries we decided to go back to donating plasma… well back for me, it was her first time selling her body to the medical industry.  It’s kinda funny because in all the brochures and stuff they show these college age kids smiling, excited, dressed all pretty, totally more happy than they should be about being stuck with a very large needle and having their blood drained, plasma seperated, then the blood pumped back into your body.  First of all very few of the people in there are anything like that… I’m one of the few skinny college age kids that comes in.  Most of the people in there are… well less than savory people.  And you don’t get many skinny little guys like myself either.  Your first four visits you get $40 then after that you’re paid by your weight… me at 145lbs I only get $15 a visit, so it’s really not worth the trip after that… I’ll keep going as long as Rose wants to since it does mean twice a week when I see her my gas is paid for!

Back to the regulars at ZLB though.  There are more than a few that I know for sure are hobo’s, a few drug addicts (even though they generally keep them out because you’ve got to clear all sorts of qualification tests), and nobody is all prettied up when they go in.  You don’t just walk into a plasma donation clinic unless you’ve got some sort of need… and it really doesn’t help with the neighborhood it’s in, which is probably intentional.  It’s not actually in a really bad neighborhood, but not far from.  So of course you get a lot of the people from that neighborhood in there… because if you’ve got a good job and are paying the bills there’s no reason to come and spend 5 hours in the plasma donation clinic for $40 (at the most).

Well the people working there aren’t much better either.  Besides the fact that you’re being stuck with a 17 guage needle by someone who has absolutely no medical training (just on the job training of how to shove a needle in peoples arm), many of them are just as scary looking as the people in there.  Your fears are only amplified by the words that come out of their mouth.  When I was getting my “mini physical” to make sure I was healthy enough to donate plasma, first she’s almost surprised by the fact that I’ve got no tatoos or piercings, then you’ve got to go through a series of questions about if you’ve ever had sex with another man, or if you’ve had sex with a man who’s had sex with another man since 1977, or if you’ve ever taken drugs or money for sex… you know the standard questions then you take a short quiz on what activities could increase your risk for AIDS.  It’s pretty easy besides I’ve read the stuff a hundred times before but when I didn’t get any of the questions wrong she says to me “You remember real good.” I didn’t know how exactly I was supposed to respond to that… I mean seriously… I wasn’t sure if I should correct her on her grammar, go into my whole “Yeah I’ve got a great visual memory” speech, or what.  I chose the “Smile and nod” out but was sort of stunned that people actually use that kind of language in their every day speech.

I got an email earlier today… well it’s best to just show it to you, they’ve started getting really funny.

Hello!!!

My name is Alarice, I am tall, good looking, perfect body figure. I saw your mail and was delighted to contact you, I hope you will be the true honest and caring person that I have been looking 4, And I have something special to tell you about me, So please contact me directly through my email address at iamastupidspammer@yahoo.com so that I can also send my picture directly to you.

Regards
Alarice.

What they really were trying to say is:

yo

My name is joe spams a lot, I am short, fat, amazingly unattractive, with man boobs.  I bought your email address from someone who checks DNS records, and a variety of other sources that I’m too lazy to bother with myself, and was ecstatic to contact you because I feel you are just the gullible little sap to help me in spreading virus’ and malware around the interwebs.  Please contact me through iamafatbastard@yahoo.com so that I can send you the virus I created directly!

suckah!
Joe Spammer

You just can’t escape ‘em any more.  I changed the email address in both because I don’t want any silly people being added to the ultimate spam list online… I’m pretty used to it owning 17 websites the only way I could of escaped it was with private registration years ago… now it’s way too late and I really don’t care, every once in a while I actually am somewhat entertained by these spam emails.  I mean seriously… who’s going to believe an email like that?  Obviously someone did or it wouldn’t of been circulating so much.  I say the same thing about the “Want a penis so huge that no girl will ever want to have sex with you” emails as well… who responds to them?  Who buys the meds?  Are we really that sick and deprived of a world?  A lot of people complain about the spam messages, there’s really only one solution though QUIT F-ING BUYING THE PRODUCTS!!! If there was no money in it spammers wouldn’t send out their messages plain and simple.  Don’t click on the links, and don’t buy the products and the spam messages go away.  I also have my emails set up in such a way that my Paypal account is attached to an email that NO ONE will ever know… if I get an email via paypal to any other email address I know right away that it’s spam… if I do get a legit seeming email with fairly good cloaking on the URL and return email address all I do is go to paypal.com and see if anything is really up… NEVER click on links within emails unless you are positive that they are safe.

Also if you don’t have an anti-virus there is no reason for that since there are plenty of great free antivirus products out there!  I’ve used AVG’s free version for years… I’ve also paid for plenty of services both virus, spam, and malware protection.  AVG has a great root kit detector also free as well.

I’ve been noticing more and more how complex it really is to get the whole 64bit generation to launch. You’ve got programmers who code poorly and can’t compile in 64bit mode, or those that just don’t care to compile in 64bit mode because the market isn’t big enough… I really don’t see how it’s not a big enough market, I’ve got 4 gigs of RAM which is pretty much standard anymore, and yes 32bit systems can go up to 4 gigs. As I work I’ve been finding the limits of that 4 gigs more and more often. Here very soon I will be going to 8 gigs, and am glad that I’ve got a 4 gig flash drive for my ReadyBoost because I don’t know what I’d do without that extra swap space (even though I’ve got 4 gigs of swap space on my 10k HDD that get’s used too). In short I don’t know how so many people are still operating in a 32bit environment!

Then again, I do see why some people do it.  The only compatability issues as far as hardware goes that I’ve experienced with 64bit Windows Vista was with my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum which isn’t really a problem with 64bit at all, their Vista drivers just suck anyways… I’ve had to go back to “onboard” sound because of the random popping, cracking, and fuzz noises that would occur without warning, or reason in some programs (Mostly Counter-Strike: Source or any Source engine based game such as Half-Life, but once it started it’d occur in Windows Media Player, or even with flash players online).  But that doesn’t really have anything to do with what my current troubles with the 64bit world are.

Most of my compatibility issues are with software… even though Windows can and will run 32bit programs many of them simply refuse to be installed on a 64bit operating system.  The first time I ran into this was with PCTools Spyware Doctor, I cancelled my subscription after they charged me the recurring fee *mumblemumblemumble* even though I didn’t have the program installed at the time, and didn’t want to… but figured since I got it for another year I’d reinstall it.  Only problem was that they don’t have compatibility for people who actually use their computer, which I find funny because SpywareDoctor always slowed changing screen names or logging off to a deathly crawl even on a system with 2 gigs of RAM, dual core 2.6ghz processor, and 10k RPM HDD.  I’ve also found it really hard to get good pirating software to work on 64bit systems… most pirating software is old technology that was just coded right, no frills, nothing flashy or pretty… just good code.  And I love that, but some things are going to need to update with the new generation because a lot of the good old software pieces for pirating or reading pirated software won’t work on 64bit systems.

I discovered this when I was trying to download and install a pirated copy of DreamFall: The Longest Journey.  Before you go calling me a bad person and what not I actually bought the game the day it came out, and payed my $40 for it… problem was that half-way through the game crapped out on me.  There’s this one puzzle where you have to figure out how to get through this magical door, I did everything right and it should of worked but it simply didn’t.  I finally looked things up online with an online walk-through of the game, it said to do things exactly like I did… so I tried again to no avail.  After that I tried getting a support ticket from the game manufacturers, all I wanted was a fresh copy of the game… obviously they refused.  I kind of quit caring for a while, but now Rose was wanting to get into a little bit of gaming, and she said that she liked action/adventure more story type games, and anything involving vampires.  So I was looking through my games, knowing I have BloodRayne somewhere and Oblivion feeling they’d fulfill her desires in a game I saw my DreamFall box and figured she’d love it, like I did before it quit freakin’ working *mumblemumblemumble* so then came the problem of how to get the game working without rebuying it… BUT OF COURSE!  We go back to our old ways of pirating everything!  I’ve already got the legit CD’s and game so all I need is for it to install properly to be good.  Only thing is it’s been more than a little frusterating trying to get some of my old pirate software to work the way it should.  Oh well, it’s a challenge and I like challenges.

Eddie Izzard’s perspective on the computers and the end of the world as we know it

Eddie Izzard, need I really say more? Being in the tech field I’ve so been here before… especially since it’s 2am now and guess what I’m doing, sitting on the computer coding my new site ApplyMyWay.com

So I finally did it… 100% of all my sites are now on the new server I’ve got rented.  It only took me all night to do!  Things started out okay, I mostly just set up all my sites to download into named folders… not a big deal.  When you’re downloading 14 websites it takes a little bit of time though.  After the downloads were complete the DNS changes could begin… this is where it got interesting.  I’ve never really had any troubles with DNS changes before, they always give you the “This could take up to 12 hours” message… blah, blah, blah.  I’ve never had it take more than 20 minutes… until last night that is.  One by one some of the sites would pop onto the grid and I’d upload the files for it, create whatever databases needed to be made, and move onto the next.  This continued until about 5am when all of the remaining sites that hadn’t come into view for me decided not to (including this one).  Figured if after 5 hours they hadn’t shown up they weren’t going to I went to sleep.  At about 9am I woke up and CodySortore.com had finally become accessible.  Shortly after uploading the files for this site, and setting up the database ArchmailleDesigns.com became accessible.  I’m still waiting on three of my sites, but all of my important sites are up and running now so we’re happy with that!  I started getting tired again after having breakfast, and uploading the sites that I could so I went back to sleep.

I was rudely awoken by a dream… of course about my sites.  I was having a dream that I was checking HollysFund.com when all of a sudden after a page refresh the site was gone simply with the message “This site has been hacked by so and so h4xz0r group” I just remember my heart dropping as I didn’t make a backup of the site last night since I was working on essentially backing up and moving all my other sites.  Needless to say I got out of bed and checked the site immediately, and made a backup.

Among one of the sites I’m still waiting on to get all cleared in the DNS settings is applymyway.com which just so happens to be the one I’m going to begin work on.  I figure if I can kick out a site ASAP using CakePHP here within a month or two have a fully functional application building site, then I can launch it and start pulling in hopefully a decent revenew from it, and if not then at the very least start building a good sized mailing list.

Rose and I just spent the last 4 days together and one of the things that we did during that time was watch “The Princess Bride” as I’ve been told by a number of my friends that I need to watch it anyways.  In general it’s been an amazing week, to start off I’ve spent the last few weeks either coding or this week promoting HollysFund.com a site for my mom’s friend who’s been diagnosed with breast cancer, doesn’t have insurance, or vacation time so it’s an attempt at getting her some help.  It’s been pretty successful so far, which is always exciting.  The outpouring of love and compassion for her has been great.

Then the uh “weekend” came a bit early for me as on Thursday Rose and I started hanging out and stayed together until Sunday.  Even today we ended up hanging out again for a little get together with some of her friends.  It’s always been joked about between my friends that I can’t be around anyone for more than two days without going crazy, which in the past has always been true, humans just annoy me… all of ‘em.  No matter how intelligent or funny you are, chances are something about you will annoy me if we are around one another for very long.  But I can honestly say that after this weekend I’m more in love with Rose than ever… don’t get me wrong I’d like to be able to get more work done than I did, but at the end of the day I’d like the opportunity to have her in my arms.  I like how Rose put it, I think it was Sunday or maybe one of the other days we were together refering to one of her work week days she said that she wishes that she could come home to me… I do too, being around her relaxes me, we’re just comfortable together, and it’s amazing.  So yeah, even though I’ve still not even really said much on here about Rose, she’s my girl, and I’ll do whatever I must to keep her.

Speaking of not keeping up with things on here that’s actually partly due to Rose… but not entirely.  A few factors contribute to that 1) spending at least two nights a week with Rose, and usually more I’ve got to keep up on my work 2) been working more for MTV 3) been doing some actual coding work, and kicking out sites of my own… just finished up on the Holly’s Fund website, and have done what I know to promote it, the rest I’ll leave up to God for that.  Now that I’m done with that I’d like to move on to coding either AgapeBeacon.com or ApplyMyWay.com probably the latter as it’s a little easier, and also could grow quicker giving me a platform (and email mailing list) for launching Agape Beacon.  So it looks like that’s how things are going to go… however I really need to move all of my websites over to my new server (this ones not even been moved over yet).  I’ve got this killer server rented, and the only sites I’ve got on it are brand new not even coded sites so it’s really a waste of money.  I need to move all 17 (seems like that number grows every day) of my sites over to the new server, and slowly get to building sites and coding platforms to make them all unique, and hopefully profitable.  Since as of now I’ve only got three profitable websites because I’ve never established some of my others.  My goal is to have that change over the next year or so.