Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading and it’s been a great refresher, for both getting me thinking about random ideas and exploring some new areas. It has also certainly helped changed my perspective toward college, in regards to just wanting to learn for the sake of learning.
Knowledge and time are two things are finite. Everyone has the same amount of time in a day to learn and nearly everyone can learn the same basic knowledge now, thanks to the Internet. However, not everyone spends the same amount of effort learning. After overloading myself with some really good books, I just started to notice how much more insightful I was becoming and how useful those books were for shaping my ideas. I think reading is something that more people should practice on a daily basis. Becoming lazy and unmotivated is terrible in the long run and such a waste, when your time here is limited.
Something else that I began to notice while reading these good books was the simple joy that I was getting just from learning about a topic in an organized and thought-out manner. I think this is something key that I have begun to use at school, to appreciate things more. I’ve been taking a class recently that is a general computer class, covering almost every function of a computer and how it all works. I wasn’t exactly happy at first because I thought the class would be more focused on one area in specific, but afterwhile, I became quite satisfied with the depth of the knowledge and the manner in which it was presented. My teacher was quite good at what he does and the slides and book combined are great resources. After getting over my initial disappointment, I really just began to appreciate the class for the knowledge that I was learning. It’s great to be able to just appreciate knowledge for the sake of knowledge and get something out of that. This is definitely a lifelong philosophy that I will try to improve.
I sit here tonight with a glass of wine, watching a wonderful movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” It was released in 1980 but I’m still salvaging something of value from it.
It follows the story of a simple tribe of hunter gatherers in Africa, a group of people who take life for what it is, living in the harsh desert and enjoying life. There is no hate, no greed, no possession, just life and survival. It’s something that I wish I could enjoy. The movie then contrasts modern day life, with how modern man adapts his environment to suit him. Modern man must spend 18 years in school learning to adapt to his environment and as someone in school, learning to adapt currently, I found this quite amusing. Why do we spent almost a quarter of our lives to learning how to live, how to adapt, rather than just enjoying what we have. I’m torn sometimes between continuing my education and stable environment versus moving to Canada and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. I think it’s smart to always challenge what you hold dear and this was simple movie provides another interesting example of doing so.
As an addendum to Shared Hosting Sucks, I’d like to share what my research found and where my new future host will be:
Slicehost.com is a small hosting company located in St. Louis that fits my needs perfectly. $20 a month gets you 256mb ram, 10gb storage, and 100gb bandwidth! Once you pay, you have a choice of several different Linux distributions, of which I chose Debian. It builds the image for you and then within 15 minutes you have a fully functioning server with an IP address and full root access. They have an extremely slick Rails management backend featuring all the important stats about your server, an AJAX command prompt tied to the hardware, rebooting and shutdown buttons, and a great wiki/tutorial section to get you started on securing your server. it’s all very clean and exactly what I need.
One of the other awesome thing is the option to rebuild or switch your distro, not that you would probably use this frequently. Say you get tied of Debian and want to install Ubunto. 2 clicks and it will delete your current image and install Ubunto. So simple!
This really is a great solution for a good price. I can’t to switch, once my current shared hosting contract runs out…
I’m a bit wired on coffee right now, but this is a rant that has been building for awhile. Shared hosting sucks. After years of experience with many different providers and situations, I’m fed up with it. The idea is great, a shared utilization of resources because usually one person on a server is not going to use 100% of the resources, but how the situation is with most providers is terrible. Recently, I’ve been coming around more and more to the idea of a VPS, a shared server setup, but not sharing just one system.
To rant specifically, I’m tired of dealing with other people. Most shared hosts have CPanel or some other web-based GUI management system that is usually not efficient enough for me. I am definitely an advanced or expert user. I need SSH and direct access on a server. When CPanel can’t solve things for me, I have to ask for someone else’s help to fix things, which can take hours or might not even resolve the situation. Relying on other people un-efficient, especially when I have no clue about how competent these people are. I prefer to learn and solve things myself.
With the big interest in VMWare recently and VPS software in general, more companies are offering VPS solutions at reasonable cost. The general limiting factor is RAM, due to the physical capacity of most 32-bit servers at 4GB, so you might only get a VPS with 128mb RAM. I find this actually more than reasonable for most website solutions running Apache and MySQL. If you need better performance, run a low memory webserver like nginx or lighttpd. It’s just so much easier to fix something that is broken yourself. From now on, VPS will be my first choice for running a webserver and I hope you do the same.
