Smaller croud today (less than 30 cars), but it rain heavily last night, so many people probably did not go out due to it, the weather is a little dim, but no rain (so far)

I sold my 8T a month or so back, I really miss racing now

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One of the is the ability to blog to wordpress from the iPhone .. This is a test using that app

I am also finding I can now type really fast with the iPhone keyboard, guess it’s just a matter of one getting used to it

Also testing the ability to add a photo

Well .. Here goes nothing.. I will try publishing it now, if you can read it.. It worked

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I cant fault the company, they have came a long way and still they have much more to go, but unfortunately it was just not working for both the company and myself, so as of last Thursday (3rd) I no longer work there (well, I am on 30 days notice).

There are several factors of why, one of them being that I was one of the few (if not the only) remote employee, in many ways I felt detached, mostly because the company is not structured to deal with remote single employees … everybody works on a Parallels office, not at home, second, coming from 8+ years of owner, co-owner & shareholder of the companies I worked for, to be relegated to a lower echelon was just not for me, I am only happy at the top, or close to the top .. if I am not part of the decision making process, I am not really happy.

Also my way of working did not help, being used to not report to anybody, I keep all my activities within the confinement of my laptop, I was not used to have to use a CRM such as Salesforce, that was a pain, and i did not adapt well to that structure, but then again, if I where working at the sales office in US or UK, then the need for such a tool is not as relevant.

So, now I am out, if this experience taught me something is that I do prefer to work on a smaller company, where the decision making is more personal and the trill of growth is very much alive ..

In the next few days and weeks I will be sending my resumé to a few prospects, time to move on.

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I am replacing the chassis with a ZERO Berg chassis and the shocks with probably the Losi shocks (the default ones are too big for the Zero chassis) .. but as default .. it looks great, part of me wonders if I need to change it at all

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About a month ago I actually bought an Axial AX10 and a Goat Brushless System, but before I had a chance to even open the box, I changed my mind when I saw the Enroute Berg 2.2

So I placed an order for on from Japan, the idea is, if it’s good, I might start importing them in and sell @ RC NUT

Anyway, the Berg arrived today, and after a stung of £80 by customs, I got to admire how beautiful and well machined it is .. for about 30 minutes .. I then had to re-package it and send it to a buggy of mine for some milling (doing some alterations to it to make it even better at competition level)

So I was left with no Berg once again, except for the wheels .. I decided (after some forum digging and advise) to go with some M3 Badlands, after mounting one, I cant believe how great they look .. it’s Bling, Bling to the max, but well worthy it.

Now I cant wait for the Berg to come back so I can finish the build

I also got 2 Spark 1000 Brushless Motors and 2 ESC’s .. I will be setting those with the Nomadio sometime this weekend.

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I’m quite pleased, even so the server is in Ireland, ping times are in the low 30ms regions, here are a PING test from my location

64 bytes from 82.195.xxx: icmp_seq=7 ttl=56 time=33.289 ms
64 bytes from 82.195.xxx: icmp_seq=8 ttl=56 time=34.724 ms
64 bytes from 82.195.xxx: icmp_seq=9 ttl=56 time=33.542 ms

Now here is my ping test to a site in a Manchester datacenter (30 miles away from me)

64 bytes from 85.159.xxx: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=29.258 ms
64 bytes from 85.159.xxx: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=28.759 ms
64 bytes from 85.159.xxx: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=27.768 ms

So, thanks for 365’s superb peering, it’s only 4-6ms more .. amazing ..

I have been doing some testing to the server for a few days now, nothing had broken and lagged down, so far, it’s all gree, I am hoping to start moving my Live sites to it this weekend, here are some specs:

Processor #1 Vendor: GenuineIntel

Processor #1 Name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5140 @ 2.33GHz

Processor #1 speed: 2332.701 MHz

Processor #1 cache size: 4096 KB

Memory: 1031608k/1048576k available (2081k kernel code, 16072k reserved, 868k data, 220k init, 131008k highmem)

And the best !!

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 7.7G

fas940head4:/vol/nas0/rcnlnas0 10GB

The first Volume suppose to be 10GB, but not a problem at the moment, can easily be changed later on when I need it, thats of course the root drive in the HP EVA system, the second is a backup drive NFS volume, with it’s own network interface … cant beat that

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A few weeks back I finalized the deal with the landlord for a new area for RC NUT

Basically it will allow the shop to be almost 5x as big, loads moire space with direct access from the car park (currently access is thru the inside corridor only) .. plus it will be big enough to have a nice Lounge Area, with TV / XBOX and Simulators .. good for chill-out .. people on the RC works do love to come to the shop and just chill .. this gives them an area to relax.

We will also have a proper office area and storage / packaging, on the other side of the shop we will have a proper workbench, with tools and chargers, to properly work on customer’s cars .. no more plunking it on top of the display counter

On the center of the shop will be the massive (when I say massive I mean probably 50+ feet) display and sales counter, these will be glass showing the models inside, in the back of it we will have the hopups and expensive small stuff, in the front .. the area where the customer is, we will have massive amounts of space for models, and large items.

Unfortunately this all costs loads of ££ .. so the plan with the landlord is for us to have it done by Christmas time .. we will do it in stages and then move when it’s done, this gives us loads of time to do it right (plus pay it as we do it) .. it will be great once it’s done .. the shop will be massive.

We are taking basically almost an entire side of the building, we will have our own car park and green area, on the green area in front of the shop I’m even contemplating building a small 1/18th Astro track (for electric) .. just for ambience and a bit of fun.

The only problem with all this is .. as those who have visited us recently have seen .. we are getting FULL, the shop is packed with stock .. I could use to have this done for next week .. but hey, one needs to be smart and not go crazy and get into debt, so I rather do it slower and pay it on the spot as we go.

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30 minutes later and no show, I started to get annoyed, told support to get a grip on things and since it was very late, I went to bed.

This morning I woke up early, about 6:00 AM to check it out, site was up, but no DB connectivity .. I have my DB on a separate server (thats the proper way a H-Sphere install is done) .. so I ping the DB server .. no luck, I then checked the IP of the webserver and .. i’ll be dammed, I was on a US server, not a UK server, I ping the MySQL server by name, and sure enough, it was there, but also in the US.

I changed my config files and removed the old US ip, the site was fully up .. except the site was 13 days old !!

Now, for 99% of people out there, this is not a biggie, but for a online shop with sometimes dozens of orders in one day .. this is a catastrophe .. over 100 order records are lost and all since we do inventory by the website stock level, a messed up inventory as well.

Upon further investigation, I found out that Relio’s (webhost) server provider in the UK seems to have decided not to pay their bandwidth bill, and the bandwidth provided cut them off, in essence rendering companies like Relio’s UK servers .. dead (notice, it was not Relio that did not pay their bill, but their server provider, UK Easily)

So I called the bandwidth provider (Uk Grid … all those UK names, they confused the hell out of me today), explain to them our situation and after some negotiations, they agreed to open up traffic to the server for 3 hours to allow me (and others) to access and backup their data out, that was commendable .. those guys where true stars in doing that, after I got the database back, I restored it and the website was up to date … gosh was I relieved.

Why was my site 13 days old to start with ? .. well .. simple, Relio backups my data every day to another server, and every week or two they backup that server to another server in the US .. ok, at first glance, not a bad setup .. but this experience taught me .. not good enough, I need more.

So, since Relio’s UK servers where dead in the water .. and no access to the backup server was possible, they had to do an emergency recovery from the US backups.

I will give Relio credit, to restore every UK account in the US servers, move DNS, remap ip’s, etc .. etc in less than 6 hours .. thats not bad, they did a good job, but it goes to show, no matter how good your first Tier is .. somebody up the ladder is bound to mess it up !!.

Thats the problem with the Web Hosting market these days, too many idiots working on it, we put out livelihoods in the hands of people who later turn around and mess it up for you .. and does not matter how big or small the company is, your are always at risk.

What is the solution ? well, nothing below 50K of hardware and a few K’s a month in fees, so sometimes .. you just have to pay up and shut up.

Thats what I am doing next, first I am going to hire a local hosting company (when I mean local, I mean 3 streets over), I feel the threat of a 300lbs+ guys walking into the office and breaking your nose is a good incentive to make sure they dont screw with you .. that can only happen if they are local, second, I am going VPS (Virtuozzo) .. my idea is to find a setup I can create a Virtuozzo Failover Cluster with a backup residing off-site.. third, I am setting up a mirror of all this on a VPS server in the US, with my DNS residing also offsite (easily re-routable) so if something happens to RIPE itself (The IP consortium of Europe) .. I can still be up, fourth … dont know fourth yet .. but it’s sure to pop up while we doing this.

Overboard, overblown, over-budget ? .. of course .. but piece of mind, i’ve been in this business for 10 years .. I have seen some huge companies working with a setup that would make anybody cringe, promises of redundancy are usually all hogwash, backups many times are simply not practical, yes, they will back your data, they just cant extract it back, customers are at huge risks all the time of loosing all their data, and for some, thats instant bankruptcy, I have try to give away control on how my data is stored and managed, but it’s proven once again, if I want it right, I have to do it myself.

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Everything I am, good or bad, I owe to the man who’s life ended today, he was my biggest hero and my fiercest foe.

My Dad was not an easy man to deal with on his younger days, he was extremely stern and constantly working (and making sure I worked just as hard), this is a man who made me work on his restaurant washing dishes at the age of 6, so I could earn my movie ticket for Sunday .. nothing was a free pass when it came to him, if you want something in life .. you have to earn it!

The lessons I learn from him have been the biggest gift anybody has ever given me, he taught me to be ruthless in business, while being kind to even your most hated competitor, a contradiction it took me 30 years to understand, he was indeed the iron fist with the heart of gold, a pot of contradictions, who where summarized by one of the most loved people I ever known ..

I always found amazing, how someone who irritated me so much at times, was never the subject of a bad comment, everybody loved Joao .. he was a man’s man, and woman’s subject of affection.

I was always the subject of his focus, he pushed me harder than anybody else, of course it was not until adulthood I understood why he did it, and how much I meant to him, but the good thing is, I am a lucky person, I got to admire my father and even become good friends with him later in life, he in return got to see his son grow to everything he ever wanted (even so I think even if I ended up a deadbeat con, he would have still been proud of me).

There are no missing words between me and my dad, I just wish that there had been more time for him to enjoy life, 59 is too young for one to go, he will be missed by many, especially me.

Rest in peace Dad .. hopefully you are in a better place now.

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In the end, we got them all mounted, and they look great.

I have locking nuts on them now, I’m hoping this time they will stay safe .. I think they look real nice

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