Sixteen Lashings

Life is good. Business is good. Well, business is really good, as I’m already having difficulty keeping my head screwed on tight. I wasn’t expecting things to ramp up as quickly as they have, and I’m amazed by the breakneck pacing of this thing. It’s been busy here at Brainside Out for the last couple weeks, a good kinda busy with the hustle and bustle of creaking oars and kettle drums and the occasional whip cracking across a scarred back. My boss is kind of a jerk, and I say that only because I know he’s a tough old lot who can take whatever I can dish out.

Things have been exciting. After a couple months of work we relaunched a client’s website the other day, to much fanfare and rejoicing. Response has been positive, as evidenced by improved network statistics and the general absence of letters stamped with anthrax. We’ve also been practicing some database judo for another client, which has been opening the doors to all sorts of dreamy possibilities.

Speaking of dreams, we finally secured ourselves a couple gigabytes at the oft-recommended web hosting company Dreamhost. Brainside Out is still hosted by Pair, so at this point I’m just playing the field. That being said, lest mine eyes deceive me, $7.95 a month gets you a killer setup at Dreamhost, one that trounces the pants off the $17.95 deal at Pair. I can’t see that it’s missing anything, and if I’m still happy after tinkering with it a little bit, there’s a good chance I’ll move the site over to Dreamhost. I mean, I’ve been happy with Pair since the beginning (even though they have no plans of upgrading Ruby on their servers, barring me from ever implementing a Rails framework), but there’s a good chance that pure economics will overcome inertia in this regard.

I turned in my registration for SXSW Interactive and I grabbed a hotel room while I was at it. This last bit was no small feat, as hotel rooms during that week in Austin are sellin’ like hot cakes. My hotel isn’t all that close to the Convention Center, unfortunately, and I’ve got a bit of a walk to the event site. Oh well. I’ll just refer to it as my one kilometer “fun run” and be done with it. Plus, I’ll probably find myself commuting in a wheelbarrow more than once, so it really won’t seem all that bad in the end.

Geez, we leave for our Caribbean cruise in just over two weeks. It looks like Nassau can offer some pretty good kiteboarding conditions, and I’m still debating over how much of my gear to bring. The breeze seems to hang in the mid-teens this time of year, which is darn light for my biggest kite. If I could add a 16 meter to my quiver I think I’d be golden.

It may be about time to send out another invoice.