It’s my second day in my thirties, and my back’s killing me.  I know, I’m old.  But I have a good reason.

Last night was the party to celebrate my 30th birthday, and we did it in style. With the things we love. Movies (well, a movie theater), Rock Band, and pizza. Oh, and friends and family were in attendance, as well.

As any big event in our lives, the wife and I like to do something big. So we (read: she) rented a private screening room at Coolidge Corner Theater.  Seating for 45, and a huge screen.

We packed up our XBox 360, Rock Band 2, The Beatles: Rock Band, our plastic instruments and headed to the theater around 6:30 to set up.  My back’s killing me is because I lugged a ton of that stuff a whole buttload of blocks since we had to park farther away than we should have.

Anyway, aside from back hurting, I feel pretty good today.  We had an awesome time last night.  A bunch of people from work, and past jobs, and family showed up to celebrate.  We played Rock Band for a whole bunch of hours, and people that had never gotten to play before got to play. And from the talk this morning, they enjoyed it.  It really is a game that everyone likes.  It’s impossible to not like the game, really. I challenge you!

Getting older is a weird thing.  Obviously I know I’ve turned 30, but I don’t feel any different. I honestly don’t think I’ve noticed my age at all since I turned 18. I don’t feel any older, I just feel like.  Obviously I can’t do all the things I used to be able to do, physically, but it’s not like I’m in a wheel chair or anything, so that’s good.

So far, 30 hasn’t been at all bad.  I rung in my new year with friends, family and gaming. What more could I want?  It was a great night.

Mac Pro day is rapidly approaching.  I was going to get it yesterday, but waited.  I asked for Apple gift cards for my birthday, so I wanted to wait till I got those, so I didn’t spend any extra money when I could have used gift cards.  So Mac Pro day has been pushed back to (I believe) October 9th, which should be enough time to allow for getting paid for the month of September, and the check clearing.  I’m super psyched, and will post before and after photos once I have everything set up.

Big thanks to everyone who came last night and celebrated, and for all the generous gifts everyone gave.  We’re definitely going to rent the theater again in the near future, and host another Rock Band night, since it was such a hit.  Next time we won’t use Facebook to invite people though, since that seems to be uber-ineffecient.

As big of a music fan as I am, I’m horrible at using the “features” of iTunes.

I use it to rip music, and store it.  Between Christine and I, we’ve got just over 80 gigs of music, which is all digital now. (I’m sure there’s plenty more CDs I opted not to rip, when I ripped ‘everything’ we own.)

I have one playlist, and I only created that so I could sync it to my iPhone.

I’m a terrible iTunes user. I know.

I’m home alone this weekend, and just upgraded to iTunes and decided to give this “Genius Mix” thing a shot.  I’m usually too impatient to wait for it to finish “delivering” results.  After all, it takes a while for iTunes to index that much music.

I let it finish (it took about 6 minutes or so), and have to say it’s pretty accurate.  It created 12 playlists for me. 12 Genius Mixes, I should say.  Here’s what it grouped, based on the 4 albums it makes thumbnails out of:

• Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Green Day, Nickelback
• Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Aerosmith
• Disturbed, Dream Theater, Metallica, System of a Down
• Foo Fighters, No Doubt, Lifehouse, (more) No Doubt
• Kelly Clarkson, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, David Cook
• Bon Jovi, Tesla, Firehouse, Poison
• REO Speedwagon, Billy Talent, Waltham, Hits of the ’80s
• Van Halen, Queens of the Stone Age, Journey, Guns ‘n’ Roses
• Linkin Park, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit
• Katy Perry, Jason Mraz, Howie Day, Teddy Geiger

Not bad mixes.  It’s certainly better than just playing all 13,000 tracks on random and skipping ten in a row, till I find something I like.

I’m gonna give the Genius Mixes the benefit of the doubt and let them play for a while.

We’re now a mere 54 days away from my birthday/Mac Pro Day,  and I’m getting more and more excited.

Over the last month, I’ve gotten so reliant on using my iMac at the office, that when I get home, I’m discouraged having to use Windows.  I often press my mouse button down, expecting Expose, and am saddened when that doesn’t happen.

I’ve also begun finding more and more applications for the Mac to perform things I do on the PC.  While I’m more comfortable than I was at the time of my last post, I’m still not convinced I can switch to OSX without at least having Parallels installed on my Mac.  There are still a few things that I need to do that are PC only.

However, I’ve also found a few new applications that I’m in love with, that are Mac only!  I know, right?!

For starters, I think MailPlane is a godsend. Especially since I’ve started converting all my domain mail to Gmail.  MailPlane is just like any other mail client, except that it’s like having a bunch of Gmail accounts open at once, for all your different email addresses.  No more logging out and logging back in to another account. MailPlane keeps you logged into them all, and gives you a notification when you’ve got a new message.  The UI for the app is identical to Gmail itself, and has all the same features (keyboard shortcuts, searching, labeling, etc.)  Very handy.  Weeding addresses out of my Thunderbird inbox at home has never been more satisfying.

Another app I’m loving is Adium.  It’s like any other IM client, but better because it’s Macified.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but I much prefer Adium to Digsby (which I use at home.)

I feel like once I get the Mac at home I’m going to want to switch all of my hardware to Mac.  Router, keyboard, mouse, external hard drives, etc.  It’s not unlikely.  Everything would look stellar all white and shiny.

As we get closer and closer to Mac day, I get more and more excited.  I can’t wait to make the switch.  Once I do, I plan on documenting the things I find that are hard for someone who’s used PCs as long as I have, in hopes that I can help other switchers along the way.

It’s been about 7 or 8 months since we picked up a MacBook for Christine, as an early Christmas gift.  Seeing how easy the transition was for her inspired me to make the transition myself.  I’ve always wanted a Mac, and seeing as how I’m a “designer” or “coder” or whatever you want to call it, it seems fitting that I have one.

After getting her MacBook, Christine never turned on her Windows laptop again, except for me to reformat it to give to her little brother, Ryan.  Was it that simple? It couldn’t be. There’s no way switching could be that easy.

Important files are kept in some form of Google docs, or an external hard drive. E-mail’s kept on web-servers.  Could it be that easy? Turn off old computer, turn on new computer?  For Christine, it was.

For me? It’s going to be a little more complicated.

For starters, I’m just about 30 years old.  I started using PCs when I was about 5 or 6. That puts me at 25ish years of PC experience, primarily with Windows. (Albeit I started with DOS, but I don’t think that counts.)

Can someone who knows Windows as well as I do switch to Mac and OSX so easily, as my wife did?  I’m going to find out.

I plan on buying myself a Mac Pro and 30″ Cinema Display.  Pretty big for a first personal Mac, right?  I think I’ll survive, and here’s why:

As you may, or may not, know, I’ve been contracting for a local University the last 6 weeks or so.  When I first arrived, they gave me a pretty old under-powered PC to use.  I quickly outgrew it, and had to seek something else.  There were no “better” Windows machines around, so I grabbed a 20″ iMac.  It’s a few years old, and has its problems, there’s no question about that.  At first, I was lost. I didn’t know what did what, or how to do the things I’d grown so comfortable with over the years on Windows.  I got angry quite often (still do, in some cases), and had to look things up.  Simple things, that most Mac users would laugh at you for.  But I’m learning.

Here’s how I know I’ll survive when I get my own Mac at home: when I go home, and turn on my monitors to look at something on my PC.  I dread it.  I won’t be one of those “I’ve switched, now I’ll bash Windows” types.  But I legitimately dislike having to use Windows at home.  I like the Mac.  I’d probably like it even more if it was newer, and didn’t have hardware problems that cause it to freeze and crash a bunch of times (4 reboots required thus far, today.)  I don’t hold that against the Mac though, it’s fairly old, and probably on its last leg.

I’m going to try to document the things I learn as I make the transition from part-time Mac user to full time, as well as photograph my new set-up once I get it.  I’m pretty excited, and much more at ease now that I’m sitting at a Mac most of my days, while doing work.  I’ve been learning by immersion. It’s a good way to learn, and I’m lucky I get to do it without having to spend money on a Mac, to learn I didn’t like it. (Which, thus far, is not the case.)

Working for a fairly large webhost, I often see people who got “hacked”, and their websites destroyed.   I often laugh, because people don’t often get “hacked”, but often simply have their password guessed, which gives the “hacker” full access to your site, account, and files.

98% of the time, that’s the case.   Given, there’s always the chance that someone got root access to your server, and really did “hack” you, but that’s very rare in today’s day and age.

So, I often laugh, until it happened to me back mid-June.   I noticed I couldn’t load the stats pages for any of the sites in my hosting account (of which there are quite a few), so I contacted my host.

Their response was “The page won’t load because it’s 0kb”, a file size of zero? That stats package has worked for years on some of my domains, I thought that was odd.

So I uploaded a new version, and went on about my business.

Hours later, I realized I should go through FTP, and look for other files that had been modified recently.   Sure enough, every index.html and index.php file, in every domain, in every subdirectory had been modified.

The “hacker” (read: bored kid in some random European country) added some code to all my pages that was supposed to redirect a visitor to a spam site.   Luckily, he did it wrong, and none of my visitors were affected.

Needless to say, I was bullshit.   I spent a few hours going through, and removing all of the code, by hand.   I got annoyed, and finally asked one of the guys who works for me, for help.   He wrote me a nifty little bash script that I could run.   Luckily, my host gives me SSH access, and I managed to run it against my entire account, and clean out the rest of the modified files, without issue.

The reason I got hacked? Simple. I had a stupid, easily guessable password.   Exactly what I laugh at our customers for.

So, I panicked.   I went in, and first changed my hosting and FTP passwords.   I then thought about how to change my MySQL password.

The problem with that is complex, but follow me.   If I change the password on the MySQL server, my sites will go down, until I update them one at a time.

If I change my password in the sites, they’ll go down until I change it on the server.   Follow?

So I opted to create a new MySQL user, with a new password all together.   I then (using the same find and replace code from earlier) updated my username in all my scripts, then my password, and voila, back up and running.

I then began thinking about how to protect myself, should this (or something worse) happen again.   I looked for scripts that I could run on the web server, to backup my sites and databases, but couldn’t find anything that would work.   I then stumbled upon HandyBackup, which runs on my computer at home.

It simply connects to your account via FTP, and downloads all of your files to your computer.   This is great, assuming you’ve got storage space to keep all those backups around.   If you upgrade, you can also have it burn to DVD automatically, but that’s costly, and not very effective.

So, each night of the week, I have the application connect, and download all of my changed files.   On Saturday night at midnight, it connects and downloads all of the files (changed, or not).   So, at worst, I’m a week out from a complete restore of files.   And any file that’s changed, I’m only 24 hours (at most) out from a clean working version.

It takes up quite a bit of space, because I host a lot of sites, however I think it’s worth it.   It’s also helpful for when you accidentally break some code on a page, and didn’t think to save a copy right then.   You just jump to your backup, and voila.

If you run any website that you “make money” from, or that “is my business!!”, you should take it upon yourself to do the backups, and not rely on your host to do it.   While most hosts do it anyway, some charge you to do the restore. (My company doesn’t, but the company I host with, does.)   You know what they say, if you want something done right, do it yourself.

WordPress 2.6 was released last night/this morning, and is a big improvement. There’s some great new features, and some security patches that were done.

I went through this morning, and upgraded all my WordPress installs, which is always a fun (yet daunting) task.

I began repurposing the old media tower last night, into a home web-server. Not that I plan on using it, but just because I want to see if I can do it, from the ground up.

Trying to run Fedora 9 as my OS, having a bit of trouble with DNS and internal routing though. Going to work on that this weekend.   Am also planning on trying Ubuntu as my server OS, as well.   I like Fedora, but apparently Ubuntu’s all the rage right now.

I thought it would be easy, and quick to leave iTunes.   I just wanted to break up, and start my new relationship with Windows Media Player/Center.   Why? Easy.

When we moved into our new place, there was no room in the living room for the “Media PC”, to be hooked up to the stereo anymore.   (We used to stream iTunes from it to the surround sound, and out other PCs).   So, I looked for a smaller PC, and determined it wasn’t worth it.

I then remembered that the XBox360 streams music from Windows.   Unfortunately, the 360, and iTunes don’t like each other, at all.

So, I made the decision to convert all of my music to Windows Media player, which sounded like it’d be easy.   They’re just music files, right?   Not so much.

See iTunes creates their own propriatary filetype (AAC, or M4P), when you rip a CD through them, which I’ve done with hundreds of gigs of music.   That creates a problem, as Windows Media can’t play/read AAC or M4P files.

So I had two options: 1) Re-rip hundreds of CDs, which took months to rip in my spare time, or 2) convert the music.

I opted for the music conversion, and found a program called “Protected Music Converter”, which boasts that it can “quickly and easily convert music files to mp3”. I thought “Great, it’s exactly what I need!”

I started running it at 9PM last night.   It’s not 9:15AM, over 12 hours later, and it’s only converted 457 tracks. That’s only .63 tracks per minute.   At this rate, it might have been faster to re-rip them.

It’s gonna be a long weekend. Good thing the software’s automated, and making the mp3s on its own.   Once it’s done, I just need to copy them over to my new terrabyte hard drive that I bought to house the music collection last week. (Bringing my total storage capacity to just over 8 terrabytes. I’ve got an obsession.)

Will update with a final “it took this long” post when it’s done.