Ronney Black dot Com

Well we have survived the high winds from Ike and things are back to normal in beautiful Euclid. That is if you overlook the nest of yellowjackets near our kitchen window.  V went out recently and was attacked by three.  Someone said pour hot soapy water in their nest.  That didn't work. Billy's Bomb Squad came to the rescue this afternoon, so we will see if he got them all. Nikita and Alvin have opened a child care center in Fort Worth.  ( The southern branch of our family is in Texas and the western branch is in California. ) The name is Little Imaginations.  We think it's catchy.

Nikita and V have put together a very nice web site at www.littleimaginations.org  Using Dot Net Nuke they knocked it together in about four days.  Not bad for starters. Stay tuned, and if you know of anyone in Forth Worth who may need child care check them out.

As you may or may not know, I'm a Vietnam era vet.  As such I have been eligible for health care from the Veteran's Administration.  For the last six months or so I have suffered periodic episodes where I have trouble breathing.  Often the episode is coupled with chest pains.  Well I finally got an appointment for a stress test. Actually I had an appointment for last November. But as it happens the appoiintment was the same day that Cuyahoga County held elections, and being a curius sort of guy, I worked the polls as an electronic voting machine technician.  - More about that later. When the lady from the VA called to set the appointment I told her I was unavailable that day and she tooks offense.  Heaven knows why - but she hung up quickly after saying someones else would call me.  Well by March the call never came so I went to the VA and they got me another appointment, rather quickly.  I was really amazed at the assortment of equipment and professionalism of the VA staff.  I was treated courteously, almost everyone was friendly and I guess I passed the test because the doctor smiled and said not to worry.  So here's a hip hip hooray for the VA. They are much better now than they were in the early seventies.

Being a cumputer guy and techie sort, I thought electronic voting would be a good idea.  And it will probably work fine, provided you let the technical peiple rather than the business people have a leading say in the implementations.  Here in Cuyahoga county, the suits decided on the system to purchase, and it was a bad decision.  Much has been written about the Diebold product so I won't say much other than poor design, and poor training.  Maybe that's why Diebold changed the name, I think it's now called Premier Systems.  In any event a name change does not reduce  the suck factor. 

Well things have been pretty busy here on the North Coast. Johns PC Repair business ( Greater Cleveland PC Repair ) has been going great guns. He's one of the few people in town who will repair laptop motherboards. Many of his customers come in and tell him that Geek Squad would not or could not make the repair. John can be contacted at www.clevelandpcrepair.com. We are in the process of wrapping up our first ecommerce project. A pair of local businessmen have been selling high fashion women's leather handbags for a few years now and have decided to enhance their services with a web site. Check out www.midwesternleatherproducts.com and take a look at the offerings. They would love it if you bought something...

V and I had quite a scare recently. Her brother Alex has had some health concerns in the last few months.  Nothing major but still not the sort of thing that should be overlooked.  Danny - as he is know to the family - is the kind of guy who is always working and rarely takes time out for himself.  For the past few years he has been managing a rooming house/hotel on Cleveland's east side. He basically rents, rooms, efficiencies and studios to folks who need temporary short tem housing.  He has built a pretty good reputation among social workers who oftem make referrals of their clients.  V recenlty built a web site for him  Alex's Rooms For Rent.  He had a health problem recently and as it turns out his doctor's put him in the hospital for a couple of days and sent him home with a prescription. In filling the prescription V hit the mother lode of sticker shock.  $400 is a lot of money for medicine. Nexium - the little purple pill that the show us on tv, you know the one they tell us to ask our doctor about.  Well something has to be wrong with this picture. That is way too much money for medicine, no matter who is having to pay for it, insurance companies, medicare, medicaid,private pay, who over. Its way to much.  And how much of that goes to pay for an ad that encourages me to ask the doctor for somehting the doctor should already know to prescribe. And why should I be asking the doctor for a medicine.  He should be telling me what he thinks I need and discussing the pro's and con's of that medication as well as it;s alternatives.

Something is really seriously wrong in this country.

Today all is well with IhostAsp.net and I.  It seems that my hosting package does not allow for multiple versions of dot net in the same domain.  The version of Dasblog which I was trying to install throouhh their control panel runs under dot net 1.1 and my domain is running under 2.  No big deal since I have learned how to use Dot Net Nuke's blog.  I recently spoke with tech support for the first time and they were really helpful. Thumbs up for IhostAsp.net  - a very good deal for nine bucks a month. I'm starting to move more domains to them. 

I have been using  easycgi for the last few years and their plans are reasonable.  But when they go down they are really down, nothing works. And that's been happening more than I like.  So far the all-time best web hosting company has been ORCS Web. They are fast - really fast,  and tech support is right now.  PowerDNN is almost as fast as ORCS Web and they specialize in dot net nuke hosting. Tony Valenti, the main man at PowerDNN is active in the Dot Net Nuke community and seems to really know DNN. But V recently pointed out what may be false advertising on their part.

I have a secondary portal at PowerDNN which is configured as a parent portal under my main DNN account. When I experienced difficulty with the images for the secondary portal not loading I contacted tech support only to be told that they don't offer support for secondary portals ! - WHOA, What was that ?  V went ballistic and suggested we contact the FTC and file a claim of false advertising. While I wouldn't go that far,  I plan to raise the issue in the future. For now, I am still moving domains to IhostAsp.net.  And besides, they have home field advantage, being located in the Cleveland area is always a plus in my book.

Wow - after giving them a nod of approval I may have to take it back - I posted a support ticket and apparently it was not read.  More later

Terry Buttram's funeral was today.  We worked together at the Cummings and Davis Funeral Home.   Terry, a fellow vietnam veteran, accidentally drove his motorcyle into the back of a parked semi. Since he was a member of the American Legion his post provided a fitting farewell to a distinguished and decorated veteran. Part of the farewell service allowed veterans to line up and give a final salute to a fallen comrade. As it turned out, almost every man in the church was a veteran, so the line was long .

Later the family let it be known that the war changed Terry in a big way.  And how could it not have.  Terry, a smart  and sensitive young  man, baptised and christian, was taken to the jungles of Vietnam and  assigned as a door gunner on a helicoptor.  Who knows what horrors he witnessed during his twenty-seven combat missions.  We never talked about our war experiences -  it's better not to wake up the dragon.  But, as Reverend Rogers so eloquently said, "Terry's war is over now".

Last night I found that I chould change the fckeditor skin  - that helped with the visibility of the icons.  A recent read od the fckeditor forum at the dnn site let me know that fck.css is the place to control fck's stylings - Maybe I can get it to stop screwing around with my html.

This morning I went over Lee Sykes videos on membership and the user profile. Now all I have to do is find a way to display / expose the underlying tables.  Maybe xmod or xlist will help me with this, It would be real cool if someone had a view of the user profile....

It would really please me to have a replacement set of images for the fckeditor toolbar since it seems we aree stuck with it. Dig this young ones - contrast is good. It lets more people easily see your stuff. Lack of contrast may seem to be cool but it sucks for those of us who are visually challenged. So fckeditor needs anoter set of toolbar images - with hight contrast.  FTB was great about that.

And now for DNN membership - I ned a module that will allow me to use an existing database with DNN - Connect/import my existing names to DNN membership - and leave the connection in place. I manage membership lists outside of DNN and will continue to do so - and I don't want to write a dnn module to do that for me - somebody must have done this and done it right.

Finally, at least for today, we need a newsletter module that does not require admin privilieges and that will use the aforementioned membership module..... Then DNN would be more cool.

So DNN blogs work moderately well - I'm still hung up on the seperation between summary and blog - I looked around for a wordpress installation to test and found one at my ihostasp.net account - along with dasblag and a gazillion other apps to fiddle about with.  It seems the ihostasp.net account is a great deal for $8.95 a month.  Multiple domains and sub domains - easy to use control panel and dot net nuke installed while you wait.

DNN is not bad  JUst have to wrap my mind around this goofy fckeditor - that's two days of work in itself and I'm reluctant to put things on hold for that. We'll see -

Meanwhile John is working his way through the VPN server on Ubuntu - A few weeks ago I prepared to configure Bigdaddy, My Toshiba portable dual boot ubuntu and xp pro.  John suggested that I try the vmware player and ubintu application.  Man was i ever happy with that hook up.  In a few hours, much of which was spent waitng for downloads, I had a fully functional linux system along with lamp, vi, ed, grep, samba,- I mean all the goodies. That was a goood night. And it got better when I popped up a terminal session and reacquainted myself with the shell commands.

With so many good vibes floating around I had a linux to the rescue moment. One of my clients is running a win2k3 server. I set up a vpn connection to the box but it has proven unstable. So I thought - how abount letting a tiny vmware linux vpn application run the vpn for us. Well that may or may not be suh a great idea John is fighting his way through it.  If anyone has any insight step right up weigh in.

For those of you who don't know, John Rosado operates Cleveland Pc Repair and is opening a new office on Bridge Road here in the next few weeks. I think the grand opening is November 5.  John has been handling my PC repair and network configuration work for the last seven months or so and I have been really please with his work.