weill aspects

originally posted june 22, 2003

summer non-vacation

The temperature and humidity are rising, the Pirates are battling it out for last place in their division, and I'm keeping myself busy with little side projects. It's summer in Pittsburgh.

weill in japan

Over the next month or two, these writings will be combined with hundreds of photos and more information to make an all-purpose supersite about my trip to Japan.

-- me, August 17, 2002

It isn't quite "the next month or two," but Weill in Japan is now on-line. It's a compendium of all the day logs I wrote and photos that I took during my six-plus weeks in Tokyo last summer, when I stayed with a host family and took a course in Japanese at International Christian University. All told, this site contains over 40,000 words of day logs and over 300 photos. It's been ten months in the making. Enjoy!

summer in the 'burgh

This marks the first time since 1998, when I was enrolled in Carnegie Mellon Pre-College, that I'll spend a summer in Pittsburgh. Now, of course, I'm here to stay, working for a small software company just a few blocks from my home.

Living on my own means that I have to find my own means of entertainment during the always-hot, sometimes-dull summer months. The Pirates are a cheap ticket, if you don't mind the fact that they're one of the worst teams in the major leagues. There's also Cinema in the Parks, which is showing "xXx" tonight on a big screen in Schenley Park. Some future events also have bands performing before the movie starts at sunset. The hardest part seems to be finding people to go with.

With a lot of free time once again, I can work on some little side projects. I took a couple of books out of the library, and I should probably start reading them before they're due back in a week. Even after posting hundreds of photos from my Japan trip last summer, I still have many more pictures from school and vacations that need to be posted. I bought a small George Foreman Grill recently, and a friend of mine came over to help me cook my first meal on it. My home network now has a printer to share with my laptop, so I don't need to leech off the ones at work any more.

Fortunately, there's practically nothing more I need for my apartment. The next time I go home for the July 4th long weekend, I plan to bring back all the rest of my stuff.

work continues

Despite a recent push to focus on improving the security of our systems, work still continues to provide a challenge each week. Working on some projects for our newest client has been a bit slow-going as we develop a mutual understanding of the technology with our client. In the meantime, we're working on putting standards in place to make sure all of our projects run smoothly.

CombineNet has gained three new summer interns, our first such hires in the three-year history of the company. Corporate life has been improving as our company slowly grows. Thanks to a recent influx of cash from one of our larger clients, the company plans to take us all to a Pirates game next month. Tomorrow morning, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) visits our office. He's on a tour of the region, and chose us to highlight the high-tech development and federal grants at work in Pittsburgh. It'll be some nice free publicity; I wonder how many media personnel will show up.

new host

Last year, I signed up with a company called 2MHost to host this site. At just $1.50 a month, billed annually in advance, I thought it was an incredible deal. I was determined to sign up with them even after their automated system rejected my credit card information three times. Somehow the system accepted me at last, and I was able to upload my site.

With many low-cost web providers, you really get what you pay for. Most providers that offer hosting for $20 or less per year offer a decent amount of storage and bandwidth, but make up for it with a total lack of support and/or an unwillingness to be flexible. Case in point: Ripplehost, a provider offering a $5/year promotional rate for 100MB of storage and 1000MB of transfer per month, offers absolutely no provisions for extra storage or transfer. Exceeding the limits of the plan results in an immediate suspension of service. My heaviest month of service was in January of this year, when over 300MB of data was transferred from my Everything2 New Year's Eve Party photos alone. Still, when the only means of support is in a UBB-like forum and the administrators specifically tell users not to e-mail them, I wasn't jumping at the chance to solve my own problems.

Enter Lunarpages. They charge $7.95 a month for the package I use: 500 MB of storage -- more than enough for all my photos -- plus 20 GB of data transfer per month. On top of it all, they offer toll-free tech support. Not even DreamHost, my old provider which charges $9.95 a month for less storage and data transfer, offers a support package like that.

So far, so good. As the summer goes on, expect to see some more content coming on-line.

Back to June 2003, or to the year 2003.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.