Author: Cj B

Spending Money…

What’s wrong with me!

I just wanna spend spend spend spend.. And SPEND on big ticket items.

First I got this idea to buy apartments. Great investment right… I can’t, well I can, but I don’t wanna do it alone. So I ask my dad. He’s being SLOOOOOW. Can’t find a place.. So then….

I got this idea in my head to buy a truck! Ohhh, how much fun it’d be. I love the idea. I still do, I still REALLY want a truck. But, I have a new idea.

LAND! And lots of it!

I want LAND LAND LAND. Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Alaska!!! Oh my god, It’d be cool. Rent it out for vacations, hunting, grazing rights, etc. Make money. Have a place to go and relax.

Are either of these practical? No!

But you see. I have this money. And lots of it. Burning this GIANT hole in my pockets! I wanna spend it! But I want to spend it on something that’ll make me money!

I put $1,000 into Prosper today. Maybe if that works out I’ll put a lot more there!!

Money! Money! Money! I want more of it!

What’s wrong with me! ::whines::

I just want to invest right now, so that I don’t have to really worry about money once I hit 35ish. I gotta get married damnit, that’ll help! I could sure use the extra monthly money that would provide. Any takers?!

j/k. Of course I’m not gonna get married just for the money!

I also need to buy a property so that I can take the deductions. F’ing Government is taking $1,000 out of EVERY PAYCHECK now! That’s $2,000 a MONTH in taxes I have to f’ing pay!

(Damn, I’m complaining a lot, eh? I need to write you an entry about the good shit that’s going on in my life… !) Maybe tomorrow!

Siteground hosting SUCKS!

Ok, I’ve had my last straw with Siteground hosting service. I have been with them for just over a year at this point and since day 1 it’s been nothing but problems.

The last issue was that I decided I wanted to turn on SpamAssassin. Up till now my Mail app has been handling spam just fine, but recently I’ve been getting too many false positives, etc. So I go to turn on Spam Assassin in the CPanel.

There’s an option there that says. “To simply have the server DELETE and NOT deliver emails that are tagged as spam by SpamAssassin, click here now.”

So logically NOT clicking that link means that your email will be processed through to your email account with the correct ***SPAM*** subject line. Right?

Apparently NO! Apparently they have it setup on the server to just delete it automatically. They claim it’s for “Security” reasons and that being on a shared host it’s the ONLY way to do it. I’m sorry, but as a systems administrator, I’ve setup SpamAssassin on MANY MANY servers in my day. You can EASILY setup PER USER rules for this sort of thing. It’s NOT THAT HARD.

Issue: They moved servers TWICE in one month. They said it was to “upgrade to a newer machine”. I’m sorry, but there should be NO REASON to move servers twice in one month. And secondly EACH TIME there were major problems with the upgrade.

1) They did it in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY!

2) The lost nearly a days worth of my mail.

3) They broke my website by not correctly moving things over.

Issue: They have some idiotic process running that creates a zero bit file in EVERY DIRECTORY in my account EVERY SINGLE DAY!

Issue: They require a php.ini file in EVERY DIRECTORY for wordpress to work correctly. This is ridiculous. Why not set these things at the server level?

Issue: You cannot re-open a ticket if you don’t reply within 2 hours of their last response. Therefor you have to go through the long and annoying process of opening a NEW ticket. They also don’t seem to be able to reference old tickets, so you have to go back through all the same crap you did in the last ticket.

Issue: I can’t send email to Yahoo! And they refuse to do anything about it.

Issue: The support sucks. There are only two ways to contact support. 1) Open a site down ticket or 2) Open a mail down ticket. These ARE NOT the only two issues that can happen in a hosting environment. And the helpdesk people are dumber then shit. I clearly explained each and everyone of these issues to them and they seem to do nothing. It takes three or four support messages back and forth before they seem to be able to understand the problem and actually do anything about it. They seem to work on the “annoy the customer to stop asking for it” theory.

DO NOT USE SITEGROUND HOSTING SERVICES! They SUCK!

Soooo. I will be moving to a new host soon (hopefully this weekend). Any suggestions? I was thinking Bluehost. Anyone use them, how do you like them?

Pinkberry

Have you heard of the latest crazy? Pinkberry? It’s been all over the news around here. Stores opening like crazy. 27 here in the SoCal area already. Some of them just BLOCKS from the next store. Lines out the door even at 10pm.

So what’s the big crazy? They offer two flavors. Plain and Green Tea. But what is it? Is it yogurt, dairy, something else!? Well apparently it lies in the something else area.

I heard an interview on the radio the other day with the companies top Public relations person. Even she couldn’t answer what it was. “Well, it’s not technically yogurt, but it’s not ice cream”.

So, I have to admit I stopped into one a few months ago when I walked by and there was a line out the door.

My reaction? It’s not worth it. Bland taste to the whole thing. The only thing that really made it good was the fresh berries and fruits to put on the top.

For nearly $4.00 take your money to GoldenSpoon and get something with flavor and just a few more calories!

Pinkberry, it’ll hopefully die out! But it could be the next starbucks!

San Simeon and Hearst Castle

What a weekend!

The group (Me, Constantine, Eric, Mok, Robert, Bill, Nina, Sirin) gathered up Friday afternoon and we headed out to San Simeon State Park. There were some issues getting the truck all loaded up. Mainly we had WAY too much shit to pack into a tiny ass SUV. Thankfully Bill brought a big ass van along! So the two trucks got us and all our shit there and back.

Getting out of town is no easy task on a Friday afternoon. We rolled out of my place at 2:30. We rolled into the camp site a full 7 hours later…. Now you’re probably asking yourself, well how far away is San Simeon? It’s a mere 250 miles. It was a parking lot all the way from here to Santa Barbara basically! Horrible! And of course I was driving and you all know how much I hate traffic!

Once we got there we got everything unloaded and I cooked the Marlboro Man’s Favorite Sandwich for dinner. Everyone seemed to really like it. After that everyone had some drinks. I went to bed, everyone else stayed up and got drunk.

Saturday morning I got up early and started breakfast, cinnamon French toast! It was delicious! After breakfast we all gathered up and headed out to Hearst Castle. That place was just amazing. If you haven’t been there you have to go! I really want to go back now and do the rest of the tours, especially the twilight tour! It’s just crazy that one guy would spend so much money building this huge castle in the middle of no where with so much art and stuff.

From there we headed back to the campsite, ate lunch and then hit up the beach. The beach was SOOOOOOO relaxing. It was just our group there and the boys were playing football and running around on the beach, some of us laid on the beach and tanned and talked and read. We stayed till 4:30 or 5 and then headed back to the camp site.

That night we made Build-Your-Own Chicken for dinner. It was amazing to say the least. 🙂 We also got very very drunk!

Sunday morning I woke up about 7, but laid in bed till 8. Got up and what a MESS there was outside. Damn drunk campers! Constantine and I cleaned that up and then started breakfast and camp tear down. The smell of coffee woke everyone else up and they cooked their baggy eggs. We got camp torn down and then headed home. Traffic YET AGAIN! It took another 6 hours to make the 250 mile trek home. Ugh!

The total came out to $100/person. Which is both cheap and expensive I think. The big factors though were gas at $238 and Hearst Castle which cost $200, food was $200 and the truck rental $125.

Over all the trip was a HUGE success. I am going to try and plan another one for mid-August, although that might be too soon. We’ll see. Perhaps it’ll be a mini-trip.

San Simeon State Park and Heast Castle Pictures

In other news, I found this great story before we left…Fit Nation: The Obesity Fight.