Sachie and I recently spent a long weekend in Phuket. I got a window seat at the back of the plane and, being a daytime flight, a pretty good view.
We had stayed at Miss Sachie’s resort, Marriott Mai Khao Beach Club, and had a lovely time. You can’t quite see it in the photo below but you can see Marriott Phuket Beach Club if you know where to look.
Continue reading “Bangkok from Above”Day two and we are checking out of the hotel and in the car to Telavi. A quick word about getting around in Georgia: Bolt. There’s taxis and busses and trains and so on, even a subway, but Bolt is cheap and good. We took one from Tbilisi to Telavi, a two-hour drive, for 133 Lari (or “Larrys” as I called them) or about 50 bucks. I guess there’s a bus that’s cheaper but we’re only around for a week so no time to lose and the ride was spectacular.
I’m afraid you can’t see the sign very well but it was raining and the car was going fast but that’s the sign for George Bush Boulevard. He was a popular chap in Georgia at one time, helping them get a bit closer to NATO membership or something. Didn’t do them much good when Russia invaded though.
Continue reading “Dan Went down to Georgia: Day II”Back in May, the lady and I went to Georgia. No, not the Peach State, in the US of A. The one in the Caucasus, next to Russia. Of course, May being close to February, the war in Ukraine was fresh in most minds and my mother was very concerned that we would be in danger. So it was easy to assure her that we’d be quite safe from the Russian army as they had already invaded Georgia, back in 2008, and they were now busy further north.
Georgia is a small country, there are only about four million Georgians, but they have a long history. They have their own wacky language and even wackier alphabet, a strong literary tradition, a fierce sense of independence and an 8,000-year long wine tradition. We, of course, went for the wine.
The flight is done and we have been picked up by the hotel. Let’s check in.
Continue reading “Dan Went down to Georgia: Day I”This blog started I don’t know when on some cheap GoDaddy hosting back in the ADSL days. They sent me a bill for $50 for another years’ hosting and I thought that was just too much, backed up the site and let it fall offline.
Much later, for a lark, I took a surplus Eee from my employer, put it on Ubuntu and stuck it in the server room. It worked! It worked surprisingly well, Nginx running on Linux is no joke. But all good things come to an end and the poor bastard died.
At work we had a legacy account at HostGator (a ‘baby’ package) where the main site used to live. It’s very cheap, $50 a year, ha ha, so it’s been less bother to keep it than move the few sites that were still there. It’s ‘unlimited’ storage so there would be no trouble keeping this site, sachidan.com and bartripping.com there.
The only trouble is that HostGator is complete bullshit. The site is so horrifically underpowered that any image uploaded to WordPress larger than 1MB, or even smaller, would cause the instance to crumble under its heavy load. The little Eee that the site used to be on was Concorde by comparison.
Well, enough of this nonsense, but I don’t like paying $3/month for hosting. It turns out that one of our new company websites is going to be on WordPress so I’ve been marshalling a couple of our DigitalOcean droplets into serving WordPress and since the dev server isn’t too busy anyway… The site has a new home. Regular readers (hi Dad) will notice a swift increase in performance and I won’t have to turn my photos into postage stamps to get them served.
DigitalOcean does have an out-of-the-box WordPress instance that’s actually pretty good but it runs on Apache and I’m completely over Apache. Hey, it’s a good webserver and WordPress is the killer app for Apache on PHP but, even though I find nginx server blocks occasionally infuriating, if I never have to edit an .htaccess file again I will die a happy man.
So sorry it’s been quiet lately, for years, but it’s been no fun on crap hosting, even though this site is all about crap hosting. Sooner or later I’ll buy a Raspberry Pi to host on, but until then you’ll all have to get by with cloud.
Go have a look and my post on the other blog.
