MarkPappas.info

So lately I’ve been pushing for ways to save some money due to other items going on here at home. Nothing truly serious thankfully, but a good idea at least. One area I’ve been looking at is the monthly bills.

Last fall I hit the gas/electric bill. I bought and installed a 7-day programmable thermostat and replace the ‘one-temp-set-and-forget’ thermostat the house had. I replace every high use light bulb with the energy saving compact fluorescents. I set my PC up to turn off automatically instead of running 24/7. That was a big change mind you. I’ve been running a computer almost constantly for the last 8 or 9 years.

Today I tried the biggest bill of them all – the Home Mortgage. Due to the recent mortgage crunch and skyrocketing foreclosure rates with rock bottom interest rates I figured I might as well give one of these ‘no closing cost’ refinance ads a shot. Heck, our mortgage is from Wells Fargo – and the ad we got was from them…
Anyhow, turns out they don’t want to drop our interest rate and add a year to our mortgage just quite yet. I’m going to guess that by dropping us a few points and taking our 29 years left back to 30 they don’t make any money. I just wanted a lower rate… Anyhow, I got told ‘no’.
I might try again in a few weeks after I’ve done a little more research.

So next up on the list – my cable/internet bill.
I’m paying $93.99 (before taxes and franchise fee’s (site note, what in the world is a “franchise fee”?). I’m seeing ads all over the place for my current plan at about $65 for ‘new subscribers’.
So I ring up the cable company, deal with the horrendous automated support menu, and finally arrive at a human named ‘Joe’ after I decided to start smashing buttons in the hopes that the automated system would figure out I had an issue…
Joe asks how he can help me out today and I simply start that I believe my bill is significantly more than I think it should be due to all of the 12 month promotions I’m seeing. He asks me what sort of promotions I’m taking about. I happen to have one on my desk right in front of me for my current plan for $69.95 – $24 less than what I’m paying now. In a quick look I tell him about that one and that it’s for about “60 bucks”.
The response amazed me – he said hold on a minute while I see what I can do.
A minute later he offers me a slightly new offer-
-My internet speed is incresed to 2x the speed it is now (7 to 15Mb/sec) (don’t really need but I’ll take it!).
-I get an additional 60-some channels added to my plan.
-When we get a digital TV all I have to do is stop into the local office for a free upgraded cable box for digital TV-out
-My new monthly bill, for the next 12 months, is $58.90

Thats a savings of $38.09 A month – or $457.08 over the next year.
Success! I cut a bill down by 40% with a 20 minute phone call.

…You think the power company would give me a lower rate on my electricity?

So today was a great afternoon to get out. The wife’s at work tonight so I’ve got the place all to myself. Right after I got home from a great day at work I hopped on my bike and went for a ride. I don’t really know how far I went, the battery in my speedometer/odometer on the bike appears to be very low. Guess I’ll have to pick up a new one. A quick look at a map gives me at least a 4 mile trek, most likely more. Anyhow – I’m out of shape. That 4 mile trek was worse than the 12’s I used to do nightly 2 years ago… Before I starting dating anyhow!

Anyhow, back the work topic.
I work where every Monday I get to run a few reports. Then come Thursday I have to explain some mundane detail about an entry that was made the previous week on the manufacturing floor. Mind you a few hundred entries are made weekly. We have all sorts of ‘weekly’ reports. These reports show us “how we did” last week.

I want to know how we are doing now.

Simply put – we have lots of reports for last week – but absolutely nothing for ‘right now’. This in turn means that it’s impossible for the production floor to know if they are doing ‘good’ or ‘bad’ right now. I can tell them next week though…  but by then – nobody knows what happened last week [or cares].

Today, I started to ‘fix’ that. Over the last few months I’ve been toying with a new tool to pull real time data on the fly. It came back semi-real time and required a ton of work to display it in a logical order – but it was a start. Last week I received the ‘key’ piece to make it work – on accident.
I found an error in the management level report for the previous week (I’d reversed engineered the site metric a few months back so I could actually figure out how it worked – and properly explain it when asked…). Somehow it was adding in a few ‘extra’ hours. Anyhow, long story short the programmer gave me a section of the code he was using to generate the report (It turned out to be a database error – my report was correct, management was wrong. Nice job to me)

But the code… Bingo. It solved my issue will pulling the data. I changed it up a little bit and hit run – and I got exactly the data I was looking for back. In real time.
Over the last week I’ve created a new report that runs in real time (ok, every 3 minutes it updates itself…) and shows how we are doing right now on our most expensive production equipment/line (easily $5 million per line – and we have over a half dozen in the building).
So I setup a simple old PC to display the data at the production line and sent out an email to the factory leaders about it at about 3:30pm.
The response from the factory people wasn’t spectacular, but Site Management found out quickly enough… I have to give a demonstration at 8am tomorrow to two of the site management guys and the emails I received back from them were very praising.

Now I need them to let me buy a new PC with dual screens to display the data and it’ll not only display how we are doing now, but it’ll look great and let me add in a few more features I’d like too….

Going to be a good week I think!

So,  the US gov’t has decided to write [most] everyone a tax rebate check to help out the economy. Not going to get into the arguement of if that will actually help or not, but it took my wife and I about 2 minutes to figure up ways to spend it-

1. Pay off part of my car
2. Fill the gas tank of the 2 cars and lawn mower
3. Pay off the vet bill.
4. Replace the kitchen window (part of it is rotted out)
5. Other windows (have 3 more to replace upstairs)
6. Down payment on a new car for the wife
7. Build the missing piece of the fence in the backyard
8. Stain the deck
9. Redo the bathroom
10. Paint
11. Pay off bills
12. Extra mortgage payment
13. Landscaping items
14. Get an emergency batter backup sump pump
15. Start putting a bathroom in the basement
16. Start finishing off part of the basement
17. Get a complete Lawn furniture set
18. Pay off a large portion of the remaining education bills for my wife
19. Vacation
20. Charity
21. Savings

In any case, we’ve got places for it to go…. wow.

So, been a while since I was last here…
Updated the wordpress script to the newest version while I was at it too.

So, AWANA is over for another year now, hard to believe that I’ve been helping out now on Tuesday nights during the school year for 2 years now.
Work is going pretty good, Angie is doing well at school – perhaps too well, I hardly ever see here it seems!

Its getting warmer and I can’t wait to start getting outside again. I really want to go camping… Didn’t really have a chance last year with the wedding and everything else.

Wonder what wonders await this weekend!

UPDATE:
Seems that everything moved to the new server alright, copying the database was the part that worried me and it appears to be working just fine…

UPDATE #2:
Just killed the …/blog/ director and moved the entire new site into the main www.markpappas.info site. About time I officially killed off that off.
However, because the old ‘photos’ page has so many links to it and gets quite a bit of traffic It’s still here.
I’m going to have to deal with that one eventually – but the traffic it brings in is nice for the moment, I ‘fixed’ the links on it to come here now.

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Just an FYI – www.markpappas.info is moving (servers). As a result the site may be ‘funky’ the next few days… Don’t expect anything new to be posted during the move.

So for the last 2, or is it 3 years, now I’ve hosted this website at 100WebSpace.com.

Simply put, I’m rather tired of:

1. my site going down unexpectedly
2. a non-functional billing system”Error 2. Incorect parameters. Please contact the support staff” every time I try to click on renew/upgrade/plan etc. They could at least spell ‘incorrect’ correctly… It’s really annoying now that I’ve seen it so many times.
3. Poor service (I’ve complained before about that error at least 4 or 5 times, it takes them a week to get back to me)
4. Poor server side services. Not that this means much to any of you, but this site is driven by a MYSQL database running php, css, and HTML. and a little java thrown in for fun. Wordpress is a great open source tool! I can only have 1 MYSQL database – and it’ll max at 5mb in size. Why is that bad? simple – if I hit 5mb (and I will eventually) the site will stop working unless I remove old posts – and I don’t want to do that!
5. I have 100mb of space. that’s it. I have a little USB thumb drive in my PC right now that is 2048mb – and it cost lessthan a one year plan from 100webspace.
6. I get one email account, XXXXX@markpappas.info
7. 3 sub domains. (www.test.markpappas.info) would go to a ‘test’ subdomain for example.

That said, I’m going to be moving my site to Hostgator in the coming days. Why?

1. I get unlimited MYSQL databases
2. Disk space available 614387.28Megabytes. Thats 600GB, a 6143% increase over 100webspace
3. Unlimited email accounts for my site
4. Unlimited sub-domains

Granted, the cost is higher – at $4.95/month ($60/year).
100webspace was $30/year …I think. I’d look but remember that error I mentioned above??

I hate that error – it’s going to make canceling my account with them require a phone call I think.
….Maybe thats why I get the error anyhow? So they have one last chance to convince me to stay with them? mmm…