Alright, I'll say right now... this is old news. I moved back around the middle of May. This apartment came up unexpectedly and I was told about it by a friend. The rent seemed pretty reasonable for all the space I was getting, and I like the building. It's not a high-rise apartment, just a 3-story building with a store below.

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Ok, sorry, this is a teaser to a series of more posts I'll try to get put up over the course of the week, but I will give out free samples:

1) IRL: Wow... where to begin. I moved into my own apartment by myself, it's quite a different experience. I've been working 5-6 days a week just to cover my expenses, and managed to get promoted to assistant manager in less than a year. Now if I could only get a raise...

2) Server tweaks: Because no server is ever good enough, I've been very busily working on my servers and network infrastructure. Long story short, I've made some major architectural changes to my LAMP stack by replacing Apache's mod_php with PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager).

3) Introducing Connor Behan: My friend has been renting space on my server from me for 2+ years and he only recently got around to actually using it. Lots to share about our adventures with Arch Linux + Lighttpd/PHP-FPM (and some caveats about the latter), and setting up multi-core Apache Solr to serve search queries for two Drupal sites.

4) APT repo and LAMP-related back-ports: I needed to back-port PHP to get PHP-FPM on Lucid, and while I was at it I decided to do the same for Apache, and Lighttpd. And since I went to all that trouble, naturally I needed a repo to house them in.

So, that's what I plan to cover over the week in more detail including how-to's and pictures. Stay tuned.

My life changed pretty significantly starting January this year. My parents announced their impending divorce, my girlfriend of the time broke up with me not long after, my grades in college began to slip... It's been a crazy year to say the least. In the last 6 months I've moved twice, put up with 'temporary' accommodations, and generally felt like my entire life was in flux. I'm glad to say things are finally starting to balance out now. I have moved closer to town where I don't need to rely on others for transportation, and managed to find a job not far away (no small feat in a blue-collar city like Hamilton where the job market has really hit the dumps).

I finally got my servers and other infrastructure online today, as you can see if you're reading this. Not only that, but I've finally gotten a brand-spankin' new server as well. This site is now hosted on a very fast Core 2 Duo 2.93ghz with 2gb of DDR2-800 RAM, and a couple 500gb hard drives. I took the opportunity to also upgrade to the latest long term support release of Ubuntu, 10.04 Lucid Lynx. All-in-all, I'm very impressed with this release. I've had to do barely any manual configuration for any of the services I'm running: Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3, MySQL 5.1 and Tomcat 6 with Apache Solr. Getting Drupal back up to date after months of being offline was quite a chore however...

In conclusion, I am very much still alive, and good things are coming my way. This is a new life, and I don't intend to let things get as bad as they were before this time around.

I've moved my RSS feeds from FeedBurner's old backend to the new one at Google. I know this has caused some problems in the last week with the feed not being available, but everything should be fine again now. Don't worry, you haven't missed anything. I'll have some new stuff to post about soon, promise. I will say now though that I got a new job. More about that at a later date.

I'll post here again someday soon, life's a little crazy at the moment.

I work night shift now, 4-5 nights a week. My shift runs from 10pm, until 6am, with three breaks: two half-hour breaks at 12:00 and 2:00, and a 15-minute break at 4:00.

I don' think I've ever slept so soundly since I was young a kid (guess I still am young), this job leaves me completely drained by the end of the night. Unfortunately, it's taking away time from a lot of other things I enjoy, like hanging out with my girlfriend and other friends, writing on this blog, coding up silly little projects for the hell of it, staying up until the early hours of the morning playing games. You get the picture.

Ah well, college doesn't pay for itself, and I don't want to take out any student loans. Oh, speaking of money... my first paycheck couldn't possibly come soon enough... I've accrued quite a list of things i basically have to buy, like a new cellphone to replace the one that got washed with my clothes, or a new pair of headphones so I don't go crazy listening to that elevator music crap they play at work. Fun times, I tell ya...

6 hours or so to go... Normally I don't make a big deal of my birthdays, not since I was about 12 or so anyway. But, this is my 19th one, which here in Canada means I'm of legal age to drink. And it's pretty much a defacto Canadian tradition to get so hammered you forget your own name on this special day. With that in mind, some friends of mine have volunteered to ensure that I get suitably drunk tomorrow, starting in the afternoon and ending sometime in the early morning. :) Thanks guys! I can hardly wait. :P

Just a couple days ago I got an offer of admission from Mohawk College (which I promptly accepted on the admissions web page.) for the Pre-Technology program which will prepare me for the Network Engineering and Security Analyst program I want to take.