Moving Servers

Brought the Beast back home today: the Dell PowerEdge 1600SC server that houses www.keithbluestone.com, www.sbluestone.com, and a few other sites. It had been at my mom's place since I moved to Baltimore, subsisting on a decent diet of SpeakEasy ADSL at 3Mb down and 768K up (~$100/mo). I found that I could upgrade my home Internet (Comcast residential, ~$50/mo) to Comcast Business (6 Mb down, 768K up) with a static IP for only $30 more per month, saving me about $70/mo and doubling my download bandwidth.

So today I redirected the DNS mapping via www.GoDaddy.com, brought the server over, fired it up, assigned it a local static TCP/IP address, opened up port 80/HTTP on the firewall to let internet traffic through to it, and rebooted. Bam -- worked perfectly the first time.

The Beast is a purebred production server: housed in a solid black Dell case, running SCSI plus mirrored 180 GB RAID drives on Windows Server 2003 and SharePoint Services 2003. No Microsoft Office; no special video cards or drivers; no pretty themes; just a server. And I have never had a problem with it in the three years it's been up.

The Joy of Click

Ahhh... I discovered the joy of one-click ordering on Amazon. Now before you scold me -- "it's been around for years, you fool" -- how many of you have actually used it? I always figured I was fine reviewing my orders and checking out the regular way.

But recently I became an Amazon Prime member. Amazon Prime is a program that gives you free two-day shipping on most products, and only $4 for overnight shipping (talk about instant gratification!) for a yearly fee of about $70. I subscribed partly because they offered me a free two-month trial in early December, when -- surprise -- I had a lot of gift plans. I also wanted to perform a social experiment on myself: would my shopping behavior change at all because I could order anything overnight for just $4?

So tonight, four months later, I was looking for a gift for my sister on Amazon... and found an electric water kettle for myself. Out of a sudden curiosity, and before I could think twice, I clicked Order with One-Click. How would they ship it? Would I be charged extra for anything? To my surprise and delight, they had placed the order as two-day (no shipping charge) and used all my saved preferences to ship it to my home.

I had a wave of euphoria come over me as a I realized that with one click I had ordered something shipped to me -- with no extra shipping charge, from a merchant as reputable as Amazon. Now one-click after the decision to buy had been reached, I could have the product shipped to me. What genius...