Our RV Adventures

But I’ll paint tomorrow for sure.

Maybe.

I spent the morning making some phone calls and working on some client stuff and then a little before 2pm Jan and I headed over to the SanTan area for a Wal-Mart / Sam’s Club run. When we were almost there, our friend Chris Yust called and said a customer had called her to say that the website I do for Chris, www.candcrvinsurance.com was down. So as soon as we were parked, I checked for myself,, and yes, it was down.

One of the strange things was the way it was down. There was no error message, no Page Not Found, nothing. It just sat there and whirled. That meant it was at least seeing something there, otherwise there would be a Page Not Found, or Website Not Found.

I put in a call to Godaddy, and after telling themmy problem, the young lady went off for a few minutes and came back to tell me the problem was with my site. She said the ‘index.shtml’ file (the first page of most websites) was invalid because it was named ‘.shtml’ instead of ‘.html’.

I can only guess she hasn’t been in this business very long because ‘.shtml’ is a perfectly valid extension that indicates that a Server Side Include is being used on the page. In this case it’s used to automatically update the ‘Last Date Modified date at the bottom of the page.

Figuring it was hopeless to pursue this further while we were on the road, I took a further look at things when we got home. The first time I did just to double-check was to replace the ‘index.shtml’ file with a plain-jane ‘index.html’ that did nothing except display the words Test Page. Can’t get much simpler.

And as I expected, that didn’t fix the problem, so I was back on the phone. But since I was getting into the busy part of their support day, I was number 15 in the queue. So I decided to take it up again after supper.

Nick and Terry were staying in, and Jan wanted some Hot and Sour Soup for her cold, so about 4:45 we headed over to the #1 Eastern Chinese Buffett a couple of exits west on Signal Butte. We’ve eaten here a number of times, including last Thursday, our first day in town, and it’s always great.

Besides the Hot and Sour Soup, I’m crazy about their boiled shrimp, fresh and crisp when you bite into them, not mushy like it is when they’ve been frozen.

Getting home it was back on the phone, and this time I was only number 3 in the queue. As I was waiting, I tried a number of other things, the first one being to check my other sites on this same server. And it turns out they were down too. Hmmmm!

But this site, OurRVAdventures.com, was still up. Not unusual, since this is a WordPress site, and although it’s in my Godaddy account, it’s hosted on a different server.

I next checked my sites that, although the domain names are with Godaddy, they’re hosted with a different company, Superb.net. And they were all working fine. So it’s not a domain name problem, it’s a problem on my shared server.

I won’t bore you with any more details, but after an hour and 30 minutes of checking everything, the Godaddy rep and I could not figure it out. We could see the problem, we just couldn’t see what was causing the problem.

So at that point it was boosted up to Level 3 support, and I got off the phone. I set my computer to keep trying the site, and about 30 minutes everything started working again.

I got an email from them saying it was working, but no hint as to the problem, so I’ll be back on the phone tomorrow to find out what the problem was.

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Thought for the Day:

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that it’s not worth the jail time.

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I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that I planned to paint the rig bumper this morning, but I wasn’t thinking about how early we were leaving out this afternoon for our lunch date, so no painting today, but maybe tomorrow.

Jan and I headed out about 1pm for the Tempe area, about 20 miles east. Originally Nick and Terry were supposed to go with us, but Nick woke up this morning feeling pretty sick, so were on our own for the trip.

Getting in the area, and since I do so much business with Godaddy, it was interesting to find what I thought was their HQ.

It’s a very large complex, complete with covered parking for some, and open air parking for others. They’ve also got covered basketball and tennis courts for the employees. Must be nice. I’ve never had a playground at any of the places I ever worked.

We got to our lunch destination about 2pm, and met our lunch companion in the parking lot of the Tilted Kilt, another entry in the ‘breastaurant’ category. And as it turns out, this one is their headquarters location, with their HQ building right across the large parking lot.

We were there to meet long-time blog reader Rod Ivers, who had suggested the place, and we were happy to add another ‘breastaurant’ to our list.

Rod and I both had burgers, while Jan had their Gaelic Chicken, pan-seared chicken breasts over fettuccine, and covered in an Irish Whiskey Cream Sauce. She said it was very, very good, and that she’s glad I’m driving home.

I had a cup of their Beer Cheese Soup, made with Guinness Stout. Very good, and maybe Jan should be driving home. I also had their ‘Inferno’ Burger with fries.

Also very good. But I’m sorry. These people must really be from up north, because jalapeno peppers and pepper jack cheese do not an inferno make. But a few shakes from my Volcanic Pepper shaker took care of that.

We now have 5 chains in our ‘breastaurant’ list: Hooters, the original one, Twin Peaks, Bone Daddy’s House of Smoke, Bombshell’s, and now Tilted Kilt. As far as how we rank them, it’s Twin Peaks, then Tilted Kilt, with Bombshell’s and Bone Daddy’s much further back. And, Oh, we’re ranking the food here, not the girls.

But Courtney, our ‘lassie’ would have ranked very high on any list.

It’s hard to put Hooters on that list, since we pretty much go there for the wings.

One thing that was kind of funny was that even the busboys (bus guys?) wear kilts. But they don’t look as good in theirs as Courtney did in hers.

We spent a couple of hours there and had a great time getting to know Rod, and finding out how many of the same places we’d traveled to.

Rod is heading out in his RV tomorrow or Thursday, so hopefully we’ll see him down the road somewhere.

Coming home, we stopped off at a Dunkin’ Donuts near the RV park, and I got my first bad coffee from them. It was so bad it almost tasted like Starbuck’s. They said it was fresh, but it had a burnt, bitter taste. And this wasn’t even straight coffee, but a Caramel Latte.

Back home and later in the evening, I got a email saying that my long-delay domain name transfer from Network Solutions to Godaddy had finally come through, but due to the way that NS had it configured, I was having trouble setting it up. So I gave GoDaddy Tech Support a call and talked to a very nice young lady named Misty.

But even before talking about my problem, the first thing I ask her was how do you get to park in the covered parking area, She laughed and said that if I found out to please let her know. She’s been with them about six months and still doesn’t know.

I asked her if it was as fun a place to work as I’d heard, and she said it certainly was, and that Godaddy goes out of their way to keep their employees happy. She said they have bikes and pedal cars to get between the widely separated offices and buildings, and besides the basketball and tennis courts for fun, if you don’t want to take the elevator or the stairs from the second floor to the first, you can take the giant spiral slide. Said it was really funny to watch guys in suits going ‘Wheee’ with their arms in the air like kids as they take the slide down.

She also said that they don’t use scripts when working with customers, and they’re not timed. They’re just told to keep us happy. And it was certainly obvious that they weren’t timed, since fixing my problem took just a couple of minutes, and we spent the rest of the 25 minute call talking about RV’ing, traveling, and things to see around the country. We even talked about cats. (inside Godaddy joke)

By the end of the call I’d figured out that she didn’t work at the complex we’d seen in Tempe, but their much, much bigger headquarters up in Scottsdale. So I don’t know if this one has a slide or not.

Tomorrow, maybe painting, maybe not.

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Thought for the Day:

“The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”  Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler

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