Our RV Adventures

Catching up on a few things that went on while the blog was in la-la land, on Sunday the 23rd of December, we all got together at Brandi’s up in Katy for our family Christmas.

With Lowell’s parents coming down from Oklahoma, and Chris and Linda coming down from Kingsland, and the possibility of going-home bad weather, we decided to have our get-together on the 23rd.

Brandi always does a great job with the whole decorating thing.

Note the 3 stockings labeled K, M, and B. Their pets get their own stockings. K for Miss Kitty, the dog, M for Mooshi the cat, and B for Baxter the dog.

Brandi decided to do a Texas Christmas this year, so she did a delicious brisket. The first one she’s done, and it came out great.

So a Christmas dinner plate looked like this. If that doesn’t scream ‘Texas’ I don’t know what does.

Everybody got presents except Jan. Or at least, she didn’t get anything from me. Because her gift was wandering around the country. It got to Houston, then left Houston for Dallas, and then disappeared. And by the time it was decided that it was gone for good, Amazon was sold out.

By the time they were back in stock, and Jan got it, it was January 4th. So Jan got her present a little late, but really love it. She had mentioned a while back that she would like a Fitbit. So she got this one.

Fitbit Charge HR

And in a favorite color too.

While the blog was down we passed several milestones along the way. First up January 6th marked the beginning of my second year of Duolingo Spanish lessons.

I wish the lessons had more conversation practice, but I can read and write fairly good, but not as well yet as I could when we were living in Colombia, S.A when I was 13-14.

I also wish they would concentrate more on conversation and idioms rather than semi-obscure parts of speech like Past Imperfect, Subjunctive Past, and Conditional Perfect.

I may look at doubling up using another online service like Babbel.

In addition I just started my 4th trip through the 113 lessons that make up the course.

We passed another milestone in our RV life on the same day. January 6th  marks the beginning of our 12th year of Full-Timing, since it’s the day we picked up our 1999 American Eagle from Roman Holiday Motor Coaches in San Marcos, TX.

And we’re still having fun.

Following on my recent blog trauma, every time I called Godaddy I got one of two stories. Either my blog was ‘out of date’, or the server was ‘under mitigation’. But it took another week or so before they would even consider moving me to a new server. Why the reluctance, I don’t know.

And even then, they wanted me to do the move using their 1 Click Migration feature. But when I mentioned I had a lot of problems doing this when I upgraded from a regular WordPress site to a Managed WordPress one, I was told it would work fine.

It didn’t .

And it didn’t again when I tried it again two days later.

But when I finally got a hold of Tom, my first glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel, and with no train involved. He said with the size of my blog, with 10 years of posts, meant it would never work with a 1 Click move. He then started moving the blog manually, which took over an hour. But at the end, the blog was up and running on the new server with no problems. And none since then.

Since the Jetpack plug-in can’t be moved, until I get the Jetpack plug-in installed and configured, there won’t be any blogs emailed out. And it may bet that people will have to re-subscribe anyway.

I’ll let you know.

Thought for the Day: 

$20,473,916

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The blog has been up for over 24 hours with nary a bobble, so I’m hoping the problem is fixed once and for all. But I’ve still got my fingers crossed.

I do want to thank everyone for the many comments, suggestions, and patience. In a way I did enjoy the ‘vacation’ for doing a daily blog, but I also missed doing it.

Strange.

And to repeat what I posted on Facebook, the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated. Apparently several readers called our friend Nick Russell with condolences on my death, which to them was why my blog was pretty much gone.

And In fact, Nick even did a blog about three different times he was assumed dead, one of which his wife Terry was sent to the hospital to identify his body. You can read about it here. Greg Says He’s Still Alive

Over the next few days I’ll try to play catch-up on all our comings and goings over the last almost 3 weeks.

To recap, the blog started going up and doing early on the morning of December 23rd. Sometimes it would be up for a few minutes and then down for 30 minutes, then up for 15 minutes and down for 5.

It was completely random.

When I called that day I was told it was a ‘server’ problem and they were working on it. OK, so no problem. When I called back on the 24th, same answer. However I did learn something that explains a lot in past calls.

Apparently Godaddy techs look at the servers through some sort of internal connection and not from the ‘outside’ world like everyone else does. So when I would call they would say the blog was working fine.when my monitoring service, UptimeRobot, said it was down. Usually I would tell the tech to either look at it on his phone, or use ShotSherpa.com to view the site, and then I’d get an, “Oh. You’re right.”

I didn’t even try calling on the 25th. Pretty much any tech who was so low on the totem pole that he got stuck working on Christmas, wouldn’t be worth talking to.

But on the 26th, my ‘problem’ was no longer a server issue. Suddenly my blog was ‘out of date’, and that was causing the problem. However they couldn’t explain how my blog was going ‘in’ and ‘out of date’ every few minutes.

And they also couldn’t explain why when they were looking at it on their internal line, it also worked fine. But they were just sure that outdated themes, plugins, and widgets were the problem.

Yeah, right.

Finally I got a tech who did enough research to track down the real problem’ the server was ‘under mitigation’. This apparently means that the server is under some sort of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.

This means that some sort of ‘bot’ network, or ‘botnet’ was attacking the server with 10’s of thousands, or even 100’s of thousands of rogue computes, so overloading the server that it just can’t respond to access requests. And since this is a ‘shared’ server with 100’s or even 1000’s of websites on it, the attack on one site takes them all down.

That’s about it for today. I’ll continue on with the rest of this saga tomorrow.

Just a note. As it stands right now there are no blog posts being emailed out. Due to the server move, I’ll have to set that up all over again.

Thought for the Day: 

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”  – Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2002

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