Setting up a weblog only takes six hours when your unshowered and eating Jaffle.

Today I spent approximately 4 hours setting up my WordPress weblog and online photo gallery software. I am hosting the website at my new web host www.Dreamhost.com. They are cheap and offer heaps of disk space. In fact they add an additional gigabyte of space every week or something ridiculous like that. My live camera website is uploading images 24 hours a day from five different cameras and we still have not exceeded 8% of our disk space. I am also using remote backup software to backup files on my computer in an encrypted format to my web host using some free open-source backup software that I found. The point is that you would really have to try hard to fill up your allotted disk space on this web host.

I finally gave in and purchased www.WesEdholm.com. Every time I went to purchase a domain name on godaddy.com the checkout process would try to upsell me into buying my own name. The fact that I have been very unorganized with my web publishing habits has resulted in bits and pieces of my digital existence being scattered around the Internet instead of a consolidated place. This coinciding with godaddy.com incessantly nagging me culminated with the birth of my weblog www.WesEdholm.com.

The Word press and photo gallery software were only supposed to take minutes to set up using the Dreamhost “one click install” system. Sometimes it really does go that easy; but in general to achieve perfection it usually does not for various reasons that may or may not be important enough to write about here. For example when I went to install the Word press software it said that I could not install it in the root directory because I had already installed the photo gallery software in a subfolder. Evidently Word press wants to be installed into a folder with nothing else inside of it. So I had to delete the photo gallery software and then reinstall Word press. I then had to install the photo gallery software in a subfolder. This ended up working fine but does not explain why the whole process took over four hours. The time clock actually says over six hours but part of that was spent eating mixed vegetables, e-mailing Marco about his new website, e-mailing the guy at the hotel about the new live camera installation, drinking a coffee, drinking the tea, feeding my son, e-mailing technical support about an issue with the domain name, e-mailing technical support about the photo gallery software installation getting hung up on step two, and probably a few other things such as bathroom breaks and nose pickings.

I did manage to get in a couple good hours of billable time starting at around 6 a.m. this morning before I took a drive down to Uluwatu to check out how good the surf was. It ended up being decent but I wasn’t feeling up to it so I settled for a cheese, peanut butter, banana, and honey Jaffle at the restaurant overlooking Uluwatu. After I was finished with my Jaffle I hung around to watch the surfers until I remembered that my car was parked in the sun with my surfboard inside and that the warm water wax would soon start melting all over my upholstery. While this does an excellent job of waterproofing my seats it does not do wonders for the resale value so I skipped the coffee that I was debating on having, paid my 10,000 rupiah and ventured back towards the car when I remember that I had a spare web cam I was looking to set up down here somewhere. My car was parked at the security gate of a yuppie hotel that also overlooks Uluwatu and is perched on the edge of the cliff. As I fumbled with my keys I was staring at the hotel trying to decide whether it was worth my time to go inside to see if the manager was available to pitch him on the idea of a web cam. I was also wondering how professional I might look showing up with absolutely nothing to show that I was a professional. No web cam, no briefcase, no appropriate clothing, not even a business card. What I did have was an unshowered surfer look, a five o’clock shadow, thongs, and some banana stuck to the corner of my mouth. Just when I had made up my mind not to go inside and make the pitch a tall Balinese man popped out of the security hut and asked me if he could be of any help. I ended up pitching the assistant manager who requested that I send a proposal by e-mail which I have since sent. He will give it to the general manager and hopefully set me up with a meeting next week.

After that I drove home and started work on my new weblog and photo gallery which pretty much brings us up to speed.