It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

Oddhammer.com has been online since Feb of 2001 and so it seems that the 5 year anniversary is as good a time as any to do some much needed maintenance.

Let’s see what the site’s been through.. hmmm..

Back in ‘01 it was running on an old PIII 450Mhz machine and running Windows 2000 Server.  I was teaching security classes and server admin classes at the time and used it as my test rig.  I had a lot of fun with it and had it to a super reliable point where the thing would run for months without reboot (only had to reboot it to apply those darned Windows patches).  At the time I used the site just to put info I found the hard way, and didn’t have a blog (who had a blog in ‘01?).  I added the blog sometime in ‘02 (the earliest post in the archives is from Dec of ‘02 but I think I deleted some earlier posts.. ) to make it easier to post stuff.  I haven’t been consistent about the blogging at all, ah well.

Then sometime in ‘04 there was this thing called Flex that I got into ..  I was hot onto it..  coolest stuff I’d seen in a long time..  but the old PIII 450 was on the bottom end of the system requirements, if not below (I actually had Flex server running on it for a while during beta, sorta).  So I moved it to a Fedora setup running on a fine P4 3Ghz machine.  It was fast, but damn it made a lot of noise with the fans.  I had planned to move it to a co-location site not far from here, but things just kept getting in the way.  I couldn’t spend the time I knew needed to be spent on maintenance and security.. so..
The site was moved from a “cable modem” to a hosting service last month (phase one of the renovation.. hehe..) and so the uptime should be a bit better since it’s not dependent on my local cable company.  I went with a hosted solution so I wouldn’t have to worry with maintaining the O/S and all that.. I don’t have time for that anymore.. that and the traffic was probably starting to be a problem.

You see the old oddhammer which used to get oh 4 or 5 visitors per day was well over a thou (unique) visitors per day..  I’ve been pushing 10+ gigs of traffic per month.  I don’t have any plans for it other than just what it’s been, but figured with that amount of interest I needed to make some changes. 

I was talking to a web developer a year or two ago who didn’t know me but already knew my site… she said I really needed to work on the design, especially since my background is in art and all that.  She reasoned that it should always look great because it would be good for job hunting, and I never knew when an opportunity might present itself.  (*bitch.. telling me my site sucked*..  when it did.. I knew that.. lol).  Well, what she didn’t know was I’ve pretty much had the dream job.  Spiffing my site up to fluff my portfolio was a crock.  I had work to do.  So the site just kept sucking… broken links, bad design, sucky tables for layout, and kept getting more google rank.  kind of scary.

So what’s in store for the hammer?  I don’t know really..  another 5 years?  I’ve moved from pMachine to Expression Engine for the blog (w00t!) and that’s a good start.

Why do I do it?  Offers like this that I got a week or so ago “you absolute star! if ever you pass through sydney or london - a beer of your choice is yours.” from Dave C. are priceless.  I couldn’t do my job if it weren’t for the willingness of others in the Flash community to share knowledge.. and so I do my part even if I probably will never get to collect that beer.