Concerning the new address
I notice that over at Free Canuckistan, Binks has mentioned my change of address (so to speak). That’s as good a reason as any to quickly talk about the reasons behind the move.
Basically, the move has to do with the fact that I outgrew my previous hosting company, Canaca.com. They were good to me while they were adequate to my needs, but over the last few months it became apparent that they were, in fact, no longer adequate to my needs.
The first such indication was a link from Digg to one of my Battlestar Galactica articles, in which I gave a very detailed explanation of my reason for suspecting that the character in that show named Karl Agathon (Helo, by callsign) was in fact the final, as-yet-unrevealed Cylon. The day the link hit Digg, about a thousand people tried to view the content within a fairly short span of time, overloading the shared server with PHP function calls.
Oops.
That happened again a couple months later, although the traffic spike at that time was only on the order of about 500 inbound connections…which suggests to me that one (or possibly more) of the other sites on the shared server was also dealing with heavier traffic load. But whatever; Time Immortal was taken down a second time, and I again had to plead for its re-activation with a promise to do my very level best to curb traffic spikes in the future.
And I tried pretty hard to do just that. I put in place very aggressive caching, cut back on the number of cron jobs I was running, and tried a few other optimizations as well. Canaca.com, for their part, also tried to help out by imposing a mandatory limit of 250 simultaneous connections on my account.
Evidently, that all wasn’t enough: last week, my account was irrevocably suspended for overloading, for a third and final time, the server with PHP function calls. What’s really odd is that none of my sites show traffic spikes; everything was “normal.”
Which suggests to me that despite the fact that between all my various websites combimed (e.g. Aiera, Lost Sosaria, my and Grace’s wedding website, Grace’s blog, and a couple of others) tended to receive not more than about 500 hits a day, my hosting needs had outgrown Canaca.com’s ability to provide adequate resources.
It was, in other words, time for a change. Enter Mediatemple. These guys are serious players (they host the Adobe website!), and offer what I think is a fairly unique service. The hosting package I have with them is their “(gs)” grid service, which (if I understand it correctly) stores redundant copies of my site across several servers, and uses load-balancing technology to distribute incoming traffic spikes between those copies. In theory, this enables the site to survive links from Digg, Slashdot, and other such sites. I’ve also got aggressive caching in place (again), to further insulate myself from the possibility of being taken down by a traffic spike.
At any rate, those are the technical reasons behind the migration to a new website, to a new blog. In the meantime, Canaca.com has graciously allowed me FTP access to my account with them, and I am in the process of backing up files from there. As I liberate the files for the various domains and subdomains I had previously been maintaining, I will put those websites back online, through the mediatemple hosting account.
There’s one other reason for the change of address, though, and this is the reason it’ll be a permanent change. As former Time Immortal readers will know, I got married last year, in October. My wife and I, this past October, welcomed our little girl — Ella Rose — into the world, a mere six days after our first anniversary. In all that time, Grace and I had kept our respective last names, and had been tossing around trying to decide what to do about them. We both agreed that we didn’t want Ella to have parents with different last names, and we both agreed that hyphenation was not really an option.
So…whose last name were we to choose?
Social tradition would dictate that we take my last name (Kully) and simply make that the family name. Now, the former Time Immortal reader will know that I’m a stickler for some traditions (specifically, for Sacred Tradition — the traditions of the Catholic Church). Where other traditions are concerned, however, I’m more ambivalent.
Whose last name a married couple takes is not a matter that can be determined by Canon Law or appropriate consultation of relevant doctrinal documents. As far as Grace and I can tell, the Church has no specific teaching pertaining to whose last name a married couple must take. Western social tradition, again, dictates that the couple should take the man’s name…
…but what if the man feels more like a son to the wife’s parents? What if both he and his wife agree that where they perceive divergent values between their respective families, it is the values of her family that they would wish to instill in their child?
And so I made a choice which some might think is unusual: I decided that I would take my wife’s last name. Because at the end of things, the only argument that could be stacked against the reasoning above is that social tradition suggested the opposite course of action…which is a pretty stupid reason, I must say.
So there it is — the real reason behind the change of address, in addition to the aforementioned technical problems. I’ve been blogging under the Time Immortal pseudonym for long enough, and I wanted to move to a site that better reflects the new life journey I have set myself on, with God’s guidance, and in His sight.
So do enjoy the new site, good reader. And do come back again.
