Recently in humour Category

At times I get out of bed in the morning and I wonder why on earth I'm involved in this "game". Maybe I should have got into something else.

But what?

The last couple of weeks' rain has inspired me, as well as soaking me to the skin.

Add to that the flooding of some parts of Carlow town (only a few hundred metres from our offices on the banks of The Barrow) over the weekend and I may have hit on the solution!

We're going to branch out into selling watersports equipment.

We'll start with Scuba gear, as we're probably all going to have to swim to the office soon anyway.

I'm not sure if we should really go full out on this or not:

What do you think?

Maybe we'll just stick with hosting for the moment ....

It's amazing what designers come up with at times!

Mouse over it to see what it's all about ....

For the last few months we have been regular advertisers in a number of UK magazines including Linux Format.

Print advertising is an interesting "game". You can spend a fortune and reap no return or spend very little and see your sales jump over night.

For the first few months of our advertising "run" in Linux format we didn't do anything really "special" with our ads. The ads we ran were the same as any of the ads we'd run in other publications. While I thought this was a good thing on one level I also thought it would be nice to do something a little bit different for the specific demographic of Linux Format (click to enlarge):

I've no idea where Alan, who does our print ads, found the penguin, but it brought a smile to my face.

I hate acronyms.

Of course they're impossible to avoid if you work in IT, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

RAID is one of those acronyms that really wrecks my head.

Not RAID itself which means simply Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, but the different types of RAID array that can exist.

RAID, in case you didn't know, is a way of improving redundancy and performance in servers by using multiple disks. Of course you don't have to use multiple disks, but if you don't you will run the risk of losing data.

A few months ago someone posted a very nice simple graphic that explained the differences between the various types of RAID arrays.

Taken from: http://www.epidauros.be/raid.jpg

One of our technical staff sent me a link earlier today to a bash.org quote which sums up the potential issues with single disk servers very nicely:

sterano: Whats the difference between Raid_0 and Raid_1? Steve: In Raid_0 the zero stands for how many files you are going to get back if something goes wrong.

Moral of the story - use more than one physical disk :)

I'd like to think that we don't take ourselves too seriously. Sure - hosting is a serious business, but there's nothing wrong with having a bit of a laugh from time to time - even if its from a competitor!

One of our competitors posted a link to a YouTube video today that was quite amusing. Remember Monty Python?

NB: Contains some language that people *may* find offensive

A couple of months ago (time flies!) I was asking people both here and on LinkedIn for product name suggestions.

I was expecting some feedback, but I was totally unprepared for the sheer volume of replies I got.

Wow!

Thanks for taking the time to exercise your grey matter and help us out!

Some of the suggestions were good, some were amusing and some were, well, em, a little, mad!

In the end we'll be opting for something that is hopefully simple enough for people to "get" without being too restrictive:

minimus, medius, maximus

Thanks for the input!