In the study, they will watch the accuracy of balloon spottings via Facebook, where they hope people who sight the balloons will go and report.

Ideally, the Internet will accurately report the location of the balloons in near-real-time, verifying that the Internet is a reasonably reliable place to get information.

On the other hand, people like me might go on there and blatantly lie… I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Needless to say, I purchased the crap out of it.

It is a 1.66Ghz, 1GB ram, Win XP machine with Microsoft Office 2007, 10 inch screen, and built in 3G.

Twenty Nine Bucks.

I nearly sprained my ankle trying to get to the nearest computer so I could order mine. It arrived today, and is not a disappointment.

I plan to carry it with me 24/7 to take care of IHS tech support stuff, which is pretty much always requested at the most inopportune times.

I installed my Macromedia Studio Suite (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc), Firefox, Filezilla, and Putty, so I can pretty much manage IHS completely off this thing.

For 29 bucks.

Did I mention it was 29 bucks?

I would have bought 50 of them, but it was limit one.

Monster.com still charges companies $400.00 for a basic, one-city job posting that stays up for 60 days.

As a Webmaster, it makes me cringe. The incremental cost of an additional job posting to their database is about half a cent. If they aren’t clearing at least $375, they’re grossly mismanaging their business.

In this economy, I’m disgusted that I’m still forced to use their stupid website. Sadly, the “more experienced” (by which I mean “old”) people looking for jobs are too stupid to check local job sites or Craigslist, all of which are free. No, they only look at Monster.

Monster has the corner on the market for experienced professionals and that’s why they can continue to bend over businesses.

Come on, old people, look at Craigslist job postings. Please. Pretty please.

But then, just when I think I’m ready to give up on old Craigslist, it gives me a gift. Yesterday’s gift was a low-mileage, mint condition Nikon D2x. The Craigslist ad posted it for $900. I offered the guy $750 and he accepted right away. I started wondering if it was all beat up.

We agreed to meet in a public place, where I looked at the camera and even tested it out. It’s in perfect condition, and he even had the box, paperwork, and accessories.

I handed over my $750 in cash and we both went on our way.

After searching the interwebs trying to comparison shop for a mint condition D2x, I found that they average $2,600. I knew they retailed new for $4,000.

So now I have a lovely new camera in Nikon’s “Pro” category. First one for me. I’ve been in the Pro-sumer category all my life thanks to their ridiculously high prices.

Craigslist is, to steal the analogy from Chris Rock, like an uncle that molests you but then pays for your college.

I input the information and A records, then I walked away and forgot about it. I used ihswebsolutions.com as my test site.

Well, it turns out I had a type in the IP address of my backup server. When it tested failover, it switched to a server that didn’t exist.

I was able to stick a placeholder page up there so I don’t look like a total boob, but the ordering system is totally down at the moment. I immediately fixed the IP, but it can take up to 3 days to propagate.

Lovely.

http://ihswebsolutions.com/ams.

Now they can do whatever they want whenever they want. I don’t even have to be awake.

I purchased an SSL certificate for IHS client area, and installed it. Waited for 30 hours while it propagated.

Then I realized I didn’t want to recode my entire existing website to point to https:// instead of http://. So I did some research and realized I could do it with a custom .htaccess file.

So I spent the better part of a night writing my own .htaccess rewrite rules. Another first.

Tested SSL on three major browsers, all good. Ready to launch.

It’s time to fill out the tutorial and knowledgebase sections of the customer section. I purchased a crapload of tutorials from Demowolf for a variety of things. They brand them with my logo and then I integrate them on the automation software’s client area.

I also moved my FAQ section from the main site over to the client area.

After poring over the site 500 more times for good measure, I prepared for the final step… security.

I needed it to look like the rest of my website, but as luck would have it, the template files for the software were in a different programming language than I’ve ever used before. That meant it took my 3 times as long to format it as I expected.

After much crying and flicking my screen, I finally got it looking good. I finally added the pages to the navigation on the main site. Yup, we’re that close.

The process went smoothly until I realized the only way to test the payment gateway was to actually spend money. I went in and changed the prices to $0.01 and started ordering stuff. Sure enough, the software took my payment, automatically provisioned the server and registered the (test) domain.

I also added the ability to create custom hosting packages – something I’d always shied away from given the difficulty of keeping track. The software keeps track for me. I ordered a few different custom configurations and verified that the server was being properly provisioned. Sure enough. It’s a little freaky when things work as they’re supposed to.

The home stretch!