Updates

It’s been a bit hectic, so here’s some updates.

Maggie’s shop got broken into in the middle of the night last Saturday night/Sunday morning. They popped open the two back doors. They had crappy deadbolts where the bolt was only about 3cm long and the rest of the mechanism was just a slender rod. Suckers popped right out. She has security through Tokai so the alarm went off and guards responded fairly quickly, but the burglars were gone by then. They didn’t manage to get anything for their trouble though. The security company also called Maggie and then she dragged me out of bed at 2am to go over to check things out. The security guard was covering the back door when we arrived but hadn’t gone in and hadn’t called the cops. Maggie insisted the cops be called before going inside. A second security guard showed up and decided he was brave enough to go in to check things out. A bit later the cops showed up to take a report. In case you are wondering, it’s about impossible to get a door replaced on a Sunday.

The new shop is going well. We need to work on a more efficient work schedule, but this is also the slow season for Subway in Taiwan. Also need to work on some store marketing because the old owners didn’t do anything in that area. However the store paperwork system the old owner designed is some hot stuff and makes the weekly reports a breeze. Need to implement that in the new store. I promised to keep everything the same for one month so just planning now what to do. We also decided to close for three days for Chinese New Years and work a reduced schedule for one week.

Today I found out that one of my favorite authors, Robert Anton Wilson died on Thursday morning in California. If you recall from a previous post asking for financial help, this was not unexpected. Thanks to everyone who donated a few months back, he was able to stay at home and get good medical care through the end.

I also host the Official Robert Anton Wilson Website on my computer, so one hint I got that something had happened was seeing my poor little SDSL line pegged to the limit with 99% of the hits for that one host. I temporarily redirected the main page to his blog on Blogspot, but it turns out that he uses some of his site’s images on his blog, so that didn’t really help any.

I was able to temporarily move the host to a free trial account I had through 1and1.com but that only has a 5gb/month traffic limit which would only last at best 12 hours with the traffic it was getting. I was thinking of upgrading the account there, but they don’t have the best reputation for reliability. Later I found a good deal on a hosting account through hostgator.com and setup on there. They seem to get good reviews, and have good rates. Also they have a promo to take $9.94 off the first month when using promo code ‘whreviews’ and since the account that I was looking at was $9.95 per month that means the first month is 1 cent with no obligation. If they work out OK I’ll probably move most of my stuff there after I shut down tcp.com at the end of next month.