Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
That’s the hope. I think my schedule will be clear enough to get it done in July, because I think schedule will get worse after that….
I am making progress this last week and hope to make more this long weekend.
That’s a thought. I’ve also thought about starting the Beta before I reach the end, although I rejected that since I can’t guarantee that I can write faster then Beta Demons can read…I know when Book 2 was published last year there were people who had it done in like 8 hours…
I shall think on Chapter 116. It has some new fun, but then a big section that was excised from Book II during Beta due to length (specifically the fate of Lilith’s demon army). So people who were in Beta last time around basically know that big chunk of the chapter.
There are a lot of solutions that work…but few that integrate directly into this site easily.
It’s a trade off. This is an open source .net forum (standalone even) integrated into an open source cms; so yes there are bugs…
I have multiple stacks worth of various variants of popular things, but there is also the question of the time to migrate everything to a new platform, particularly ones I don’t know well.
For example, much of them are php; I haven’t used php since the late nineties, and have never been a fan of it. And to be honest, I haven’t done a heck of a lot of *nix development and minimal systems since the advent of Windows NT. Prior to that I was all *nix and VMS. But I started working in MS based business environments; smaller shops that preferred windows to *nix.
Anyway a hosted solution is unlikely to integrate well. And trying to keep themes and look/feel consistent across platforms is a ton of work.
And it’s not just this site, I have multiple sites all of which would have to be migrated otherwise I am maintaining too many platforms.
Well, aging is complex in a world where lifespans vary by huge amounts.
Also information on controversial subjects is not widely shared. I think one thing that is confusing to many readers is that different people say things that contradict each other all the time, this is because they have different world views; in most books there probably aren’t so many widely different perspectives intertwining so closely.
I think the people that call Lenamare “old” are his students. This is the traditional “anyone over 30 is old” plus, Lenamare is so bitterly unpleasant and perpetually grumpy, he seems older than he really is. Part of his “old” is is authoritarian nature. He just “seems old” He was also a child prodigy, and has been around and annoying for a couple decades. However, his life of perpetual anger and stress has made him look older than his physical age. He looks like someone in his late 40’s.
And Maelen is not precisely correct about wizards knowing all of this. Highly educated animages, such as the higher ups in the Society know this and sort of assume most high level wizards would as well. The Anilords tended to live very long lives. Most animages know it’s possible but don’t necessarily have the skills to do it.
For wizards, the rejuvenation, resurrection and similar spells are generally the most powerful of thaumaturgical spells. Maelen being a healer and seer, is thus most familiar with thaumaturgy and sorcery.
The problem is, thaumaturgists are not particularly flashy, they don’t summon demons or throw lighting and balls of fire. They do plant spells, healing and similar heavy animus type spells. And these often require more work at the higher levels for less obvious results. It is sort of looked down upon as being rather pedestrian, thus not a whole lot of wizards spend a lot of time with it.
Very few live long enough to be a great thaumaturgist and Pyromancer or Conjuror; it just takes too much time, too much specialization. And while a Master Wizard, like pretty much everyone on the council is a ‘master’ of each of the discipline, the heavy duty spells of life extension are quite a bit beyond what is required for a “Master Level’
Of course, Necromancers also have ways of prolonging life. Or something like life. But trust me, you wanna kill a party? When some asks you what you do, just say “Oh, I’m a necromancer.” People will suddenly find other things to do than be anywhere near you.
As for Trevin, well, most people know/believe she is several hundred years old; in fact we know her to be over 1000. There is great speculation about her, some suspect that the “old” is an illusion and that Trevin has been multiple people over the centuries. Others speculate that she has become immortal, but without eternal youth, and tries to make herself look younger but the best she can manage is 100+ year old wrinkled flesh in a harem costume. The truth? Well, so far Jenn probably has received the most insight into that.
As for Exador, he has little use for Thaumaturgy, he qualified as “Master Thaumaturgist” just as a notch on the way to Master Wizard (mainly in competition with Lenamare) but he has little patience for it, nor practical need, being truly immortal. It’s not going to cross his head; nor does he want to raise any more suspicion than necessary, thus he pretends to have a normal lifespan of around 80 years or so, give or take depending on the particular ‘incarnation’
Also, remember, he is not always a wizard. His last several incarnations were as wizards, but he’s also been the Ach-Vicar General of the Rod; ostensibly a non magical position. He has been an animage as well; probably a few other things, warlord, knight, etc.
Reasonably certain most people in the Abyss would like him to move to his own country.
That is the main problem with sovereign citizens, they are typically occupiers on foreign soil. Seems to me that, unless they have visa agreements with the nation they are residing in, they could be deported.
Not exactly sure to where, the only truly neutral place would be Antarctica. Sure, the moon or mars are options, but very expensive options. Much cheaper to deport people to Antarctica. Plus from an ethics point, at least there is the possibility of survival in Antarctica. The other two spots, we’d need to provide them with a space suit and a really huge bottle of air…not sure about water, if Nestle gets its way, water will not be a universal human right. Pretty clear from mass starvation that food is not currently a right.
So Antarctica seems best; and before long, it’ll have excellent vacation opportunities, the SC’s can stake out all the future beach front property and make lots of money.
Of course with so many SC’s it could become very chaotic once enough are down there, it would sort of be like Eternal War ala Warcraft….
Yeah, I know on the Venezuela…eeshh.
I’m still working on the avatars. I fixed this by using my super powers as admin to post an external site for the image.
The problem is, this isn’t available to non-admins. The only way normal users can add an avatar is via the DNN user management, which is what is getting blocked by the DNS rebinding issue.
I am a little unsure of the DNN Gravatar support.
What did you do for it to work, did you just register http://www.astlan.net on your gravatar profile and DNN pulls it in automatically?
Although it’s also working on http://www.astlan.org so did you register both?
That’s what it looks like, that’s what I figured, you don’t seem to have anything set.
The DNN Avatar selector lets you choose to upload from a URL, but that appears to just load it into the system like a file upload which shows up broken.
Tried that for Lenamare.
Going to try unsetting my avatar both in the forum and on main site to see if my gravatar just shows up.
I have gravatar working for me; I changed my gravatar and it changed here.
Still not doing it for Lenamare though.
Yep, signing up in here will allow me to collect the usernames and auto-beta demonize people.
I will also post a link for people who haven’t dropped a note in here.
The big problem is that gmail and hotmail are not liking my emails for various reasons, so people should check back here periodically as I can’t guarantee everyone will get the site emails.
The same is true for my clients; this is a first foray for them to go through me for anything.
My clients have all either hosted themselves internally, or used third party colocation or dedicated hosting packages and now dedicate virtualizations.
ATT, QWEST, various other old school hosters, now days SungardAS Enterprise Cloud, AWS, Rackspace….lots of people like Rackspace, I’m ambivalent, but they have a lot of different options and models so very different companies can find a fit with them.
SungardAS, for financial services is sort of the gold standard. It costs a fortune and is procedure-ally bound as hell, everything is at least a 5 person job; it’s change management hell, but that’s what people are paying for.
I had a client who I transitioned from 24K/month at ATT to about 7K/month at AWS; we tested and tested/vetted, moved in and the first freaking week we were their the SAN in their NE-US data center went down, taking all the “indpendent zones” down for 2+ days.
Needless to say, we then started moving to SungardAS which was about 10-12K/month. Worked great until they were acquired and then we moved everything to Rackspace because that’s where the new parent company was.
I am going to push this for my smaller clients, or larger clients who want cheaper dev or dr Protection.
I can CloudProtect any windows server (physical or VM) with very low resource replication agent on a 3 hour sync to my cloud for peanuts.
I am working overtime to bring up linux based solutions as well. Looked at Docker, but not so sure how it works in an non docker environment, so currently testing TurnkeyLinuxLXC and messing with Bitnami Images and Webuzo.
Just glanced at your link. Holy bananas; their dedicated server pricing is unbelievable! Going to be checking these guys out.
My plan is to rent out cloud blocks of resources
1) vLan with FW appliance, private class-C, unlimited IPsec branch office tunnels, unlimited openVPN users $50/month (including basic support and 50 Gb outbound/month) Inbound data free, additional outbound data $0.04/Gb
2) RAM, vCPU, DiskSpace all by chunks
a) $10/vCPU/month
b) $10/GB RAM/month, including Windows Server licensing (discount for linux)
c) $10/100 GB RAIN storage/month (which will include so many IOPS, but you can add more IOPS for more money)
You can reserve extra data for snapshots
d) Option to CloudProtect on a different hypervisor
e) option for an HTML5 client RDP serverYou order what you want and that is reserved and dedicated to you, and you slice it and dice it into however many vms of whatever type you want.
I plan to provide some standard linux container options as well as allowing custom OVA/OVF files.Really looking to target smaller dev teams and individuals on top of my actual clients.
Actually, that cloud consultant model is very important. There is so much changing in the space and these platforms move/change so fast that it can become bewildering for people in the corporate environment, who have a lot of other stuff on their plate to follow it. Much like using network security consultants to ensure ones network/systems are safe. I have a lot of friends that do that, and they are pouring over the latest security bulletins and working on patches, it takes a lot of dedication and attention.
I see the same thing coming quickly in the cloud space; particularly for customers that are somewhat agnostic. In the old days, most companies focused on a particular set of brands Dell, HP, IBM and similar Software vendors, and just tunnel visioned and trusted them and did what they did. Now, the cloud has decentralized everything a great deal as well, and even within a single provider like AWS there are so many options, so many gotchas that having a navigator is critical to success, and that is a service level that AWS is not in the business of providing.
Rackspace, for larger clients, will do that sort of service level, but then again you are tunneled into their view(s) of the universe. It’s a lot to disentangle.
My model is actually pretty simple and I am not building from scratch I have gone with a whitebox cloud provider that has a platform and scaling already in place and I am repackaging and selling their product as a channel partner, basically.
I bought a specially modified hyper visor that is in their enterprise cluster (like a condo) I therefore “own” X CPU’s, Y GB RAM, and the internal drives/ssd’s that act as caching devices for the RAIN. This includes 24×7 technical support for the cloud platform and full hardware support for a bit too long of a period of time.
I then resell outbound bandwidth, hard disk space on the RAIN on a usage basis, and if I want Windows licensing (for which they have a per GB RAM pricing model worked out) MS SPLA licenses or I can use my own. I also resell from them common infrastructure public IP’s and a few other software licenses (FW appliance, CloudProtect Agent+lower tier storage for the backup server replication)
Since my node is in a cluster, if my node goes down, they can roll me onto another node; further if growth comes faster than I can add nodes, they can rent me resources on other nodes for a bit higher cost until I can add the next node (and that’s me coming up with the capital) Similarly, I can cloudprotect vm’s on my node on other nodes (that is included in the cloud protect price I pay)
Their platform is highly customized based on ESXi 5.5 now, going to 6.0 which they have built their web based management system around the ESXi API.
From a hardware perspective, they roll new machines into the infrastructure with new generations each year or so. Each year it’s a very specific standard server unit that they’ve optimized to work with their proprietary RAIN (which is why disk performance is better than I’ve seen at most other providers for the same money)
How I upgrade is by adding additional hypervisors of the new platform each year and people OK with older platforms stay on the older hypervisors. Which is really what they do/did in the dedicated server space.
The target audience is really the SMB market and channel partners like myself; except that most of my money making clients are a bit bigger than their target audience, which is why I mainly push for using it as a cheaper backup/test/dev environment, not production.
It’s also not designed/targeted for the really dynamic stuff you can do at AWS, spinning up VM’s on the fly. The target is really that segment that used to rent dedicated whitebox servers but now wants to be on the cloud.
My goal is to come up with a very simple pricing model that is cheaper/more cost upfront/easy to use than what they can get from most cloud providers. I.e. create something that I or someone like myself could use and get a good value out of.
I am still working on balancing out my support cost vs cheapness. For example that FW/vlan includes some of my time per month assisting people (not much but some) plus my markup. I don’t know yet how much of my time will be taken up, I’d like to get the entry price cheaper, but am concerned about getting bogged down.
In theory, I get enough documentation down, I want the platform to be very self driven/automated. It actually is, but there is the learning curve and good documentation is critical to keep support calls/requests down.
My biggest goal is to cover my costs and get another revenue stream that is stable. Books are one such stream, this is another. As an independent consultant, I am getting tired of the feast or famine model and am trying to build more stable baseline income streams.
And for that, the CloudProtect business will probably be best. I’ll give people a preconfigured vlan with all VPN connections ready to go, replicate all their servers into it in cold standby mode, and then let it run until disaster strikes; that’s very low overhead–just monthly testing of the VM’s which I can shift to the client’s support team. You have an upfront setup, which I bill as a consultant and then just a stable revenue stream.
Exactly. I actually am trying to get more time to write.
The big problem I have with getting money in a feast/famine mode is that I essentially have to go full time with a single client; and when I do, I tend to be all in one way or the other. If I have to go onsite, then I generally add 1.5 hours per day travel, at least and am probably really focused on them for 50 hours per week; so we close in on 60 hours/week which sort of wears me out. I end up sitting in front of the TV watching netflix, or reading a book; not writing a book–because it requires too much thinking and I am thunk out.
And then when the client is done; yes I’ve saved up money, but now its famine time.
My goal is to have multiple smaller clients, only occasionally go onsite, and have otherwise stable recurring income to level things out, giving me the flexibility to write as the muse occurs. This is a revenue stream to ensure minimum income.
Eventually, I should be able to turn the tables and make IT/Consulting the side business and writing the main business, but I’m not there yet; at least not to my current living standards. And being a tech-nut, my expenses for tech things are pretty ridiculous: Redundant 100+ Mbps ISPs at my house, professional firewall w/maintenance, Multiple developer subscriptions (e.g. RadStudio maintenance, MSDN, DevExpress, various ETL tools) and all sorts of things like that plus my 3D graphics hobby (Vue Infinite maintenance, PoserPro, Adobe CC) And of course, my entertainment, Cable, all premium movie channels, Netflix etc.
And that doesn’t even consider the random one-off binges like when I went IOT crazy and bought all this stuff for arduino, pi, etc
I am actually very lucky in that as an S-Corp in IT, all my favorite hobbies are business expenses because I also use them for clients.
