WhiteSites Blog
WhiteSites Blog
You can't call anything a hobby unless its consuming your time, and quickly turning into a money pit. Which leads you to do things like spending money on tools and equipment that will help you spend less money on your hobby long term. This brings me to my currently delima. Should I start reloading my own ammo?
After some discussions with friends about the economy, I wanted to put my own thoughts in writing for future reference. My feeling is 2015 is going to be a great year for the US Economy. And here is why
On Christmas after opening presents, we quickly got all our christmas decorations put away, and started to focus on the new year. This included shopping for Health Insurance. Our current Provider Cigna had already informed us that our rates would be jumping for 2015. Even though I tend to be conservative on most issues, I also don't fall into that high tax bracket that puts me on Par with other OLD gumpy republicans. I am a younger guy (35) so I am not affraid of using self checkout at Grociery stores and I am very comfortable with online shopping. For these reasons I decided to give the Healthcare.gov website a try. For those of you who buy your insurance directly from the market place, I highly suggest you give the site a try.
Anyone who works in technology is usually surrounded by the clutter of old hardware. Over the years I have upgraded systems where the old components were no longer needed, be it memory, or Hard Drives. So my office had slowly become a graveyard for perfectly good but older hardware. Finally after getting ahead of my inbox, I decided to conquer my office clutter and do an Ebay blitz to sell off this stuff. After all Technology doubles in power every 18 months ( Moore's Law ), but this also means it depreciates by 50% every 18 months ( My Law ). Holding onto old hardware thinking that someday you might need it again is a bad habbit for most of us. It's time to sell it.
Matt Cutts has been at google for over 15 years, he is one of the most respected voices in Search Optimization. Mainly because unlike any other SEO guys out there he actually works for google. So I decided to take some of his advice from past vidos and articles and combine them into a short guide for any website that wants to increase their search rankings.
After upgrading my graphics card ealier in the year, I gave up on bitcoin mining. Not because the returns were quickly dropping as the Hive's Hashing power continued to increase, but because of the amount of heat a monster video card creates. That combined with a hot texas summer, and a home office that does not have a dedicated AC unit, instead its central air, caused me to prefer comfort over Mining. But with it now being mid November and temperatures dropping in Texas, I had a new reason to Start Mining again. To Keep my office warm and cozy.
Recently I heard about a little loop hole in the whole Obama Care thing. Its called Short Term Health Insurance. Since Short Term Health Insurance is less than 12 months of coverage none of the Obama Care Rules apply to it. This makes it ideal for people who are healthy, and just need something to cover emergencies. After I got a letter from Cigna ( my current health insurnace provider ) saying our rates were going up 12%. I am seriously thinking about cancelling my plan with Cigna and just getting a Short Term Plan.
If you are looking for a truely terrifying Haunted House in Houston, look no further than Terror Dome. This one might not be appropriate for young children, unless you want to mentally scare them for life.
They are located on East I-10 just outside of the Beltway. They are right next door to the Spookers Halloween Store, which is where you buy tickets before you get in line.
Tickets Cost $20 a piece, but coupons are availble on their website to save a few bucks.
The best night to go is Saturday or Halloween night, when they have the Live DJ and Zombie Dancers, makes for a very entertaining evenining, especially if you are with friends.
Twilio is a great service for developers who want to integrate SMS, MMS, and voice features to their websites and applications. One of the great things that twilio does is provide status updates on the messages you send. Letting you know if they are Queued, Sending, Sent, or Delivered. However these status updates come from a Proxy that is Cloud Hosted, and does not originate from any specific IP or block of IPs. When I submitted a ticket to Twilio asking for the IP blocks they use, they said there are no set of IPs used, and that they are constantly changing. However After a little digging through my Access Logs I have been able to compile a list of IPs that Twilio has used to access my server. Hopefully these will help others who need at least something they can whitelist on their firewall for twilio.
There are many ways to meassure what is the best when it comes to haunted houses. Some haunts have elaborate sets, but you don't actually interact with the exhibit. More like walking through a museum. Other Haunts are a few twisted hallways, that spit you out at the end asking yourself, "That was it?" So before you go wait in a vegas style queue line ( they make you wait for hours for no reason at all ) at one of the more well known haunts read this.