And then we have:

From New Zealand

Tell me. What DO they have in common, dear reader?

The second photo, by the way, is one I took on our way to the veggie market we shopped at. I’m easily amused.

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Then look at the picture.

From New Zealand

And tell me what you figure out.

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• Now tell me what these two have in common
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From New Zealand

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

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From New Zealand

And hanging out by the droves in the CBD.

From New Zealand

Or this guy:

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

Who hung out practically everywhere that I could see.

And by everywhere, I really do mean everywhere…

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

From New Zealand

Food courts. Subways. Inside other buildings… Yeah, just the way I like it. Similar Posts:

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We were lucky enough to have an apartment on the 17th floor, which meant we had a decent view. Which, naturally, I took advantage of. Happiness!

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Fahim and I arrived in New Zealand last on the 28th of February. By the time we reached the serviced apartment we’d arranged before we’d left Sri Lanka, it was the early hours of the 1st of March. Mere days ago. So why and how did we end up in New Zealand?

About a year ago, Fahim and I were discussing where in the world we wanted to live. We’d looked into the middle east, like Dubai for example, but there, the only way to stay in the country legally is to be there on a work permit where you work for another company. And, as soon as the job is over, we’d have to leave the country. There are no provisions for permanent residency and acquiring citizenship, so at best, it would be a temporary situation. We didn’t want that.

We looked around at other countries, seeing what the possibilities were. New Zealand came up. No surprise – it was a country that we’d discussed before we even got married. So I researched New Zealand further and saw that we had two good options. One was to come over as a skilled migrant, but again, that would mean Fahim working as an employee for someone else’s company. Or we could come over on a long term business visa, start our own business, and have a life here on the terms we preferred.

I spent the next six months or so working on the business plan, which ended up being around 320-350 pages long. Really really long, I know.

In my defense, that includes well over 200 pages of financial projections, market research, and other supporting documentation. Still, quite thorough, which I figured was necessary since we were depending on it to, you know, emigrate to a whole other country that had no other reason to let us in.

Apparently, it worked.

How long will we stay? It depends. Does the business work as well as we believe it will, as well as the market research seems to indicate it can? Then most  likely for the rest of our lives. This is the preferable option. Or does it flop? We’re really hoping for successful. Similar Posts:

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From New Zealand

We’re staying in a serviced apartment at the moment. It’s cheaper than a hotel, has a small kitchen, a washer/dryer, and is really convenient to the CBD (central business district) in Auckland. It’s also really really small. And it’s on the 17th floor, so we get a decent view. I like views.

All these photos were taken from our balcony.

The first photo (above) is of the harbour. Next we have the downtown area. Well, some of it, anyway.

From New Zealand

Another shot of the harbour.

From New Zealand

The harbour at night.

From New Zealand

A shot of the street outside our place.

From New Zealand

We’re a few short blocks from Queen Street, which is the central shopping district in the CBD. Everything’s there. There are superettes everywhere and restaurants and cafes, too.

The only real problem? We’re on a hill. And, from what I can tell, Auckland CBD is hilly, or at least, the parts where we’ve been is hilly. Up hills, down hills, everywhere we go, there are hills. My leg muscles are not entirely happy about that. But theoretically, in a month or so of walking those hills every day or other day, it won’t be so bad… Similar Posts:

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Image via Wikipedia

Fahim and I have a new adventure happening. We’re flying off – theoretically, at least since we’re waiting to board the flight – to a new for us country.

Why? Because we can. Seriously, though, I’ll answer that in another post.

To where? Well, since I am nothing if not a little bit mean, I’m leaving it for you to guess.

Here’s what you need to know. We’re leaving early Monday morning from CMB – the Colombo international airport in Negombo, Sri Lanka. We have a very short layover in a city that both Fahim and I have spent time in. Then we’re on the second leg of our flight to a city and country that neither of us have been to before, which is where we plan on being for the next, uh, while.

The question before you are these:

1. What is our stopover destination? Five points for guessing the correct country and an additional five points for guessing the correct city.
2. What is our final destination? Fifteen points for guessing the correct country and 25 points for narrowing it down to the correct city.
3. What is my favourite happy colour? Hint: I used to have it as a hair colour. A bonus 50 points for guessing correctly. Be specific.

That’s a total of, um, *counts fingers and toes* 100 points up for grabs. Whoever gets the most points wins! And what do you win? Why, you win my, uh, admiration. Yeah, that’s it! And, uh, respect. And, um… Yeah, that’s it.

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Fahim went to the Rackspace site and signed up for an account. He received an email saying that Rackspace would call him to verify the account. No phone call.

Then he got another email saying they, Rackspace, needed Fahim to call them – on our dime – to verify the account. So he did. Only to be told that the account could not be created for “legal reasons”. What legal reasons? They could not tell us.

@rackspace Wants me to call them back on my dime to tell me that I can't have an account with them. Major customer support fail! @scobleizer

Sunday, 12 December 2010 7:21 am via NambuReplyRetweetFavorite

@FahimFarook

Fahim Farook

@rackspace Apparently won't give me an account and can't tell me why for legal reasons. Bad customer service. @scobleizer

Sunday, 12 December 2010 7:22 am via NambuReplyRetweetFavorite

@FahimFarook

Fahim Farook

And why did they need us to call them, spending our money on an international call, for them to tell us the account was denied when they could have emailed us that information? Was it to prevent anything from being in writing?

Bottom line: No account. No explanation why no account.No option to resolve the issue through the customer service person.

We got a response back:

@LMAshton @FahimFarook @rackspace @scobleizer Fahim - would love to help. pls email me at rob @ rackspace.com with details.

Sunday, 12 December 2010 7:35 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@kr8tr

Rob La Gesse

Meanwhile, I have questions. Like…

Question of the day: is @rackspace denying service because of our location (Sri Lanka) or because of @FahimFarook's name (Muslim)?

Sunday, 12 December 2010 7:36 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

All the information they had on Fahim at that point was his name (Muslim), his location (Sri Lanka), and his credit card details. Our credit card works fine, and if there was an issue of the credit card being declined, they would likely tell us. So what’s the reason for the account being denied?

The response?

@LMAshton @rackspace @FahimFarook It is neither, I can assure you both. We want more business, not less.

Sunday, 12 December 2010 7:37 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@kr8tr

Rob La Gesse

Then what is the reason?

Meanwhile, Fahim emailed @kr8tr and, three hours later, is still awaiting a response other than “it could have been for fraud protection.”If it’s for fraud protection, again, the only information they have on us is Fahim’s name, our location, and his credit card details.

We still don’t have an account and we still have no answers.

Lessons that Rackspace could learn from this:

1. Don’t tell a potential customer to call Rackspace if the only thing the potential customer is going to be told is that they can’t have account.
2. If you’re going to have a verification process in place, why not make it actually useful instead of turning down potential legitimate clients who are not criminals or terrorists.
3. Don’t offer hollow assurances that the reason for the denial isn’t location or ethnicity when that’s the ONLY information you have on a potential client. It rings false.
4. Provide a potential client with a way to escalate the situation through normal customer service channels to a supervisor who can approve the account. If we have to call on the name of Scoble or use Twitter to resolve an issue, then you’ve already got a customer service problem.

The reason we wanted to go with Rackspace? Scoble raved on and on about their service, as have other people. We thought they would be better than this.

If they can clear this up and create an account for us, we’d still like to go with them based on their reputation. Meanwhile, we’re still awaiting resolution.’

UPDATE:

We now have a Rackspace account, approved and everything. Thank you, @kr8tr, for looking into this and seeing that it gets resolved.

UPDATE:

I was wrong. We don’t have a working Rackspace account. Fahim received a “welcome to Rackspace” letter. He followed the link to a “your account is suspended” page. I suspect that it’s not a welcome letter that he was intended to receive.

UPDATE PROBABLY THE LAST:

AND IT’S UP! We have a working account. Fahim’s created our server instance. And he’s happily mucking about in there. Yay! Happiness abounds!

MUCH thanks to Rob La Gesse aka @kr8tr for getting this resolved so quickly.

UPDATE REALLY THE LAST, I THINK:

We got our Rackspace account and Fahim has moved everything over. Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting to do the WordPress 3.0.3 update on my blogs because with SLHost, I’ve had to do it manually. I’d always get an out of memory error. On the new server at Rackspace, Fahim allocated 64 MB of RAM to PHP instead of the 32 MB of RAM for PHP he had allocated at SLHost. Okay, double the RAM, good. So I figured I’d try doing the automatic updrade on the blogs. The automatic upgrades that hadn’t worked in how long?

And, because I pretty much like pushing things to see what the limits are, I did four blogs at the same time. Because I wanted to see what would happen. You know what happened? The upgrades worked. All of them. With NO out of memory error messages. With NO error messages of any kind. And it was fast. Four. At a time. When I couldn’t do one at a time before.

Yeah. Moving to Rackspace? Good. Decision. Ditching SLHost? Another good decision. Yup.

UPDATE THE FOLLOWING MORNING (REALLY REALLY THE LAST UPDATE, I THINK):

You know how I mentioned I couldn’t move my email from the IMAP server to the local folders on my notebook? And you know how I said it could be because of our crappy Internet connection? Well, guess what?

This morning, the day after the move to the new server at Rackspace, I tried moving the email to my local folders on my notebook. And it worked. Flawlessly. On the same lousy Internet speeds. Yeah. Rackspace for the win. Similar Posts:

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The last half year, however, it’s gone downhill. Fast.

We experienced some problems with the server about a half year ago, so SLHost moved us to a new server. That should fix things, right? Except that it didn’t. We continued to experience some of the same problems. And more.

Our email would be shut down. Fahim would have to turn it back on. Cron jobs shut down. This script or that shut down. Server unresponsible. Fahim would have to either restart whatever services had been shut down or restart the server. Repeatedly.

Not once when any of our services were shut down – by SLHost.com staff  (ETA: I assume, but have no hard evidence of that) – were we informed that they were doing so. Every single time we discovered a service shut down or something not working, it was because Fahim or I discovered it, not because we were told.

The last month it got worse. Services being shut down more frequently with no explanations. Fahim would enter a ticket to find out what was going on. He didn’t get any reasonable answers. (Oops – I was wrong!)

As I type this, by the way, our server is down again. Again. It spent the last 36 hours down – I’ll get to that a bit later – and has only been up for a couple of hours, and again, it’s down.

Email, for both of us, has been spotty with SLHost. I’ve had trouble downloading the email to my notebook for the last month. I can access it through IMAP, but not POP3. But I can’t even move it to my notebook through IMAP, although I can, most of the time, read it and delete those emails that I no longer need. But the emails I DO need I cannot move to my notebook. (ETA: The IMAP issues could be caused by the SLT Internet problems. I can read the email, but cannot copy to a folder on my local machine.)

I have not been able to upgrade any of my WordPress blogs automatically for at least a half year, some for as long as a year. I get out of memory error messages, despite the amount of memory WordPress trying to use being dramatically lower than the amount of memory we supposedly have allocated to our VPS. Sometimes, I get out of memory error messages trying to simply load a blog post or a comments page. Sometimes, it just doesn’t load with no apparent reason.

Our domain host SLHost.com is failing left, right, and centre. Just deleted 400MB in core dumps, another 100MB appeared. #fail #fb

Friday, 10 December 2010 12:05 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

Contacted SLHost.com last night to complain about crashes, instability. No response. They don't care. #fail #fb

Friday, 10 December 2010 12:06 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

Accessing our sites via FTP or cPanel problematic. Email problems. Error messages. Disaster! SLHost.com #fail #fb

Friday, 10 December 2010 12:10 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

The last month, I’ve been running into disk space usage problems where my remaining disk space is suddenly used up with no warning to me. Upon investigation, I discover over 400MB of core dump files taking up all of what used to be my remaining space. Core dump files appear when there’s a really nasty server problem. And those core dump files means that email no longer works at all. So I delete the core dump files just to get my domain and email working again. But then, the core dump files – another 400 MB of them – appear again in less than 24 hours. Delete. Reappear. Delete. Reappear. Delete. Reappear. Delete. (ETA: Core dumps appear to be created when an app on the server crashes.)

All of which means the server is suffering some kind of catastrophic failure. At least, that’s how I read it, since my domains were down more than they were up.

Fahim  opened a ticket. SLHost responded that they would move us to a new server.

SLHost.com came back with an offer to change us to another server and extend our contract 1 month. We'll see how that goes. #fb

Saturday, 11 December 2010 10:23 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

Meanwhile, SLHost.com has been changing us to a new server for at least the last 16 hours. WTH? #fb

Saturday, 11 December 2010 10:24 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

Except the transfer didn’t work. At least, that’s what we think happened, although they couldn’t be bothered to tell us. Fahim opened another ticket when our servers had been inaccessible for 16 hours – they said the server transfer would take 7 to 8 hours. Their response was only “we’ll look into it.” It’s not like they ever answer actual questions.

24hours since SLHost.com said they'd put us on new server. Domains STILL inaccessible. No response from them to queries. #epicfail #fb

Saturday, 11 December 2010 7:27 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

And now we find out that SLHost.com didn't even migrate us. Same server. So we were down for 36hrs WHY? #fail #fb

Sunday, 12 December 2010 6:22 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@LMAshton

Laurie Ashton Farook

So finally our server is back up again after 36 hours of being completely inaccessible. No email, no websites, no back end access. Completely down. And it turns out they couldn’t transfer us to a new server because the old server was running old software which wasn’t compatible with the new server. So our sites were down for 36 hours… WHY?

Of course they don’t answer that question, either. Fahim opened another ticket and requested that they leave our server alone. No more attempts to transfer. We need access to our server so we can remove the data and set up an account elsewhere that will actually function. Meanwhile, Fahim also requested that this be escalated to a supervisor. Of course, however many hours later it’s been, we haven’t heard back from anyone.

Meanwhile, AFTER the domains are “restored” to the old server, after 36 hours of being inaccessible, they again go down. Email still doesn’t work. (ETA: Fahim says that email hasn’t actually gone down, it only looks that way to me.) Up, down, up, down, up, down. Except that even when it’s up, it’s not really working properly.

The whole reason they were attempting to move us to another server was because our existing server sucked. Rocks. Because our experience was terrible. So of course we’re completely down for 36 hours. Sure, so they gave us an extra month free, but why would we want to use it when their “service” is like this?

If you’re considering going with SLHost.com, my question would be… Why?

UPDATE:

We got our Rackspace account and Fahim has moved everything over. Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting to do the WordPress 3.0.3 update on my blogs because with SLHost, I’ve had to do it manually. I’d always get an out of memory error. On the new server at Rackspace, Fahim allocated 64 MB of RAM to PHP instead of the 32 MB of RAM for PHP he had allocated at SLHost. Okay, double the RAM, good. So I figured I’d try doing the automatic updrade on the blogs. The automatic upgrades that hadn’t worked in how long?

And, because I pretty much like pushing things to see what the limits are, I did four blogs at the same time. Because I wanted to see what would happen. You know what happened? The upgrades worked. All of them. With NO out of memory error messages. With NO error messages of any kind. And it was fast. Four. At a time. When I couldn’t do one at a time before.

Yeah. Moving to Rackspace? Good. Decision. Ditching SLHost? Another good decision. Yup.

UPDATE A SECOND PART, THE FOLLOWING MORNING:

You know how I mentioned I couldn’t move my email from the IMAP server to the local folders on my notebook? And you know how I said it could be because of our crappy Internet connection? Well, guess what?

This morning, the day after the move to the new server at Rackspace, I tried moving the email to my local folders on my notebook. And it worked. Flawlessly. On the same lousy Internet speeds. Yeah. Rackspace for the win. Similar Posts:

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