From mid-afternoon on Thursday 29^th through late evening on Saturday the 31^st I was occupied with moving our domain {website/blog and e-mail} to a new web-hosting service.  That wasn’t all we did, of course, but the process involved a lot of back and forth and everything else seemed to fit in around it.

Like many things in our modern world, we tend to take our communications technology for granted, after all, most of the time it just works.  But just like losing power to your refrigerator, you don’t really understand just how dependent you are on technology until it doesn’t work.  Unlike a refrigerator, which either works or it doesn’t (and it’s usually obvious which condition it is in), our e-mail failure was more subtle.  We continued to receive e-mails from some recipients if they originated them (but not always) and recipients typically received e-mails that we originated (but not always).  But we did not receive replies to e-mails that we sent.  What was particularly strange was that the person sending the reply did not get a bounce-back or other error, so to them it looked like they had sent the reply successfully.  We didn’t know if they got the original message, and they assumed we got the reply.

I do not know what went wrong with our e-mail accounts at iPage, and never will, but they were definitely malfunctioning and iPage was unable to fix the problem and ultimately unwilling to move it to a sufficiently high level of technical support to figure it out.  I have nothing against overseas technical support as long as it is technically competent and customer supportive.  In my support ticket interactions with iPage I never corresponded with the same person twice.  The problem with the “big name” hosting services is the same as a lot of mutual funds.  Huh?  Way too much time and money put into marketing, way too little into a high quality, reliable offering.  It’s a numbers game, and my number was 1, as in, I am only one customer.  We will almost certainly lose money in this transition by not getting an adequate refund from iPage, but one of the secrets to life is knowing when to take your losses and being willing to do so and move on.  In the end we had no choice but to move our domain.

In the two weeks prior to reaching that decision I had two completely independent recommendations for QTH.com as a web-hosting service.  “QTH” is ham radio lingo for “location” and Scott Neader, the guy behind QTH.com, has amateur radio call sign KA9FOX.  The company is located in Wisconsin, and so is the technical support.  In the move from iPage to QTH I exchanged numerous e-mails with Scott, who personally handled much of the set up and transfer.  Moving our WordPress installation (website/blog) turned out to be particularly tricky because of how iPage had it installed.  I would not have been able to do it by myself, but Scott got it done.  By 8:00 PM EDT Saturday evening I had confirmed, as best I could, that everything was working and began sending out e-mails to a selective group of recipients asking for replies to validate the correct functioning of our accounts.  With the exception of a couple of e-mails that got blocked as SPAM (one in each direction) all of our e-mails were received and successfully replied to.

Chuck Spera, a fellow H3-40 owner in our area, found a place locally to make a screen for the awning style window in the main entrance door of his coach.  I drove down to his bus garage in Novi and borrowed it to check the fit in our coach.  It was good, so we are getting two of them.  It’s a custom fabricated part, and it’s easier to get a spare up front.  These are not rectangular screens; they have five sides and are basically trapezoids (top and bottom parallel) with one upper corner cut off to make the 5^th side.  The local shop made and checked a template in Chuck’s coach before fabricating the actual screen.  They used a sturdy aluminum channel, and in spite of having five joints, the frame does not flex very much.  This is a significant improvement over the flimsy, poor-fitting we have lived with for the last three years.

I finished editing drafts of two more articles for Bus Conversions Magazine, selecting/inserting the photographs and writing captions for them, and uploaded them to my Dropbox account.  We enjoyed a lively breakfast with our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club as we do most Saturdays.  We are trying to get ready for a house warming in early October, so we continued to unpacking boxes and find places for things.  We are managing to identify a few things for disposal, recycling, or donation, but that continues to be a challenge for me, which is one of the reasons we are not full-time RVers.