I’m not sure if anyone noticed (or cared), but the blog was down over the weekend.  The reason is that I run my blog server out of my house and on Saturday we moved to a new neighborhood in Cincinnati.  And while virtualization can do wonders for server availability, it can’t do much when your servers are sitting in the back of a moving truck!  

Man, what an ordeal.  Moving is such a pain in the butt!!  Now, I’ve moved plenty of times in my life, but it’s been as a bachelor and I didn’t have a lot of stuff.  Now that I have a wife, son and two dogs … holy cow!!  I think I said the phrase “how in the world did we get so much crap?!” about 400 times over the past three for four days.  But now we’re all settled in to our new home in Hyde Park, I got my Time Warner Internet set up and I got my servers unpacked and powered on in the basement.

My wife and I are excited about this new area.  Hyde Park is a very cool place to be.  The picture above is of Hyde Park square and was taken in 1901.  Here’s a quick blurb from a Hyde Park website …

Hyde Park was named after Hyde Park in New York and is one of the 52 neighborhoods that make up Cincinnati located on the east side of the city accessible via I-71. It was once a suburb before being annexed by Cincinnati and is the wealthiest neighborhood in the city. It is home to stately, well-maintained homes with manicured lawns and tree-lined streets. The business district is called Hyde Park Square and offers an array of upscale restaurants, boutiques and galleries.

This morning I walked down to the Hyde Park square, which is about three blocks away from our new house, and got some coffee for my wife and I.  Last night, we walked to Beluga, my wife’s favorite sushi restaurant.  This was NOT possible in our old house because we were way out in the country.  Of course, this kind of convenience could be dangerous for the waistline, and the wallet!

Anyway, the blog is back online.  BUT, if you’ve been trying to email me at my sweemer.com or virtualinsanity.com email address, then I have not been getting your messages.  See, I *thought* I had ordered business grade Internet service from Time Warner which would allow me to run a mail server.  But evidently I got the consumer grade service, which blocks port 25.  I corrected the problem yesterday, but it will take a few days for the service to get upgraded.  So for the next few days, email still won’t work.  Until then, I can be reached at asweemer [at] gmail [dot] com.