Toby Johnson’s Blog

The trailer for the Return of the King Extended Edition DVD was released today. The DVDs come out December 14th!

Well, it seems that it’s time to switch web hosts yet again. I had been using Flux Services, which I was very happy with. They’re only $7.95 a month, which includes 1 GB disk space, 50 GB transfer, unlimited email addresses, 5 domain pointers, and 2 MySQL databases. They also have SSH access, which this Linux user considers a necessity. And they don’t charge extra for people who pay month-to-month, which is a nice (and rare) bonus.

Unfortunately, last week I tried to send just under 200 emails out to a mailing list. I got back a couple dozen bounces, which didn’t surprise me at first, because I didn’t know how good the addresses were. However, when I started to read the bounce messages, most of them said “unrouteable mail domain”. This was puzzling, since the domains were ones like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, etc. Even more puzzling, some emails to the very same domains were making it through.

After much digging around, I found that this message can also be used when an SMTP server has rate limiting in effect. Sure enough, I contacted Flux Service’s support, and found they limit outgoing mail to a paltry 150 emails per hour! I was pretty upset, not only because I found this limit to be extremely low, and that their support seemed to be unwilling to help (besides suggesting I send emails through some ridiculous PHP “time-release” program), but because this policy was completely unadvertised, and the error message I received had nothing to do with the reason my emails were rejected. So I wasted over an hour of my time solving a “problem” that was really my own hosting company’s ridiculous policy!

I can understand they’re trying to prevent spammers, but considering their SMTP server requires authentication, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to track down and stop abuse using more reasonable means. So, I set out to look for a new web host. And I found one that I am very pleased with so far.

So now I’m with Site5 Hosting. For $1 less per month ($6.95, if paid annually), they offer 1.5 GB disk space, unlimited transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, SSH access, plus all the other usual stuff. Plus, they give me my own IP address! This is practically unheard-of on such a low-cost package. I was worried I’d get some maxed-out, slow server, but things seem even faster than they were before. Reading all their support forums sounds like people are very pleased with their service. And, they impose no limits on outgoing email!

Anyhoo, I’m posting this so that maybe the next person who googles “unrouteable mail domain” finds a bit more helpful info that I did, and finds just as good a solution as I did.

Update 4/25/2006: The information on Site5’s plans is no longer correct, and I’m transitioning my websites from Site5 to a VPS, but I’m leaving the rest of the post intact in case it’s useful for anyone.

Well, today’s the big 3-0. It’s all downhill from here, right?

Anyhoo, happy birthday to me! :)

All my predictions were pretty much correct, except that Bush’s electoral victory was smaller and his popular victory was larger than I guessed.

While we did win two seats on the Clark County Council, I expected Jim Smith to be one of those two! Since he is currently on the council in a district seat, the Ds attacked him pretty hard (although he still did better than two of the three Democrats). However, concentrating their efforts on Jim meant that Monty Snelling and Danny Yost were able to get in. So now we have 3 Republicans on the Council out of 7 members… not quite a majority, but a historic feat nonetheless.

We definitely worked longer and harder this year than we ever have in the past. Thanks to Mitch Daniels’ Final Mile campaign, we were also able to have an order of magnitude more grass-roots workers in the final days of the campaign.

A Floyd County friend of mine, Abe Navarro (who works in prosecutor Keith Henderson’s office) told me that a Democrat attorney said to him the day before the election: “Abe, I heard there is an army of Republicans knocking on every door in Clark and Floyd counties. Is this true?” To which Abe replied, “yes it is.” We weren’t really trying to knock on every door, but it makes a good story nonetheless! I’d guess we did talk to (or leave information for) over 30,000 households.

Since I ran over my camera a couple weeks ago, I unfortunately wasn’t able to take as many pictures of our 11th-hour activities as I would have liked, but suffice it to say we had lots of fun and everyone had a well-earned sense of accomplishment. I didn’t sleep for about 40 hours in a row, but once we found out that Mike Sodrel won by less than 1500 votes we knew it had all been worth it. I was more worried about his race than any of the others, but knowing that southern Indiana finally has a representative who actually represents our values sure is a great feeling.

I loved Peggy Noonan’s article wrapping up the election, especially this quote: “The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.” (Please note that neither Ms. Noonan nor I intend this as a slam against Obama, who is indeed a rather eloquent speaker and who I’m sure will be a respectable senator).

I was really looking forward to Michael Moore’s analysis of the election, especially considering that he realized months ago what a poor campaign Kerry was running, but he has been strangely silent since the election.

The new Star Wars Episode III Trailer is out! (Media file removed, sorry…)