Hashrate and price climbing
Very nice indeed! It's been a couple of days since I looked in on the net hashrate, over 500MH! My pool is getting lonely, though... Not sure if people have lost the faith or if it's simply more profitable to mine elsewhere, but whatever the case may be,
I'm lowering pool fees to 0.2% for the next few weeks. As always, if anyone has any issues, I'm only an email or PM away and always put forth my best effort to resolve situations as promptly as possible.
Seems like I never run out of tales of woe for you guys, this week has been right at the top of the list...
One of my last few posts contained some bitching and moaning about Murphy's Law.
I've decided instead of fighting it, I'll try embracing it... If ya can't beat em, join em, right? Nope, screw that, because I'm typing this post for the second time, Murphy ate my first attempt. The latest Firefox is horrible for me, for some reason.
Anyway, I try to be as active as possible in the community, the last few weeks, though, have been an endless slogging from one problem to the next, while occasionally getting some actual work done. Thankfully, my pool pretty much runs itself without daily manual intervention.. As for some of my other stuff, not so much, but it's to be expected. Lack of sleep and constant frustration are starting to feel "normal" to me now, and I'm going to have to learn to co-exist with Murphy's Law at some point, but my lack of progress on my most important projects is really starting to get depressing, and, as I'll explain in a minute, I may soon be facing choosing between finding the first low wage, crappy 9-5 job available and give up (or severly postpone) some of my long term goals, or just go all in, balls to the wall, and hope for the best (and devine intervention).
I'm used to having bad luck, it's just a part of being me. Something about me makes things break down constantly without me even touching them, lol. I'm not even joking. Cars are the worst for me, nothing but trouble. Computers generally behave for the most part, but I can count on having time consuming problems when I need to get something done urgently. I've become adept at fixing pretty much anything now. Anyway, before I start rambling too much, I've got a story for you guys. Thursday I woke up feeling good, ready to get some actual work done and be on top of the world. I guess that was the wrong attitude to have, and mother nature quickly set me straight. Had a bit of running around to do that day, took my sis to a dr appointment, after I picked her back up and took her home, I ran across town to grab a few PC odds and ends. As I was getting ready to head back home, it started getting dark and cloudy, extremely quickly. One minute, it's calm, after about a block, it's raining so hard you can't see 10 feet in front of you, and then the softball size hail started falling. Now, I've lived in west TX most of my life and did stints in Kansas and Nebraska, so I know how quickly weather can change, and how severe it can get, but what happened Thursday, I have never in my lifetime seen anything like it. Before I could make it a couple of blocks to the nearest place to shelter our car, it was destroyed. The back window actually has several perfectly round holes where the hailstones just went straight through. The windshield, thanks to safety glass, didn't give way completely, but every millimeter is shattered, and every inch of the rest of the car besides the plastic fenders and bumpers is battered beyond belief. The area of Abilene I live in, the north central part of town, got it the worst. 9 out of 10 cars have major glass damage and are beaten to hell. Body shops, glass shops, and roofers are completely swamped with work (the only silver lining for anyone). Most of the police vehicles have been destroyed (fine by me, APD is awful), they're having to get by with unmarked vehicles with no computers or radio, lol. Now I have no idea what to do, even if they don't total our car out, the deductible might as well be 5 million dollars, we barely managed the bills and I had to scrape to keep the servers on, since my aunt relieved me of my credit card for her all-important crack habit, or whatever she's smoking these days. So I'm just kinda stuck right now, not sure what to do next. One thing I will say for sure is that my existing pools aren't going anywhere, no matter what. I'm finally able to donate plasma again so that will be covering my operating costs for the most part (it was my plasma card that was stolen, ordered a new one but didn't catch it in time to stop her from emptying my account, never again). I'm ready for summer to be over, right now. As soon as the weather warmed up, every day is some new and annoying, or costly, fiasco. And the saddest part, I'm whining about it here. I realize its petty, and pretty much all of west central TX has been screwed by the storm, but I'm just starting to take it personally. I remember my dad explaining Murphy's Law to me when I was about 4 years old, and it has had a major influence on my life perspective ever since. I can't stand to watch or read the news anymore, I stay as far away from political discussion as possible, I can't bear to watch as this world we live in crumbles around us and mankind struggles to survive, because there's nothing I can do about it. I can't even get a foothold on my own personal obstacles, much less contribute in any meaningful way aside from spreading goodwill and applying my talents. Just helpless. Anyway, the big hail disaster made it to more than just the local news, so I'm sure some of you have probably heard.. If you have a second, check out the following link, I'll be willing to bet most of you have never seen destruction like this. In one of the photos, the biggest and weirdest hailstone, being held by a girl with a tattoo on her wrist, that's my sister (pic #41)
http://www.ktxs.com/news/gallery-heavy-rain-and-large-hail-sweep-through-abilene-big-country-79-photos/26469932I think our Octocoin spokesperson is in Austin, if so, were you affected by the weather too? Anyone else here in Texas? We've had quite a few strong storms lately, but this one was one of those freak storms that just seemed to come out of nowhere, fast, and they're going to be getting worse.. Hello global warming! I don't know how we're going to get by without a car, it wouldn't be so bad if our public transit system here in Abilene wasn't absolutely worthless. I guess things could be worse.
Anyways, if you're still reading, thanks for taking the time to step into my world for a minute. This community is one of the very few things in my life where I feel I actually belong, and I'll always do whatever it takes to make sure Edric is a name you think of fondly. As I've said before, though I may not be running the most cutting edge, high class, or multimillion dollar corporation backed services, I try to make up for it by providing a high standard of personal service and do my best to build the trust and confidence of the community. I've made it this far, with many bumps in the road, and learned a great deal of lessons along the way. So far, the pools do not provide very much income, not like you'd think, but I really enjoy it, and my presence in the community and experiences so far has opened the door to other opportunities as well, lots of little odd jobs for people here and there, which is really awesome and enjoyable. I really love helping people, but find myself stretched thin alot of times, plus I get distracted easily (they don't feed me ritalin since I grew up).
A little news on my multipool project... Not much, really. The good news is that I've found a VPS host that offers 6GB RAM for unbelievably, insanely low monthly price, and though their TOS is EXTREMELY strict about what you can do with it, though, and *coin services are strictly prohibited, as well as any other stuff that attracts DDoS and hacking attacks, they're going to let me skirt the rules a bit and allow me to get some of my infrastructure in place there, something that would be too costly with DigitalOcean. The frontend and guts will be on a digitalocean node, though. The entire "profit switching and auto exchange" bit is probably going to have to wait a while. I've explored a few options, most of them involving learning programming languages I have zero experience with yet, though I have run across some promising looking stuff, I've got to figure out what to do with it. I have no experience with ruby, just getting my feet wet with node.js, and just don't know enough PHP yet to write it up from scratch. I've talked about doing it with LiveCode a few posts back, which is actually do-able, but LiveCode isn't best suited for this kind of application despite its enormous versatility. Any of you guys know what LiveCode is, or have ever used it, or old school Hypercard, Supercard, or metacard? Seems like one of those things that kinda gets ignored, despite being extremely useful, and as of recently, free. I love free. Anyway, back to the multipool.. I don't want to be part of the "multipool problem", yet still have one to offer you guys. There won't be a big selection of scrypt coins, but Octo will be one of them, though I'm likely going to leave that one out of the profit switcher. When we get some kind of auto exchange system going on, Octo will definitely be on the payout menu, with a few select others, geared not to the pump n dump crowd but for those who are investing themselves in whatever they choose to hang on to. My main 888 pool will stay open regardless. So, that's about it for now, if you're still with me I'd be grateful for some PM's with suggestions on what to offer and how best not to screw up the economy by contributing to the multipool rape of popular coins. I'm not extremely far away from having a "vanilla" version ready to go (no auto exchange, etc), but this service is for you guys, not me, so I need more input on what people want.
Ok, that's it for now. If you've read all of this, thanks!!! I appreciate everyone's support, trust, and encouragement you've shown me so far, I hope to always be a part of this community. With the network hashrate as high as it is now, and with my pool's hashrate dismally low,
I'm cutting fees down to 0.2%, going to better fine-tune transaction fees (so they're not eating me up, but not eating you up too), and hopefully get a fresh infusion of hashes! As always, when you mine at my pool, you also have my personal support, should you need it, for any issues you may have.
