Why am I up this late? Because everything is up in the air…

Three holidays in a row, sheesh: Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day and Mardi Gras!

I had an absolutely fabulous Valentine’s Day. I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with octoberland, who had press passes for their very pricey special Valentine’s Day event. We found a parking space on the street and didn’t even have to pay for parking! I’d never been to the ISGM before, and I’ve always wanted to go. I had absolutely no idea how stunning it is. The entire place simply took my breath away. However, we got there a bit late, and we missed all the food! So we ended our evening with late supper at the Cheesecake Factory. It really was just the most lovely Valentine’s Day I think I have ever had!

It was a nice break from what I’ve been doing since Thursday: slowly and painfully transitioning my e-mail, webhosting, and Internet accounts. I’ve never switched domain registrars and webhosting like this, so it’s been a process of trial, error, phone calls, running searches, reading FAQs, backtracking and fixing things…*sigh*

I spent Thursday changing logins and account information to remove the net1plus address from just about everything, keeping a log file of all the changes which got longer and longer. I’d accumulated so much crap, too–opt-in newsletters and alerts and so on that were cluttering up my time and in-boxes, I don’t know why I’d just click on those things, gods. So I was “unsubscribing” as much as changing things. Wow, has my e-mail gotten quiet as I’ve killed all those opt-ins off! I finally had everything done except for some snags. I can’t get into my account at my health insurer, Fallon, and they’re going to be calling me back. I finally unsnarled the long-standing mystery of my login to the state health insurance website–turned out I was misreading my own handwriting where I’d jotted down the password I used! I figured out my account for the Harvard alumnae association but my undergraduate school alumnae account won’t let me in! They’re just going to get e-mail bounces, I guess.

At around 3:00 a.m. on Thursday night, I had gotten to the point where I decided to initiate the domain registrar transfer. I didn’t check the instructions carefully enough and got wires crossed. It turned out that I needed to contact Net1plus and have them unlock the domain first. I punched through the transfer and paid the fee for the new registration, then didn’t get the e-mails from GoDaddy with their code numbers (I have no idea what held them up). Finally I cancelled the transfer and then couldn’t re-initiate it because it was marked “transfer rejected by owner” (i.e., me) and meanwhile my payment had gone through. Finally, in desperation, I called GoDaddy’s support line.

Yes, folks, you read that right. I got a live person on the phone at GoDaddy. At 4:00 a.m. Without paying a penny or having a fancy service contract or anything like that. And he was just incredibly helpful. He fixed my crossed wires and cancelled the charge and put a new charge through and resent the code e-mail–which went right through without any delay. But I still had to call Net1plus and get them to unlock the domain before I could proceed.

When I got up on Friday, I started making phone calls, and mostly left voice mail messages. Every time I called Net1plus and negotiated their voice mail menu hell to a department, I got the same message: “the department you have reached is either closed or all representatives are assisting other callers…” Well, which is it? Closed or busy? It kind of makes a difference! And Net1plus doesn’t even give you the option of holding if you want to. You can either leave a voice mail message or hang up. You don’t have any idea if your message will even be picked up, let alone replied to.

So I just kept calling–every half hour, trying different departments. Finally I got a live person. When I explained what I wanted, he unlocked the domain for me and sent me an e-mail with the authorization code I needed, no questions asked. I didn’t burden him with any explanations or discussion, either.

So I was able to proceed with the domain registration transfer. I had to pick one confirmation e-mail out of Net1plus’ spam filter, Postini. Add that to the list of things I won’t miss with Net1plus: logging into Postini every day to fish out and approve the false positives, including some pretty important stuff. Finally I’d gotten through all the steps of the process. Then I could set up the hosting with GoDaddy, make the directories, upload all the files, do a preview, and finally, the very last step, change the DNS nameservers from Net1plus to GoDaddy. By Light Unseen Media‘s website went “live” on its new server today.

Then, I’ve been wrestling with e-mail. I set up the e-mail accounts for BLUM before I changed the DNS–oops, wrong move, I had to delete them all and do them from scratch so they had the right information attached to them. But that worked, and those addresses were all out of commission for only about three hours or so today. I set up MySQL and installed WordPress and imported all the posts for BLU Media Blog, but I still need to do the blog template. WordPress is just stunningly easy to use. I hadn’t realized what a comprehensive system it is when you install it, you get the admin console and editors and a whole self-contained blogging system, it’s like having a one-blog version of Blogger.com all your own. The only reason I have to fuss with it at all is because I want to design the template to match my websites. Both BLU Media Blog and Rewriting the Rules blog are completely functional and running right now, in terms of content. I even reset my Amazon Author Central page blog to import Rewriting the Rules posts from its new address.

While I was working on all the stages of the domain and hosting transfer, I was re-doing the design for my author website and recoding it in CSS and xhtml-compliant code, including new graphics and a new color scheme. That’s uploaded at http://inannaarthen.com if anyone is curious to take a look.

Today I’ve been fussing with e-mail clients. It took some research and experimentation to get Outlook and Thunderbird to work with all the new e-mail accounts and the new provider for them all. BLUM has three different accounts, and I created e-mail accounts for my author website and By Light Unseen. I finally got them all set up. Thunderbird was the hardest–it kept auto-loading wrong information for the accounts and had me stymied until I discovered that if you stop Thunderbird from “checking” the account, it doesn’t cancel the set-up, it drops you into manual mode so you can enter the right information yourself. I mean, who’d have guessed? Of course, I can access all these e-mail accounts online in GoDaddy’s webmail system but that’s such a pain.

The last two steps are signing up for Internet service with Verizon and cancelling my account with Net1plus. I put through the Verizon order online tonight–a “bundled” plan that combines the same phone plan I have now with high-speed Internet and saves me some money. But that takes a few days–it’s supposed to be “installed” by Friday and they’re also sending me a modem. When that’s all set, I’ll cancel with Net1plus and send back their modem (it’s a loaner, with Verizon you buy one from them).

This has all been very disorienting, to say the least. So many changes! Not bad changes, ultimately, because when all the dust settles I’m going to have more flexibility, resources and options, and be saving a truckload of money in the bargain. But all my Internet habits and routines are just getting flung into the air like so much confetti. I have to get used to new logins, new interfaces, new places to go check this or that list or contact or e-group, new blogs, new everything! I’m still getting used to my new computer!

And now we’re having a snow storm. It’s snowing now and is supposed to snow all day and into the evening–we may get up to 10 inches. I ran some errands this afternoon and no one was panicking in Pepperell. The grocery store was peaceful and well-stocked, the gas station wasn’t busy, there wasn’t a lot of traffic. I did notice a lot of trucks with clean shiny-looking plow blades out–probably gassing up for tonight! They haven’t had a lot of work this season. But, yeah, here in Pepperell: ten inches of snow? Yawn! *wry smile*

Spring is coming. The sugar maples are dripping sticky all over my car. That’s always the light at the end of winter’s tunnel! 🙂 But I’m snow-bound for Mardi Gras. Laissez les bons temps rouler!