I have finally gotten the Race To Space Affiliate Dashboard to where I don’t feel like I have to do more coding before I can proceed: It has transitioned from being a schedule delay into a valuable marketing asset: The logged-out Dashboard is now an exhibition of the benefits of becoming a Race To Space affiliate rather than a promise of what you might get if you join the team; the logged-in page includes all of the materials promised in the marketing brochure.

This event is a rather liberating experience, and I really wish I had someone special to share the achievement with…

          

After what seemed like an interminable series of obstacles and delays, the Race To Space project finally not only has an Affiliate Program but an Affiliate Dashboard as well. Anyone who buys a pre-publication copy of the book is automatically enrolled in the Affiliate Program, entitled and encouraged to earn commissions by helping to spread the word about the project.

In case you haven’t heard, Race To Space is an infotainment book combining predictive fiction with a solid development plan to entertain and educate the reader in an effective way about the only grid-level long-term solution (solar power satellites in geostationary orbit) for the looming end-of-oil crisis.

The fictional story is built around competition for The Nebula Prize, a major prize being offered for achievement of a significant space settlement objective. The development plan will be a “take it to the bank” business plan explaining how that prize will be won.

Please visit https://RaceToSpaceProject.com to learn more about the effort, and to find links to many of the other projects being developed in parallel to achieve these ambitious goals.

          

One way or another my blog has been broken to some degree for a couple of months. It’s not the blog’s fault – the ground was changed underneath its feet, and the building it lives in was reconstructed, altering all of the door and window locations. (Metaphorically speaking, of course…)

More than half of my sites had been running on a CentOS 5 VPS for almost 20 years. (ChatGPT described the system as “museum grade obsolete” – which was “a little” too close to true.) In the middle of April I undertook moving everything from that server to a much newer environment. When I started, I had the “extremely” optimistic expectation it would take a day or two to make the swap. Reality, however, had other plans. After a grueling 3 weeks of working days, nights, weekends and most of everything between, I’d finally gotten all of the functionality moved and the migration complete late in the afternoon of May 6. I notified the the hosting service they could shut down the old VPS, which I strongly suspect was the one remaining instance of CentOS 5 they had been needing to keep running.

There were some hiccups in moving this site and my blog, but it was working happily on the new server – accessible using HTTP only: I hadn’t set up SSL certs and all in moving any of the sites from the old VPS to the new one, everything was carried over as-is.

Being able to change my sites from HTTP to HTTPS was one of the big reasons for moving to a newer operating system, and changing all of my sites to HTTPS was done in just a few days. It almost seemed too easy …

Meanwhile, the laptop I’ve been doing most of my work on, where I’ve got just about everything installed and properly configured, started being more and more unreliable. The BSOD rate started climbing from where it had been 2-5 weeks between crashes – and when I’d had three bluescreens in two days, I had to stop to deal with the problem. I replaced the graphics drivers. That helped – or did it? I replaced the disk drivers. That seemed to make more of a difference – for a short time. I’d at least been able to get a little work done in those two weeks – but then another BSOD stopped me again – and hours later, I ended up disabling everything that might launch DeFrag.exe. winDoze started behaving properly until I used NoScript to disable Amazon’s JavaScript (20% CPU) in one Firefox tab, then went to refresh another Amazon tab (so it would know JS had been stopped.) As the screen went dark before turning the all-too-familiar shade of blue, I thought to myself “I shouldn’t have just done that right then …” At least I knew where that problem came from.

As if I didn’t have enough to keep me busy, I needed to install PHP-FPM on the new server so I could simultaneously have the current version of PHP available for new software, and the “older” version needed by a large part of the massive PHP code base I’ve built up over the past few decades. Getting the extension working “properly” had been a required part of the migration that I had done on May 6, so I should be all set, right? Wait, what does “Primary script unknown” mean in the error log? What primary script? … and when there’s an error saying “Undefined variable: ... in ... on line 74” how did that happen – who called that script, what parameters were passed in the original request? I ended up spending a week and a half exploring the PHP-FPM source code and building a new version of the package on my server that has reasonable error reporting that is now a diagnostic tool rather than noise – but another big chunk of time had gone by.

I was wrapping up something else when I happened to pass by my blog here and discovered it had pretty much become completely broken. A few other fairly serious problems had also come up on the rest of the site. I’ve become quite anxious to get back to being focused on the higher priority work I’ve got “on the stove,” but investing “a little” time to get my “Internet Home” into order seemed like a good idea. It’s now about 26 hours of wall clock time later, but I’ve now gotten to where I can say “wfredk.com and its blog are now presentable enough that I can leave further work until ‘later’” and I can close the book on this chapter.

The patient is being discharged from the hospital and can go home to return to normal life.

          

I realized a day or so ago that I haven’t posted anything on my own blog for over a year. It’s not because I don’t have anything to say, I’ve just been busy with a host of other things. I will be writing here more often because I need a centralized place to point to, so you can expect to see pointers in a lot of different directions appearing here in the near future.

Thanks for your patience 😉

If you haven’t looked at it yet, please be sure to check out the site for the Race To Space book I’m writing.

          

I no longer have an empty house to return to at the end of the night. I want to go home, but that’s going to take a girl being there. I’m looking …

          

I am currently seeking $75,000 to underwrite redevelopment of the FredLines-Tshirts.com website, originally built in 1997, into a functioning and profitable business.

I’m willing to pay a $5,000 finder’s fee to anyone who introduces me to such an investor when the deal is completed.

Please contact me with serious inquiries only.

          

As midnight passed and the date changed to October 26, 2004, I was taking pictures in my apartment in East Boston because my artistic eye was appreciating what I saw.  I thought that if I had a website, I could share some of the beauty I see around me.  After discovering PhotoByFred.com was available, I registered the domain and tossed together an initial presentation of the site.  The first picture I posted was one I’d taken at about 12:05 AM:

PhotoByFred.com’s first picture, October 26, 2004

At that time, I figured I’d post pictures for a while, and see where it went.  I had no clue I’d still be posting a picture a day eighteen years later, but here we are:  PhotoByFred.com turned 18 today, it’s old enough to vote (in some jurisdictions, I’m sure…) and there are now 6575 different instances of “Your Daily Dose of Art” to be seen on the site.

It originally started as an art project, a chance to share some of the pictures I’d taken that I thought were pretty nice.  Over time, I have come up with a few ideas about how to make some money from the effort:

• LimitedEditionPhoto.com offers limited edition prints of the photographs on PhotoByFred.com for sale, either for private collection and display, or as an investment opportunity (but some work needs to be done before it’s operational)
• PbFpaper™ is an application to I was writing to update a subscriber’s Windows desktop with the picture of the day
• PuzzleByFred.com will offer some of the pictures from PhotoByFred.com as [1000 piece] jigsaw puzzles
• PosterByFred.com will offer some of the pictures from PhotoByFred.com as [motivational] posters
• PhotoByFred – The Movie is a project to create a “flip book” movie showing all of the PhotoByFred.com, in succession. With an average display of 1/3 second per image, the movie would be more than thirty-six minutes long. (Even showing frames at the NTSC standard 30 frames per second rate would yield a film over three and a half minutes long!)

So far, none of those projects have generated any income:  I’m still posting to Photo By Fred every day as a labor of love, so that I can share the beauty I see in the world around me.  If anybody would like to invest in helping me turn any (or all!) of the “side jobs” into profitable efforts, my Current Projects page has more information.  I’d be happy to pay a referral fee if you can introduce me to someone who does make an investment into the work.

Speaking of referral fees, I’m actively looking for visionary customers interested in reserving a condo in the colonies at L5 I’m working to build, with occupancy circa 2050.  The L5 Condos site has more information, and I will pay a 10% commission for a referral that directly leads to a completed sale.  Get out your address books, and let’s pass some $1000s around 😉

          

So I’ve been reviewing some of the things I published on LinkedIn …

Condos at L5 – $10,000 down – apparently updating an article doesn’t bump it up as more recent – that’s got to be done by hand:  If I want to make what’s probably my best bet for getting to the first million of my $50 trillion project, I’ve got to make it a “Featured” article in my profile.

Race To Space, Introduction 2.0 – some details are obsolete, but I would like to spend time writing a more detailed business plan

NASA’s plans, Sept. 11, 1969, and what they mean today – more about why…

The most precious slice of the pie – TL;DR – “sports and leisure” – the one that doesn’t exist

Why am I looking for a job?? – a previous edition of Deja vu

To get a J.O.B. or to not get a J.O.B., … and To get a j.o.b. or to not get a j.o.b., part 2 – yet another previous edition of Deja vu

Death by Social Distancing – still relevant even after most of the COVID-19 restrictions have “gone away”

Stop calling videos “webinars”​ PLEASE! – the title says it all…

How NOT to run an employment service – I haven’t been back to Upwork Freelancer.com whatever name they’re now using since

This is not “best practices” – it was then Dice, GoDaddy and AppNexus, similar things abound today

Facebook support isn’t – as if there weren’t enough other reasons to not be part of the “Facebook nation”

          

I’ve finally gotten the initial version of the new site for the Race to Space project up and running. There’s a teaser on the Home page, an opportunity to pre-order copies of the book at discounted prices, and the “Corporate” section has a copy of the investor goodies I first published on the L5 Development Group Web site.

Check out the new site, and if you’re sufficiently intrigued, pre-order a copy of the book.

          

Someone told me they thought the name of my #BlowUpTheTunnel campaign was promoting domestic terrorism – really?!?!?!?  That idea was so totally out of my perspective when I built the campaign I couldn’t believe it.

Now the project has grown in scope, and a new name is in order:  It’s now called #RaceToSpace. Instead of just resulting in a book describing how to get space colonies and solar power satellites built, there’s a full-length “predictive fiction” action novel thrown into the mix – and maybe a major motion picture, if things go right.

The campaign to underwrite the project is on GoFundMe, donations are now being accepted…