Because this is hosted on my home connection there will probably still be some future downtime.  Also, this will probably cause my site to load a little slow.  I hope to have this site back on my main (fast/dedicated) server within the next month.

Unfortunatly I misspelled “howl” and “Bailee” in the video. Bailee I mispelled numouros times. Just wanted to make sure you alll knew I was fully aware of this.

Jeremyjefferson.com however will remain fully functional and will redirect to jeremyj.com.  In fact, you will notice many links (especially for the page design) still refer to jeremyjefferson.com.

I don’t believe this should cause any issues, however please leave me a comment if you notice any part of my site acting weird, or not working at all because of this change.

Since I really wanted jeremyj.com I placed a backorder with Godaddy.  Even though this costs about $10 more than the registration costs ($18.99).  This pretty much assured me that I would be able to beat any other human trying manually for the domain when it dropped.  Of course, Godaddy is not very good at beating bots from backordering services like Pool or SnapNames.

I placed my backorder three to four days prior to the domain dropping.  It was already in “pending delete” status.  I probably should not have waited this long though because if someone else had placed a backorder on it with Godaddy before me I would not have been able to because Godaddy only permits one backorder per domain from all their customers.

Well, on drop day Godaddy changed the status of the backorder to “Capture in progress”.  It stayed in this status for about 8 hours.

Dot-Com domains start dropping around 2PM ET and continue to drop until around 4PM-5PM ET.  Mine dropped right around 3PM.

At right around 3PM I refreshed the whois database and the domain had still not dropped.  I refreshed about 20 seconds after that and the domain had dropped and it the new registrar was Godaddy.  This made me very happy because this meant Godaddy was in possession of the domain and most likely it was mine.

It took about another hour and a half to get confirmation, which came in the form of Godaddy putting my contact info in the whois database, proving to me and the world that the domain was now mine!

Overall I was very pleased with Godaddy’s backorder service.  Of course, had I lost I probably would not have been.  Jeremyj.com in my opinion is a good domain that I figured would be tasted or grabbed by someone else with a backorder.  Since I know Godaddy obtained it within 20 seconds after it dropped their bots are fast at getting them.  Most likely Godaddy got it within a couple seconds.

I do recommend now anyone who has $18.99 to risk on a domain they want to try Godaddy.  Their backorders do work (as they did for me) and its the cheapest backordering service I can find.

Anyone who has any questions about Godaddy’s backordering service or wants clarification on my experience can just post a comment.  I will respond very quickly to any questions you may have.  Just make sure to leave your valid email address so I can inform you of my response.

Yep, that’s right. I am very excited as I’ve been trying/wanting to get this domain for three years now. Basically when I first bought a domain for my personal site (this site here) I wanted something to do with my name and be short. Jeremy.com was already taken obviously, so I tried jeremyj.com. Unfortunatly this was also taken. Eventually I just ended up with jeremyjefferson.com.

Jeremyjefferson.com is a fine domain for me (I think everyone should try to get their full name in a dot-com), but it is way to long for people to type out or even remember.

Ever since that day I have wanted jeremyj.com and wanted it bad. I hope the old owner of this domain reads this some day, but I sent 3-5 emails to the former owner from 2006-2007 trying to get a hold of the guy who owned it. Basically I said I was interested in purchasing the domain from him and asked his price. I was going to accept anything $200 or less on the spot. Sad thing is, after 2007 the guy didn’t even use the domain and had no site on it. He never responded to any of the emails, so I gave up.

Well, last year during September (2007) I was all excited. Jeremyj.com was about to expire! Unfortunately the dude renewed it and the domain stayed alive until September of this year (2008). I didn’t stop watching the domain however….

Well, September 2008 rolled around again and the domain was ready to expire if he didn’t renew. This time he did not renew. The domain eventually went to auction which I did not bid in (lack of funds at the time). Fortunately no one placed a bid on it.

Now, almost 80 days after the domain expired I successfully obtained it with a Godaddy backorder for $18.99 ($17.01 after coupons). I will be posting an entry here later on my experience with Godaddy backorders. Luckily for Godaddy this will be a very good review.

So now I have this to decide: Should I leave jeremyjefferson.com as the domain for this site, having jeremyj.com forward to it? Should I have jeremyj.com take over as the domain for this site and have jeremyjefferson.com forward to it. Or should I allow both of them to work without forwards?

Personally I’m probably going to go with keeping jeremyjefferson.com as the main or have jeremyj.com become the main and forward the other one to it.

If anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Also, 3 days ago on the 5th of October was the birthday for my website also. My site turned 3 years old on the 5th. I actually had a personal website prior to October 5th, 2005, but it didn’t have the jeremyjefferson.com until that date.

I can’t begin to express my disappointment, heartbreak, and overall sadness.  Odds are at this time tomorrow the Cubs 2008 year will be complete, and they will go down in the most humiliating fashion ever once again, getting swept out of the playoffs.

This also means that the Cubs era of no championships will extend into a second century.  How much longer can I take this?  I really am not sure.

I’d also like to take the time to recommend any Cubs fans who find this post on Google or some other search engine to look into Cubscast.  Cubscast is a podcast with 2-3 episodes a week.  It is done by 3 die hard Cubs fans who give really good insight into the Chicago Cubs.  You can find a link to Cubscast on my sidebar to the left, or by Clicking Here.

My mom came upstairs and woke me up to tell me the Internet was not working.  I thought this was just a case of the router freezing up or something so I went into my back room to reset the router.  I noticed however that the DSL and Activity lights were not on/flashing on the DSL modem.

I restarted the modem figuring it had just froze up, although it had never done that before.  It still would not connect.

I assumed that either my dad either didn’t pay the Internet bill or the ISP was just down right now.  I asked my mom if he paid it, and she said yes.  Thus I just figured the ISP was having issues or doing something right now.

After a while, maybe 5-10 minutes, I had a thought.  One of our dogs, Bailee, was chewing around the top of the steps last night.  I thought she was just chewing the floor board.  I went and looked and sure enough, she had chewed through the phone cable that runs along that step.  There was the issue.

Okay, so here I was.  My dad was at work, who would normally fix this type of thing.  I didn’t want to wait 6 hours for him to get home so I started to work on it myself.

I knew if I could strip the wires and reconnect them and tape them back together I could get Internet again.  Unfortunately I could not locate my dad’s good pair of wire strippers.

I used my pocket knife to get the outer cover off each end of the wire, but obviously the two wires inside the phone cable were too small to use my knife.  I decided, I would use my teeth.

I first did the side that goes to the modem.  I got both of the covers off the wires showing the copper inside.  I then started on the other one (that goes to the wall downstairs.  I put the wires in my mouth and OUCH!

I pulled the wires back out of my mouth then thought I had just poked myself with the bit of copper that was showing, I started to put it back inside my mouth but realized, that hurt way too much to be just a poke then I remembered, this thing has current running through it.

Basically I electrocuted my tongue a little.  It still hurts a little right now, about an hour after the fact.

After that I went down and disconnected the other end of the wire from the wall and went back upstairs and continued what I was doing with the wire; stripping it with my teeth.

I have it rigged right now and working, but we had no electrical tape so I used shipping tape to just tape the wires to the wood floor.  Its rigged so it will work fine right now until my dad gets home and does it properly.

I guess I’m just lucky phone wire just has a couple volts running through it.

My goal is to offer some of the most advanced free hit counter available on the web.  This includes the ability to highly customize your hit counter and view detailed stats about your hits.  These stats include detailed logs with graphs.

This is still a work in progress but it is fully functional right now.

The best part is, these counters can be used on sites such as eBay.com.

Click here to check it out.

I have a little bruising around the incision that has started to go down over the past couple of days.  He said it should be completely gone within a couple days.

Unfortunately, he said I would still have some swelling around the incision for another month.  Its not swollen that much right now, but it does bother me from time to time.

I am pretty much back to normal with very little pain.  When I wake up in the morning, or get up after sitting for a while I am a little sore but once I get moving I am fine.

Oh, and the doctor also told me that my hernia was pretty big.  He said it was no wonder it was bothering me.  He also said that I have had it since birth.

Unfortunately, I was/am still sore from my hernia surgery so that held me back from doing some things.  I go to see the doctor for the follow-up surgery on Tuesday this week.  I believe he will basically just look at it and tell me I’m good to go, but I will be sure to update you all on that.

I AM VERY PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THAT THIS POST IS MY 200TH POST SO FAR ON MY SITE!!!  THIS IS A HUGE MILESTONE FOR MY WEBSITE IN MY OPINION.  I FIRST STARTED BLOGGING ON THIS SITE IN SEPTEMBER OF 2005.

I am hoping I am not too sore this weekend from my surgery last week so I can enjoy it.  Unfortunately, yesterday was probably the sorest I have been since I came home.

Everything went good before the surgery for the most part.  Of course I didn’t enjoy the IV part too well, and the antibiotics they gave me through it right before the surgery made my arm hurt a little bit.

I was in the outpatient recovery area for around an hour and a half before they took me upstairs to the Operating Room area.  There I waited for around 20-25 minutes before they took me out of there to the surgery room.  While in this room the doctor who did the surgery talked with me and answered my questions.  He also prayed with me which was kind of nice.

They gave me the option of either being put fully out or being left awake and put on local anaesthetic along with relaxing medicine.  I choose to be put fully out since I didn’t really like the idea of being awake for the procedure.

According to my parents the surgery took around 30-45 minutes.  The doctor told my parents that I had a pretty good size hernia and that it was apparent to him (somehow) that I have actually had it since birth.  The doctor said my muscles there were very strong so he didn’t need to use a mesh to repair it.

After I woke up I felt a little sick but was in pretty good shape.  I got out of surgery around 9:45 am and left the hospital around 1:20pm.  They gave me a vicodin pill to keep me pain free for the ride home and also gave me a prescription for vicodin.

Another cool thing they did was they gave me a medicine ball that had a long IV that went under the skin at my incision.  This thing gave me a pain killer at a steady dose of 2mg/hour for 2 days until we removed it per instructions.  The only thing I did not like about this was I had a huge ball taped to my side which made sleeping even harder.

After I got home I pretty much slept the rest of the day.  I was awake for a few hours around 10-12pm but went back to bed after that for another nice long nap till the afternoon the next day.

It really wasn’t till around Sunday night that I felt like getting up and moving around any.  On Monday I was starting to think I was getting back to normal but after I woke up on Tuesday I noticed the area around my incision was starting to become black and blue.

I was pretty sore on Tuesday and took it very easy.  I am hoping when I wake up tomorrow morning (Wednesday) that the bruising and swelling have gone down, or at least don’t get worse.

I have stopped taking the vicodin as of Monday and have been taking 2 Tylenol’s every 4 hours for the pain.  They actually said I could take 2 Tylenol’s and 3 Advil’s every 4 hours for pain after I stop taking the vicodin, but I think that is a little overkill (close to overdose) so I haven’t done that.

Well, that’s all for now.  I am going to attempt to go to school again tomorrow, but I am going to have my parents drive me.  Hopefully I am able to do that.  I should post here again in a day or so to update on my condition further.

Hopefully all will go well.  I will post again after the surgery as soon as possible, but I will probably want to come home and go straight to bed so it may be a while.

This will be my third surgery in my lifetime so far, and hopefully one of the lasts for at least a long while.

Well, I’ll probably post again in the morning right before I leave just to say if I’m nervous or not.  Hopefully, I will feel like posting after the surgery also.

I’ve had my blood taken for these type of tests so many times in the past that it doesn’t bother me at all really. After this, my surgery will be this Friday.

This will be my 3rd surgery, so I am not new to this whole ordeal. The only thing I do not like about having surgery is when they put that IV in you and start sending salt water (or whatever) into your veins. For some reason this really bothers me and is actually very painful (the water going in that is). Last time I actually almost passed out from it.

My first two surgeries were on my back to fix my scoliosis and the second was to remove a growth from my head.

They gave me a new/refurbished unit that looks great, and seems to be 100% new. Its works great and I am very happy with it.

They also gave me a 1 month free subscription card to Xbox Live as their way of saying sorry (of course Xbox Live should be free to start with).

Anyways, I guess this ends my posts about the Xbox 360 repair process. I hope any of you having to go through the same process have found my posts to be helpful.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 14 DAYS (FINISHED!!!)

I am writing this post just to alert you all of something they did that could affect others.  A day or so after they ship the 360 back to you, they will remove the link to the tracking number from their status page.  Therfor, I urge anyone to write this tracking number down once it is posted because at some point they will remove it.  Luckily for me, I had it in my history.

Again, this is the tracking number for when they are sending it back to you.  Make sure you write this down once its on the site, because after a day or so they will remove it.

Rather than that, this process is going very quickly and very nicely.  The status page shows they extended my full warranty on the 360 another 3 months which is nice.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 13 DAYS

UPDATE:

You actually can still get the UPS tracking number for the return I found. However, you have to go to that page where you enter the repair service number and your zip code. If you go to it that way, they will still give you a link to track it.

For the most part, my chest pain from my costochrondritis is gone, thank God.  I still occasionally have a little bit of tenderness that causes pain in my chest, but it is nothing like it was a few weeks ago when it was so bad I actually started to cry in pain.  My stomach is also not bothering me at all really anymore, and most importantly, no more diarrhea.

I also had some problems with my sinuses.  It felt like I had golf balls under my eyes because they were so swollen inside.  This has also went away.

My eyes seem to be getting a lot better also.  I was having some bad pain in my eyes and it was causing me headaches also.  They were very red on the sides and were very troublesome.  They are getting back to normal color now and I can see fine again…. Well, for the most part.  I do believe I have a slight issue in my right eye seeing things from a distance.  Mostly, I just can’t focus with that eye to read things far away like a road sign that I can see clearly with my left eye.

I think this means I might be ready for glasses and will probably go to the eye doctor sometime soon to have a checkup that I am, really, long overdue for.

My only issue now is I have a slight sore throat and it sometimes feels like I have something stuck in my throat which is also very annoying.  This has gotten better over the last couple of days though.

For the most part I seem to be back in good health, thank God.  My only obstacle now is my surgery next week on July 18th (a week from this coming Friday).  If you haven’t read or know already, I have a hernia that is going to be repaired.  This is an outpatient surgery and I should be back to normal after only a couple of days.

I will be sure to post probably right before my surgery and afterwards to say how it went.  This will be my third surgery I’ve had in my lifetime and I’m not really scared or nervous about it at all.  My first surgery was on my back to fix scoliosis.  The second was to remove a growth from my head.  This, my third, will be to fix a hernia.  Hopefully, this will be my last surgery I need for a long time.

This means My 360 (or its replacement) is already on its way back home!  I suspect though, since they did it so quickly, that they replaced it.  I should probably have the unit back by tuesday I think.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 9 DAYS

I understand today being the 4th of July though that they are probably closed.  Plus they probably don’t do anything over the weekends either.  So, we’ll see.  Their website status thing has not updated yet to say they have received the unit, but UPS has confirmed delivery.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 8 DAYS

It took them 4 days to get the box to me, which isn’t all that bad really.

CURRENT TIME SINCE I STARTED REPAIR PROCESS: 4 DAYS