Author Archives: Peter

Brother To Brother

1 Reply

Last week, the ownership of my employer, Christian Book Distributors, changed hands. The company was sold by its owner, Stephen Hendrickson, to his brother, Ray Hendrickson. Ray has been with the company for just as long as Steve, and I think he’ll do a great job. Obviously, with a new person in charge, there will be changes, but by and large I think Ray will stay true to Steve’s mission. There are sure to be interesting days ahead!

Since CBD is a privately-held company, I waited to post this news on my blog until I was sure that the sale was public knowledge.The Boston Herald ran an article today on the sale, so there you have it!

If you have any comments or feedback on the CBD website, the best thing to do is probably not to talk to me. Rather, please use our feedback page to make sure it goes through the proper channels.

Also, if you are within a day’s drive of Peabody, Massachusetts, plan to come to our Warehouse Sale on Saturday, September 18! It truly is a fascinating experience if you have never attended. People from all over the nation show up – I’ve even heard that some churches in the midwest charter buses and drive out to make a trip of it! Our site has more information on the sale, if you’re curious. I’ll be there for much of the day, of course – almost all CBD employees put in a full day of work on warehouse sale days. So if you are planning on coming, drop me a line beforehand – I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for you!

Looking His Best

Leave a reply

Here’s to Uncle John, who brought us to the wonder that was Cabela’s:

ppp|Uncle John|ppp

I found a half-decent photo of him – aren’t you all surprised? (Sorry, it’s an in-joke… anyone in the Keefer clan can attest to John’s photogenicity. (Is that a word?))

Two Years of Site5

1 Reply

I forgot to mention this last week, but prwdot.org has just passed its second anniversary of hosting at Site5.com. I originally signed up on August 15, 2002, after many bad experiences with my previous web host. My experiences with Site5 have been nothing but terrific. Their prices are great, their service is great, their support is great. I couldn’t be happier. Site5 has a very professional and personable staff, which is a rarity in this industry. I ask a lot out of their support personnel, as evidenced by my Site5 support mailbox, which contains 339 messages. These aren’t just common support questions, these are arcane issues that most people would never even encounter, such as setting up procmail in a shared hosting environment, setting up DAV support, custom Perl module installations, etc. They have had no problem responding to and taking care of each and every one of my requests.

You can get their basic account (which is quite a bit beefier than most places’ basic accounts, I must say) for just $6.95/month if you sign an annual contract. It’s $9.95/month if you prefer to go with a month-to-month contract. I currently have their Site4 account, which is just $25.95 for a month-to-month contract that provides 2 gigs of storage space, 60 gigs of bandwidth per month (with bandwidth rollover!), unlimited subdomains, MySQL databases, email accounts, FTP accounts, and more. Check out their site to see what plan is right for you.

Several other users are also happy with Site5, by proxy, since I am hosting them for free under my account:

Will Farnham
Amy Walton
Corey Lowe
Nathan Clark (though I’m not sure if he’s actually using his account any more)

A Holiday…

2 Replies

Today is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ first ***sales tax holiday|http://www.dor.state.ma.us/forms/SalesTaxHoliday.htm***. Normally we have a 5% sales tax (which really isn’t that bad), but today on items $2500 or less, you don’t have to pay sales tax. A great place to use this would be to purchase something like a new computer. Fortunately, the Apple Store is making this very easy – they will be open for 24 hours today at all three Massachusetts locations. Unfortunately, not only do we not need to buy a new computer, we also don’t have anything else we need to buy. Going shopping today would only motivate us to buy things we don’t need (which, of course, is exactly what the Commonwealth and Commonwealth businesses are hoping for).

That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing I *want*, of course. If you hadn’t noticed already, I’m keeping track of such things in the new ***Stuff Peter Wants|http://prwdot.org/?p=stuff_peter_wants*** page. It’s on the left navbar of our main website.

In more exciting news, we had some folks over last night for a little party to celebrate the 2004 Athens Olympics. There were nine people there, including Becky and I, which is just about as much as our living room can hold. 🙂 We did some Olympic trivia, watched the opening ceremonies, and had lots of food and desserts. Becky made a ***watermelon whale|http://gallery.prwdot.org/craftiness/IMG_8797*** which she filled with fruit salad. There were also various munchies, and several delectable desserts: peanut butter cheesecake with chocolate topping, which Jenn brought, strawberry cake, and ice cream sandwich cake. Recipes are available. if anyone is interested. 🙂

One other thing I missed posting earlier was that I attended the ***BMAC|http://www.bmac.org/*** meeting this Wednesday. You can see the ***photos I took|http://gallery.prwdot.org/bmac_august_04***. The topic of the meeting was “Stump the Chumps”, where people bring in all sorts of Mac problems they are having and try to stump a panel of Mac “chumps”. Many of the questions were beyond arcane, but it is always an interesting study in Geek group dynamics to see all of these people interact. Of course, the free ice cream at the end of the meeting was a nice bonus. 🙂

Can you believe that we are halfway through August? Before you know it, it will be October — which means my birthday (see the aforementioned ***Stuff Peter Wants|http://prwdot.org/?p=stuff_peter_wants*** page), Dad’s birthday, and our second anniversary! 🙂