I’ve been working at a large retail store for almost two years. I don’t want to get in trouble, so I’m not going to say which one. I’m trained in 8 different areas of the store, but have been working in the Pizza Hut express primarily as of late. I’m looking for another job because the hours I’m getting are not paying the bills.

I applied at a gas station a block away from my home on Monday and the interview went great. The manager was ready to hire me, and said I’d start that night. When the interview was over, he looked over my application one last time and said “This might be a problem”. The problem was that I’m 18, and the store sells liquor, which you have to be 21 to sell. Damnit.

Yesterday I drove around and picked up 15 different job applications for various places. I applied at Subway, Quiznos, Pizza Hut, Blackjack Pizza, Starbucks, and several different gas stations. I even applied at a shoe store in a moment of desperation. I filled them out last night and handed them all in today. I hope one pans out.

Just a funny side note, the Quiznos application has the url of Socrates.com on the bottom of the application. Socrates is a large legal form company similar to LegalZoom. The funny thing is that they had 4 w’s in the web address. You’d think they’d catch that before mailing out mass amounts of applications.

Wish me luck in my job search! If you work for a company in Colorado and they’re hiring, please send me a message from the sidebar.

If you use Twitter and have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ve probably heard of Hahlo. Hahlo recently announced on their website that they are testing a new version of their site, and it includes many updates, bug fixes, but still needs some work.

From Hahlo:

Hahlo 3.0 is currently available for beta testing, it has a whole heaps of cool new features that I’m sure you’ll all love. If you’d like to test it out send a request to beta@hahlo.com and I’ll send you more info.

After emailing hahlo, they sent me a beta URL. I’m not going to share the URL for the new version publicly, but contact me or find me on IRCNode and I’ll share it with you.

You can view screenshots of the new version on my Flickr (tagged: Hahlo 3 Beta). Click here or in the full post.

One bug I noticed is that some of my contacts don’t appear in the dropdown for sending a direct message. This error was in version 2 as well, and can be a pain in the rear. The below screenshot shows what I mean. I clicked the “Direct Message” icon for a contact of mine, and they are not in “To” field at the top.

Read the rest of this entry

Eleven2.com, a webhosting company who claims they offer “World Class Hosting Right”, has been gaining visibility. However, some customers have had problems. As a current shared hosting customer of Eleven2, I can provide an accurate assessment of their services.

I became a customer of Eleven2 about two months ago when I purchased the LaunchParty plan (available for a limited time apparently) for a year. The plan came with 60GB disk space and 6TB bandwidth. The specs offered by this plan are much better than any other shared plan they offer. A full year of Eleven2 Launch Party hosting cost me $96.

For hosting plans, I rate Eleven2 7/10. The Addon Domain limit is horrible on their lower end plan. However, the disk space and bandwidth make their plans some of the best in the industry.

Eleven2 boasts “Free Instant Setup”, as many other hosts offer. As advertised, my account was setup immediately.
For setup, I rate Eleven2 10/10

The first 3 weeks of hosting with Eleven2 were great. The uptime was 100% as far as I could tell, and my websites ran quickly. However, about a month after I purchased hosting, my experience changed slightly. My websites would go down for 1-2 minutes at a time randomly throughout the day. 5 hours after filling out a support ticket, they responded by saying that the issue had been resolved. They also posted a explanation publicly on their blog. Downtime has been non-existent since.

Eleven2 has also started offering AIM support for customers. I’ve asked for assistance with different issues 4 or 5 times via AIM, only to be told to fill out a support ticket. While their representatives on AIM are helpful, the level of support they provide is nominal.

The support staff has been *very* friendly and very helpful when responding to support tickets. I’ve received a response for each of my tickets within 24 hours, and all issues have been resolved.

For support, I rate Eleven2 9/10

When IRCNode started hosting some files for UnrealIRCD, I was concerned when I saw download speeds were hovering at about 50kbps, but that has increased to about 300kbps. To test the download speed for yourself, download this.

My websites load for the end user relatively fast, nothing to get excited about - but nothing to complain about either. Some visitors have complained about latency, but for the average US user, it’s not an issue.

For speed, I rate Eleven2 7/10

Overall, I’ve been very happy with Eleven2. The uptime hiccups in the past were made up by the excellent level of support offered by their staff. Overall Rating: 7.5 out of 10. I’d definitely recommend them for shared web hosting, and I hope to remain a happy customer for the remainder of my 1 year of hosting with them.

This post did not contain any Eleven2 referral links, and was not a paid post. I’m a real Eleven2 customer.