As of March this year, I am now fully “out” and living as a woman. First, let me thank all the people who did know on the way and supported me, as well as everybody who took the news and then proceeded to show me that my fears were unfounded. My transition has been incredibly smooth – not a single negative word, and tons of love and support.

My only explanation is that I have a fantastic family, awesome friends, and I work for one of the friendliest (and kick-assingest!) companies on this planet.

As a result of all this, there has been a name change, too. “Robert” just doesn’t work so well as a woman’s name…

So my shiny and new name is “Rachel” from here on out. That makes it a little weird to maintain a blog called “robertblum.com”, but fret not – I will stay around. In fact, even this site will stay around – I am where I am now by virtue of having travelled a long road, and unlike for many other transgendered people, there does seem no need to hide my past. (Again, thank you, everybody!)

So robertblum.com will stay around, but experience a slight change. Looking at my web stats, there are three groups of people who come here:

• People interested in iCalFix (which is in sore need of an overhaul, I know)
• People who come here searching for my productivity articles
• People who know me personally and just want to know what I’m up to.

The last group, I’d like to direct over to rachelblum.com. This is where I will keep my more personal stories, as well as my daily thoughts.

If you’re in group 1 or 2, you’re welcome to follow me there too – I will continue posting about the subjects I’ve posted about here. But I will also cross-post articles that fall under productivity/Life Hacks/icalfix on this web site – so if you’d rather have “Just the facts, ma’am”, I recommend you stay here.

I am fairly certain I will get a question or two about my transition and anything related to it – if it’s a frequently asked one, I will post an article on rachelblum.com. And if you don’t want to ask right here on the site, feel free to send your questions to transition [at] rachelblum [dot] com

And now I finally have the time to actually tend to this thing.

Yes, I know. I’ve been gone forever from here, and I’m sorry about that. Life has conspired to keep me busy. In the last few months, I had the pleasure of:

• Buying a place (with my wife out of town, so I could make the fax machine work overtime)

• Overseeing the remodeling

• Packing and moving

• Flying to Germany to settle a few things regarding possible dual citizenship.

• Having my in-laws over for three weeks of vacation time. (Which was awesome – lots of free help with the moving…)

• Volunteering for No on Prop 8. BTW: If you care about equal rights at all, I’d appreciate if you could donate some time and/or money.

But now that most of these things are wrapping up – almost moved in, citizenship interview at the 8th, in-laws back home – I’m ready to write again. And boy, are there topics out there. Expect some commentary on politics and finance on this blog in the near future…

Well, actually quite a lot. First of all, Petra and I took a dolphin watching trip to Dana Point. Which was especially fun considering we’ve just been whale watching in Mexico – I could get used to being out on the ocean.

But far from just slacking off, I’ve been quite busy blogging-wise, too. If you’re visiting this place via a web browser (as opposed to a feed reader) you’ll have noticed the new theme, result of an upgrade to the latest WordPress

And since that wasn’t enough, I’ve started a new blog – Groby’s Coding Adventures. After several people hinted that maybe I’m getting sometimes a bit too technical over here, this is the place where I’m taking all my programming ramblings, ideas, thoughts and projects.

And because that still wasn’t enough fun, I’ve started exploring “Son of iCalFix”. For various reasons, I was not very happy with the technical direction iCalFix was taking. (More on that at the new place…)

So instead, I’m exploring new ways to achieve the same result – or event better results. I’ll still keep you posted here whenever there’s a major release.

So, after all this is done, I hope I’ll now have a bit more time to post over here.

It started with a rash of unexpected events. My life switched to interrupt-driven. For a while, that was kind of fun – don’t look out for any long-term issues, just juggle the events at hand. Until I realized that that meant I had no way to actually pursue my long-term interests.

Now, moving back to an organized life is hard if the fire hose of life’s events is turned up to eleven. So I spent a bit of time going through my life, reorganizing my priorities, and discarding the parts that were more distracting than helpful. That includes both obligations and possessions. Recently, I have been selling quite a few things that clutter up my life and my apartment, and I’ve been cutting back on my obligations.

The funny thing is, after I started doing it, uncluttering became sort of a web trend. There’s Unclutterer that’s been gaining quite a bit of steam recently. 43Folders has declared a War On Clutter. Steve Pavlina is talking about “Making Time for The Important“. Zen Habits writes about escaping materialism.

What does that actually mean? Not much for this web site, or iCalFix. I took stock of things I love doing, and both of these ended up very high on my priorities list. If anything, it means I now actually have time to work on iCalFix.

Anyways – it’s been really fun decluttering my life, and I’m glad to be back to writing here!

We’re also replacing any old light bulbs that burn out with CFL bulbs for quite some time now. All this makes me very happy that I decided to join Pandemic Studios almost three years ago. (I can’t believe it’s already that long!)

Now here’s the part where I need your help – the e-mail also contained a request for more ideas what out company can do better. I’ve come up with a few (recycled paper, anyone?), but I’d really like to hear your suggestions how companies can become greener without spending a fortune.

Thanks for your help!

One of these brands is Iams. Ironically, I bought a few pouches of Iams as a treat for my cats – fine treat that turns out to be.

It gets more fun, though. MenuFoods knew on February 20th that their food is toxic. So they started a test series on February 27th – why move with any speed just because your product is deadly? (Note that all that initial information “vanished” from the MenuFoods website…)

The result: It’s deadly to about 20% of the animals eating it. Now, that’s kind of bad. So they waited till March 16th to actually issue a “precautionary” recall. Which, to help reach a wide audience I assume, is marked as “Not for release over US Newswire Services”.

And interestingly enough, MenuFood doesn’t sell directly to end consumers, yet they got complaints “from their customers” which means that at least parts of their customers must have known about the problem before February 20th.

In other words, quite a few people seem to have knowingly accepted the death of pets to further profits – can’t have a recall that might damage the image.

It’s not exactly a small scale problem, either. I’ve tried to reach the SoCal office of the FDA, and their voice mailbox is full. Our local vet’s office has a large number of cats and dogs being treated for kidney failure right now. I’ve been contacted by the Los Angeles Public Health Department for info, so it’s bubbled up to their attention.

And of course, MenuFoods (and all their customers like Iams) never bothered to notify vets, either – after all, they might stop recommending their foods, and that would impact the bottom line. Can’t have that.

(“Official” death toll by menu foods: 10 – Some random website collecting stats has 200 reports so far…)

Oh, and just to make this an even bigger mess – WalMart is still selling deathly cat food despite recall

So that’s why I’ve been quiet. When we brought our cat to the vet on Tuesday, they gave us a 50% survival chance – I was certainly not in the mood to write happy fun blog posts after that. Thankfully, she’s recovering well. Her kidney reading is still elevated, but at least back on the charts, and she seems to be doing quite fine. (In fact, they called her the “superstar” – so I’m really happy now)

If you have cats, or dogs, I suggest you never again buy any foods that are produced by MenuFoods – they clearly place little value on your pet’s life. And even if you don’t have pets, I’d appreciate it if you sent a few positive thoughts out for all the animals that are suffering right now.

And while it’s a pleasure to place the order, it sure hurts the pocketbook. No, don’t worry, iCalFix – at the current functionality level – will always stay free. In the meantime, I’d appreciate any kind of support.

Please visit my friendly sponsors, or donate via PayPal. And if you need a web hosting provider, sign up with dreamhosts – my provider – and use the promotion code ‘GROBY’ (without the quotes). You’ll receive a $50 discount off your hosting costs, and I’ll get a referral bonus.

At the same time, my thanks to all of you who already contributed!

Let me share the upside first – my new hosting company, DreamHost, has been great to work with so far. Not only that, they provide a very nice incentive program that pays up to $97 in referral fees. And they let me share that with you – if you go sign up with DreamHost and use the promotion code GROBY, you’ll get $50 of that money credited to your new account. That’s almost half a year of free hosting!

The downside? I ran into so many snags, one could write a book about it. Don’t worry, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version – but there were a few interesting lessons in there, should you want to switch.

The funny part is, I practiced that transition on Monday with my staging domain, and everything went just nicely. The transition was complete within less than 45 minutes.

Tuesday, I had too many other things to do, so the transition got postponed. Lesson 1: If you need to switch over, plan for a fixed day, and reserve at least 4 hours for that. Don’t spread it out.

Then, Wednesday night, everything got transferred and set up on the new domain. However, this time round, the IP change didn’t propagate down to the DNS servers quite as fast.

After much digging, I found out why – nobody had accessed my old staging domain for quite some time. So when I did the transfer and looked up the name, the lookup went right up to the DNS root servers – and those get usually changed within minutes.

This address, on the other hand, is visited frequently. So its IP address was sitting in my ISPs DNS cache, and not moving. Using ‘dig’, I found out that the time it would sit there was another day – so I figured I’d just go to work and use my connection there. Most major ISPs had already taken the change, so that should’ve worked. (dnsstuff.com is a fantastic site to look up those things)

Of course, my work connection had things also still in the cache – so no luck there. Since work is a bit more demanding right now, resolution of that issue got postponed to the next morning – Friday now.

The next morning, it turns out Adelphia likes the cached entry so much, it just refreshed it with the same data. A bit of research revealed that a DNS change can take up to 72 hours.

I finally remembered that I could always edit //etc//hosts on my Apple to locally force robertblum.com to the new address, so I could post at least an update. That’s lesson 2 – don’t wait for your DNS change to propagate. Why? Because connecting right away let’s you find problems with your new setup.

As you guessed by now, when connecting to my new site, I was greeted with an error screen. In the transition process, I had migrated to WordPress 2.0. And I’d forgotten to fix up my configuration properly.

Lesson 3: Never make multiple changes at a time. No matter how well rehearsed, it will backfire.

That should be it, though.. Please let me know if you run into any SNAFUs, and welcome back.

Tags: host change, DNS, IP, promo