As posted on my Twitter feed yesterday, the server is being upgraded to a better spec system.  We’re going from a dual-core/2GB box to a quad-core/8GB setup.  I’m pretty excited about the upgrade, as there will be significantly more procesing power available to companions.

The upgrades were to have taken place yesterday, but were delayed after discovering several accounts with insecure scripts installed.  A couple of these scripts were exploited and allowed a malicious user to upload a folder with dozens of interior junk pages to many accounts on the server.

So I spent from yesterday afternoon until 3AM this morning manually going through each account to clean them up and take an inventory of what scripts were present.  I found several accounts that had uploaded 3rd party scripts that did NOT come through me first.

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I received the following notice from my datacenter on possible downtime to occur between 1AM-7AM PST on the evenings of January 26th, 27th and 28th:

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This is advance notification of an upcoming maintenance window provided to us from one of our backbone uplinks.

Location: Los Angeles Datacenter
Provider: SAVVIS
Date(s): January 26th, 27th, 28th
Timeframe: 12AM PST – 7AM PST
Level of Impact: Sporadic Latency/Packet Loss

Work to be performed (as provided by Savvis):
“In this window, engineers will be performing maintenance that will affect IP peering in the Los Angeles region between 0001 and 0700 MST on consecutive nights Jan 26, 27, and 28.

During this time, traffic may be exposed to increases in latency to and from the peer network.”

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This announcement relates to changes in my service and schedule, which will take effect immediately following my return from holiday break on January 4, 2010.  Specifically, I will be cutting back on my workload by about half of what it is currently.

I will not go into great detail on the personal circumstances behind these changes, except to say that my youngest child has exhibited  developmental delays that have become a concern for us and her pediatrician.  Her initial screening seems to point toward a spectrum of autism, though it is not conclusive and her full diagnosis will not be made until the end of January.  As a minimum, we know at this point that she requires speech therapy and a greater amount of one-on-one interaction to encourage interpersonal relationships & communication.

Because my greatest priority at this point is focusing on whatever is needed to improve her development, I have decided that it would be best for me to temporarily cut back my Veda Designs workload so I can spend more time with her.  Our hope is that an early and aggressive intervention will give her the greatest chance of catching up developmentally so she can still start preschool on schedule next fall.

I have outlined below in more detail on the specifics of these changes. Because I will be working about half of what I do currently, some of these changes require adopting more strict policies relating to client updates and new projects than what I’m entirely comfortable with.   I want to apologize in advance for whatever inconvenience these changes cause.  Cutting back on my business was a difficult decision to make and not one I’ve made lightly.

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I’ve been meaning to blow the dust off this blog for months.  Like most every other social networking tool I’ve attempted to utilize in the past, my active participation tends to run in spurts. However, with the holidays coming up and some schedule changes planned for my business after the new year, I decided it was time to resurrect the blog so it can be used once more for in-depth client updates.  My twitter account has been allocated for this purpose as well, but the text length restriction isn’t really practical for certain types of news and updates.

So there is really no purpose to this entry except to say that the blog is active and live again.  As mentioned briefly above, there will be some changes to my service after the new year, which I’ll expand on in a future post.

It’s been ages since my last posting. I’d initially hoped to maintain this blog with useful articles relating to security, SEO and any thing else that would be helpful to design clients.  Unfortunately, I just haven’t been able to allocate the amount of time I’d have liked to for this purpose.  Given my workload in the past six months, I’m not sure this will change any time soon.

So although I probably won’t be making regular entries for awhile, I wanted to make the official announcement here relating to the recent increase of my design fees and changes in services.  As of January 1st, 2009 – my standard design fee has increased to $1000 for independent companion web sites and $1400 for agency web sites.  The price difference is due to the custom Agency-specific CMS now available and the significant amount of development that went into it.  There are more details about VedaAgency on the new Software page of my web site, though in summary – it allows the dynamic addition and removal of complete escort profiles on an agency web site.  This also includes separate photo galleries for each companion.

I’ve also started selling my VedaCMS and VedaAgency CMS software as a standalone application for use on those web sites I have not designed.  Again, details can be found on my software page.  I’m currently offering it under a leased license agreement with no 3rd party install option (eg: This means I would need to install it instead of someone of your own choosing).

Also, I just wanted to say thank you to all of my design clients – for whom I owe the success of my business.  It is, and continues to be, a privilege to work with you all.