Looking For a New Home

Well, I am looking for a new home for my website, sunlaker.com. Things are coming together in a mini perfect-storm condition, and it is time to move to a new server and a new provider. I have been paying for the hosting of the web site with a credit card, and today my wonderful bank told me that they are closing this credit card and opening another for me in my name. The problem is that the new one will have a different number and expiration date from my old card.

Put that together with the fact that my web site "host" has disappeared from the internet. Their web site no longer exists! My sunlaker.com is continuing because my original host (that seems to have vanished) had actually resold the server space to me from another vendor. And that vendor is getting paid (I hope) by my credit card. And when my credit card disappears in a 45 days, the payments that keep my web site alive will vanish.

Fine, you say, just tell them the new credit card number. I might, but all contact has to go through the original host that is "selling" me the service. And he has disappeared.....

I contacted a new potential host on the internet today, and they were very nice. They can get my new site up and running in a matter of days. No problem. The web site name, sunlaker.com, is a different story. To change that to the new host company I have to get the old host company to make the change for the web site name. And since they have disappeared, I can't do that! So I have a great name, but can not move it. The web site name is also being paid by this soon to expire credit card, but that is not until October 2008. So that can't timeout until after that date.

So it looks like sunlaker.com and I will part company for a while, maybe forever. Too bad. I liked that name.

Books I Have Read

I read fiction books to relax my mind, and to escape for a while. I mainly read in the late evenings as I try to turn off my mind from the day's activities. In the late 1990's, after I retired I wanted to conserve my money, but I needed to keep on reading. So I rediscovered the joy of the public library system. Since I normally only like to read a book one time, this was the perfect solution. I started by using the Chandler, AZ library, which had a large collection of books.

I developed my method of using a library. I would walk in and look at the New Books shelves. Chandler had normally two full book cases of new books. I would pick 2 or 3 to read and check them out. If I liked one of the authors, I would look for that author the next time. I branched from the New Books section to the stacks where the books were grouped by author. I would start with the author's oldest published book, and read that author two or three books at a time. If the author held my interest, I would continue until I exhausted the library's supply.

After a few years of reading 2-3 books per week, I realized that I could not always remember whether I had read a book when seeing it upon the library shelf. So I developed a system of tracking what I read using an Excel spread sheet on my home computer. That worked great for a while, until I got over 400 books on the list. So I decided to put the list online.

By this time, 2007, I had transitioned to the Maricopa County library system. The local library gives us access to the Internet so I could now access my list from the library. That way, if I saw a book or author I was not sure about, I could research my books read list and quickly decide if the author was interesting or the book a duplicate of what I had previously read.

I just updated my list today, and put the latest online. So I thought I would share it with you. You are welcome to take a look at my Books I Have Read, and see if there is anything there that interests you. I mainly like legal thrillers, mystery, and military history books. And sometime a good spy novel. Enjoy.